Instructor
Cole Mercer
Product & AI | Ex-Lead PM @ SoundCloud, VP PM @ Semrush
About me
Howdy, I'm Cole!
I'm happy to be a Udemy Instructor Partner with over 270,000 students worldwide on Udemy and over 1.6 million in total across all platforms.
I found my love for teaching in 2015 and have courses across Udemy and LinkedIn Learning where I am lucky enough to be rated a top instructor on both platforms.
I'm currently working at Dynamo Air Systems building precision autonomous heavy lift tandem rotor drones with a significant hard tech / deep tech core and plenty of aerospace and manufacturing components.
I'm also still a product management, strategy, and artificial intelligence consultant with a history of helping companies with over 5,000 employees on all of the above.
In the past I was a Senior PM at an AI API company called Perigon, and before that a VP at Semrush holding the position of Head of Product for the Academy division - the company was a public one with over 1000 employees.
I was also a Senior and Lead Product Manager at SoundCloud where I worked on listener experience for over 170 million monthly users across web, iOS, and Android platforms and a General Assembly Product Management instructor where I taught courses in person to students in Manhattan.
I'm on Udemy now because I loved my experience at GA and really enjoy teaching others about things I've learned.
I've taught and spoken in places like The Czech Republic, Ukraine, Spain, and of course the US to audiences of 30 to over 4,500 people.
I've lived in Texas, Manhattan, Sweden, and Berlin. While in NYC I was a Product Manager at Bonobos - a web-focused retail clothing brand where I oversaw web and mobile properties that generated tens of millions in annual revenue through tens of thousands of customers.
Included in my knowledge is not only Consumer PM, but also enterprise and a SaaS product management experience.
I was an early product manager at Mass Relevance, a social API and data-focused enterprise marketing platform which was acquired in 2014.
Much earlier in my career I spent over a year as a PM with an investor funded startup in Austin, TX focusing on driving traction for early stage companies where we had over 35,000 users. I moved to that position from an initial role as a web engineer.
My career in Product Management started after graduating from Babson College and becoming a technology consultant to several companies across the US for over 2 years. As a result, I am fortunate enough to have experience in product management that spans several industries and development models.