About Product Sparks

Product Sparks is a brand created by yours truly, Alex Bleau. Throughout the roles I’ve played in my career so far in building products, services or leading small businesses, there have been many key learning points, times or moments that have helped me grow and perform. 

In the grand scheme of things, you could say that they were all sparks that have ignited new perspectives, opportunities, developments and growth paths for me. 

It is for this reason that I choose Product Sparks as a brand, because everything I offer under its umbrella in terms of services, trainings or products, are meant to be similar sparks for other product manager, leaders and anyone focused on building great products and businesses.  

About Alex Bleau

I’m a seasoned product leader, currently @E.ON One working as a Senior Product Manager. I’ve been building and developing products or services for 15 years and have been working in actual product roles for over 10.

I have worked on or built advertising products, online services, mobile apps and games and physical, educational and travel products.

I’ve also had the chance to experience working at companies with 2, 20, 200 and over 1000 employees, trying out various agile frameworks while working onsite, distributed or fully remote with cross-functional and diverse teams.

I wish everyone a crazy day, have a growing collection of bow ties from LEGO bricks and can pull a pretty good shot of espresso. 

Why work with me?

My services, coaching and training are all based on relevant business and product experience gained by doing the work, by succeeding and failing in the roles, by “earning” mistakes and learning from them, by reflecting on successes and trying to replicate them.

I started building products and leading teams already in college, some 16 years ago and jumped into actual product roles about roughly 9 years ago.

I broke the product and leadership proverbial ice by leading a student NGO and the university newspaper and then doubling down with company led training programs for students and digital signage networks within the faculty halls.

Since then I’ve had the luck to continue the fun by building products and services of various types and in various fields either as owner, co-founder or under companies that I’ve worked for.

With everyone I work with, I focus on what they want to achieve and then tailor the value that I provide so that we hit the target.  And last but not least, I will be straightforward and speak my mind in all of our interactions. From my personal experience, this not only gives you transparency and a stable sparring partner, but it also builds and maintains trust.

I have worked with product managers, leaders, executives and early founders from trivago, Innogy, E.ON, Metro Markets, EarlyNode, Thyssenkrupp Materials Services, Caru AG, Swisscom, Zalando, HOW.FM.

We introduced OKRs in our teams and Alex accompanied us extensively. This includes his e-learnings, but also his workshops, coaching and close support for the Teams. Especially his experience and his questions lead us to rethink and to the successful implementation and usage of the OKRs in our Squads. I would highly recommend working with Alex when it comes to outcome and OKR definition.

We enjoyed having Alex facilitate a two-day in-person OKR Summit to plan our OKRs for the trimester. Alex was a pleasure to work with and we received much positive feedback from our team! He pushed us and held us accountable while providing valuable input to individuals, teams and the whole organisation. Alex also put effort into ensuring that we had a shared understanding of OKRs to work from. We look forward to continuing to work with Alex in the future!