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Angela Blake

Senior Product Manager & Product Builder

I combine experience leading mature products and major initiatives across multiple teams with the technical acumen to leverage AI in my daily workflow. I build production-ready products and features, not just prototypes.

picture of Angela Blake

I've contributed to products and teams at:

Jetpack logo
WordPress.com logo
GoDaddy logo

Technical Partnership Management

I own partnerships end to end: initiating new ones, negotiating favorable terms, and managing the relationships that generate revenue and reach new users.

  • Managed relationships with companies like PayPal
  • Evaluated new partnerships and negotiated terms
  • Scoped and shipped product integrations

Skills & Expertise

Product Leadership

Mature products, multiple teams.

Building With AI

Coding, evaluation, review.

Customer Research

Interviews, feedback analysis, JTBD.

Partner Management

Contract negotiation, technical integration.

Product Analytics

SQL, data-informed decisions.

Market Research

Competitive analysis, trend monitoring.

Recommendations

She approaches product management with a rare blend of kindness, curiosity, and genuine passion for helping customers. I learned a lot from her thoughtful approach. She’s a steady, strategic presence who makes every team better.

Ben Ritner - Founder of Kadence WP

She has this rare mix of market strategy, data-driven decision making, and genuine customer focus that makes every conversation with her both inspiring and practical.

Taylor Waldon - Director of Technical Product Ownership

Under her leadership, the products she serves have clear direction. The engineers, marketers, and customer-facing team members know not only the direction we are going, but the speed and tradeoffs we are making to get there.

Ben Meredith - Director of Technology and Systems

She’s a chill, intelligent, strategic person with an acute mind for product. I particularly admire her ability to take feedback and direction in stride, knowing when to pivot and when to stand firm in her decisions.

Jason Adams - Director of Engineering, AI

45

Projects & Writing

Product Beacon

I write a hype-free newsletter where product people can find encouragement and camaraderie, published casually.

200+ subscribers

Why You Keep Getting Laid Off

Understand the compounding effect of layoffs and how to break the cycle.

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A Wizard is Never Late

Before you apologize for being absent on social, examine why it wasn't a priority.

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Contact Me

Let's build better products together.

I'm always open to conversations about product, opportunities, or just a good discussion about the future of the web.

Driving adoption by reducing risk

Situation

I joined as the team's first Product Manager partway into a multi-year effort to replace the legacy form editor. The major architectural and design calls were already made, and an early alpha was out.

Problem

The work had stalled. The team kept refining the new interface, but the feedback pointed elsewhere: customers cared about compatibility and feature parity, and they weren't going to switch from something that worked to something that hadn't earned their confidence yet.

Action

I partnered with the engineering lead to refocus the work on what customers actually needed: compatibility and a safe migration over more polish. We widened the beta so hesitant customers could try it at low risk, then made the new builder the default once it had earned their trust.

Results

The block-based visual form builder became the default experience and reached 70% adoption within twelve months, winning over even the change-averse power users who had been the hardest sell. This was huge, considering past versions of the product can be used indefinitely.

Changing architecture instead of adding features

Situation

The product had grown well beyond its original focus on forms, picking up integrations, peer-to-peer fundraising, and donor management over several years. But no one had agreed on what it was becoming: a donation form tool or a full fundraising platform.

Problem

Without explicit direction, every release defaulted to adding more form features, piling on complexity without addressing the real need. Meanwhile, customer research showed people were already using forms as campaign landing pages. How the product was built and how it was actually used had drifted apart.

Action

I led the call to commit to reframing the product around campaigns as its core organizing concept. That meant aligning stakeholders behind a point-of-no-return initiative: a new data hierarchy, automated content creation, and a guided experience built around how customers already worked.

Results

The campaign-centric experience gave the product a clear direction and pulled its scattered capabilities into one workflow. Adoption reached roughly 50% within three months, and our customer success teams received positive feedback on the new structure.

Building AI controls and SEO that users can trust

Situation

Answer engines are becoming a new way to get discovered, but many WordPress.com users are nontechnical and want to protect their content against AI training without losing exposure to their audience.

Problem

The available SEO tools provided very few options to make a site visible to AI and treated protection against training as one off-switch, simultaneously blocking helpful crawls from answer engines.

Action

I scoped the flagship SEO dashboard to include AI optimization and AI bot controls alongside the standard search engine optimizations. Then, I built it myself. I used Claude Code to draft the PRs and run automated reviews. I collaborated with engineers to review the riskier pieces, make architecture decisions, and plan the merge sequence.

Results

The SEO dashboard shipped to WordPress.com, giving nontechnical site owners a way to embrace AI-driven discovery without surrendering control of their content. This was the first piece of a broader push to modernize SEO for the agentic web.