Vidya Dinamani
VIDYA is the co-founder for Product Rebels where she exercises her passion for coaching product leaders and teams. She has over 20 years of experience specializing in business and technology strategy development and product design, development and management.
Vidya has held multiple executive roles at leading companies, including executive positions leading Innovation and Design, Product Management and Marketing at Mitchell International, as well as Director of Customer Experience for TurboTax. She also served as Director of Business Operations in the TurboTax division of Intuit where she first met Heather.
Vidya loves working with early stage companies, helping them establish their Groundwork, and coaching them on how to quickly achieve product-market fit. She serves as advisor to multiple companies through her partnership with Ad Astra Ventures.
A holder of 9 U.S. patents for software technology, Vidya earned a B.S. in Physics from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and a Masters from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is also a certified Net Promoter Associate.
Heather Samarin
HEATHER is co-founder of Product Rebels a product management leadership training company, and has over 17 years of experience in delighting customers through the design, development, and management of customer experiences within both B2B and B2C marketing and product management.
She started her career and spent over 13 years at Intuit where she met Vidya and built her passion for customer-driven decision making. It was in her positions as Director of Quickbooks Enterprise and VP of Product Management in the TurboTax business where her love for new product design and innovation began. She and her team launched Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise business, an up market Quickbooks product that is now achieving over $50MM in revenue. Since then, she has held C-level and senior roles within multiple industries like social gaming and healthcare where she led product strategy and new product design and development. She holds a BS in finance from California State University and an MBA in marketing from Santa Clara University.
Heather lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys mentoring local entrepreneurs, angel investing, and taking advantage of all the beauty that living in the northwest has to offer.