From Air Force Engineer to Touring Drummer to Startup BD Leader
Why the best product managers understand sales, the hidden power of saying "no" to deals, and what drumming teaches you about onboarding your team
I recently sat down with Amanda Krantz, and within the first ten minutes of our conversation, I realized I was talking to someone whose career makes mine, which has a little bit of everything, look linear by comparison.
Air Force Academy electrical engineer. Six years of military service working at NASA Goddard, Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, and as a Division 1 college tennis coach. Got an MBA and interviewed for Product Manager for iTunes V1 (didn’t get the job). Music startup PM at Launch (acquired by Yahoo). AT&T business development. Professional touring drummer. Startup founder in healthcare gratitude software. Drone company BD leader.
And now, heading up business development, product management, AND finance at Kalogon, a Florida-based startup making smart cushion technology for wheelchair users and Air Force pilots. The woman just got selected to speak at South by Southwest on a panel called “Zigzag: Having a Weird Career.”
When Your Tour Manager Skills Become Your BD Superpower
Here’s something I didn’t expect to learn from a former touring drummer: the best business development training might not come from an MBA or a sales bootcamp. It might come from booking a national tour for your band.
Amanda spent time on the road as a professional drummer, handling endorsement deals, booking venues, and managing the logistics of keeping a band fed, paid, and on schedule. When she transitioned back into tech startups, she assumed her Air Force engineering background and brief stint at AT&T would open doors. Instead, it was the tour experience that got her hired.
“I went on tour with my band at that time.I was a drummer and got stick and cymbal endorsement deals and booked the tour,” Amanda told me. “And I learned a lot about sales, which was what opened the door to Silicon Valley startups. I was the first BD hire at an early stage company.”
The lesson here isn’t “go join a band to become a better PM.” The lesson is that professional skills are transferable and often come from unexpected places. Amanda’s ability to handle the uncomfortable parts of sales—the cold emails, the rejections, the negotiations, the relationship building—came from a context that had nothing to do with B2B SaaS or hardware partnerships.
Business Development Are Not Deal People
We see BD as “the deal people.” The folks who show up in the final stages of a product partnership, shake hands, get contracts signed, then disappear while we (the product team) do the “real work” of building integrations and launching features.
Amanda had a different take.
“Business development is relationships and understanding people and helping people solve problems and connecting dots,” she explained. This isn’t about closing deals. It’s about understanding ecosystems, identifying mutual value, and building relationships that unlock opportunities your company couldn’t access alone.
Here’s a framework Amanda shared that completely reframed how I think about BD work:
The Three Pillars of Effective Business Development
1. Know what you’re selling
This sounds obvious, but Amanda emphasized that BD people need to understand the product at a deeper level. It’s not enough to know the feature list or the pitch deck talking points.
At Kalogon, where they make smart cushions for wheelchair users,pilots, and commercial aviation passengers, Amanda has to understand not just the technology (foam, air bladders, sensors, software) but the clinical outcomes, the reimbursement landscape, the ergonomics research, and the very real impact on people’s lives when pressure injuries keep them bedridden for months.
2. Know who you’re selling to
Again, this sounds basic. But Amanda’s version goes way beyond “our target customer is enterprise healthcare organizations” or “we’re selling to OEMs in the automotive space.”
This is where Amanda’s tour booking experience comes through. When she was booking venues for her band, she learned to understand the venue owner’s perspective: they needed to fill seats, sell drinks, and avoid drama.. A successful booking wasn’t about convincing them her band was the best—it was about solving their specific problems.
“You need to know what you’re selling, you need to know who you’re selling to, and you need to care about solving their problem,” Amanda said. The third part is crucial.
3. Actually care about solving their problem
This is the difference between transactional sales and relationship-based business development.
Transactional sales: “Here’s my product, here’s the price, do you want it?”
Business development: “Here’s the problem you’re facing. I think we might be able to help. Let’s explore whether there’s a fit. And if there isn’t, I’ll be honest about that.”
Amanda gave me a perfect example from her current role at Kalogon. They started solving problems for wheelchair users (medical) and long-haul pilots (military/commercial aviation). But they have received inbound interest from automotive, home reclining chairs, long-haul trucking, and commercial aviation passenger seating.
The temptation for a high growth VC backed startup is to chase every opportunity. Amanda’s job is to say no to most of them.
It was tempting to try to expand to automotive after Hyundai worked with us on a demo for their executives,” she told me when discussing automotive partnerships. But then she immediately added the caveat: “ There is a big difference between low volume, high margin manufacturing that we do now and high volume, low margin for automotive. Just because you can sign a big logo, does not mean you should.””
This is BD functioning as strategic filter, not just as sales accelerator.
The Hidden Superpower of Great BD: Knowing When to Walk Away
Here’s something that surprised me: Amanda spent a significant portion of our conversation talking about deals she didn’t do.
In the startup world, we’re conditioned to think of BD as “more deals = good, fewer deals = bad.” Partnerships are partnerships, right?
Amanda has learnedthat the wrong deal is often worse than no deal.
She described working on partnerships where the economics didn’t make sense, where the partner’s timeline didn’t match their capabilities, where the integration requirements would have consumed the entire engineering team for six months with unclear payoff.
The immature BD approach: “Let’s sign it anyway and figure it out later.” The mature BD approach: “This doesn’t make sense for us right now. Let’s stay in touch and revisit when X, Y, or Z changes.”
This requires a few things:
First, it requires understanding your own company’s constraints and priorities.
If you’re the BD person pitching a partnership but you don’t understand your engineering team’s capacity, your product roadmap priorities, or your financial runway, you’re flying blind. You might commit to things that are impossible to deliver.
Amanda emphasized that her role isn’t just BD—it’s BD plus product management plus finance. That integration means she knows the full picture. When a potential Commercial Aviation Tier 1 supplier partnership comes up, she’s not just thinking “this would be a huge logo for our deck.”
Second, it requires being honest about fit—even when it hurts.
Early-stage companies are desperate for revenue and validation. It’s tempting to force partnerships that aren’t quite right because you need the cash or the credibility.
Amanda’s learned to resist that temptation. “If we’re going to expand into multiple verticals, we need disciplined product teams, clear roadmaps, and costs under control. We want to grow intelligently.”
Notice the phrase: “grow intelligently.” Not “grow fast.” Not “grow at all costs.” Intelligently.
Third, it requires maintaining relationships even when you say no.
This is where BD differs fundamentally from one-time sales. When you close a one-time deal, the relationship can end. When you’re doing BD at a startup or growth-stage company, the person you’re talking to today might be at a different company in two years—one that’s a perfect fit for your product. Or you may have to say no on a big partnership opportunity this year because you have to focus on your core vertical, but after the Series A when you can hire additional engineers, the time might be right to pick things back up. Sometimes a BD deal can stay warm for multiple years before moving forward when the time is right.
Amanda’s career is a perfect example of this on a personal level as well. She interviewed at Google years ago. Didn’t get the role. Applied to work with me at one point (I didn’t remember this initially, which is embarrassing). Ended up getting an offer at Amazon Prime Air—until the offer was rescinded during an economic downturn. And shut down her startup after 5 years instead of taking a bad acquisition offer.
What Drumming Teaches You About Onboarding
Here’s a segue I wasn’t expecting: we started talking about drumming lessons, and it turned into a great analogy for team management.
I mentioned to Amanda that I recently took an intro drumming class and found it overwhelming. Within minutes, the instructor had me trying to coordinate bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and more—and my brain just couldn’t handle it.
Amanda’s response was immediate: “If you’re trying to go too complex too quickly, it’s not fun. Put music on that you like, start with the bass drum, feel the beat, and add from there.” And don’t try to do all the coordination at once, just enjoy whatever it is that you can feel with the music and then it just grows much more organically from there.”
And then we made the connection:
“You could argue the same for onboarding new people to a team. If you ask them to hit the ground running versus let’s get them into the groove and get them something very doable, and then layer up on top... As a manager, maybe you’ll have more successful onboarding of teammates that way.”
Think about how most companies onboard product managers:
Week 1: Here’s our codebase, our product suite, our customer segments, our OKRs, our tech stack, our competitive landscape, our roadmap process, our stakeholder map, and oh by the way here’s your first project.
Week 2: Why haven’t you shipped anything yet?
We ask people to play the entire drum kit on day one. And then we’re surprised when they struggle.
Amanda’s approach, both for drumming and for management, is different:
Start with the bass drum. Feel the beat.
In drumming, that means just tapping your foot to the music. Get the rhythm. Don’t worry about fills or technique or paradiddles. Just... feel it.
In PM onboarding, that means: pick one customer conversation to listen to. Read one PRD. Attend one standup. Don’t try to absorb everything. Just feel the rhythm of how this team works.
Then add one element at a time.
In drumming, once you’ve got the bass drum, add the snare on beats 2 and 4. Once that feels natural, add the hi-hat.
In PM onboarding, once you understand how the team ships, add understanding of one customer segment. Once you’ve got that, add understanding of one key metric. Build it up gradually.
The complexity emerges organically.
In drumming, once you’ve got the basic pattern, you start to feel where you can add a fill, change the hi-hat pattern, accent certain beats. It’s no longer mechanical—it’s musical.
In PM work, once you’ve got the basics, you start to see where you can add value. You spot the gap in the roadmap, the customer need nobody’s addressing, the technical debt that’s slowing the team down. It’s no longer just executing—it’s creating.
The Honest Truth About Work-Life Balance
Toward the end of our conversation, we got into something I don’t hear talked about enough in the Silicon Valley hustle culture: what happens when you can’t do it all.
Amanda’s been navigating this her entire career.
I asked her how she thinks about balance, expecting some platitude about “making it work” or “prioritizing what matters.”
Instead, she said something that felt deeply true:
“I think what I’ve realized over time is you can’t have it all at the same time, but you can have it all over time.”
Not “you can have it all if you just optimize your calendar and hire enough help.”
Not “you can have it all if you’re disciplined enough.”
But you can have it all over time.
When Amanda was touring with her band, that was her focus. Not startups, not career advancement, not building wealth. Music.
When she was building her healthcare gratitude startup, that consumed her. Not touring, not side projects. The startup.
Each phase demanded focus, and each required letting other things go. . And it required giving up the idea that she needed to be excellent at everything simultaneously.
The Career Advice I Wish I’d Heard at 25
So here’s what I took away from Amanda’s career for early and mid-career PMs:
Your career doesn’t have to be linear.
In fact, the most interesting careers rarely are. The zigzag isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
Skills are more transferable than you think.
Booking a tour teaches you sales. Coaching teaches you management. Poker teaches you decision-making under uncertainty. Don’t discount experiences just because they’re not “traditional PM experience.”
Say yes to weird opportunities.
She went on tour with her band. She started a gratitude software company in healthcare (not exactly a hot venture-backed space).
None of those made perfect sense on paper. All of them contributed to where she is now.
Build relationships even when they don’t immediately pay off.
Amanda stayed connected with a VP she worked with at AOL a decade ago. That person is the one who brought her to work with her again at Kalogon.
Understand the business, not just the product.
This one I can’t emphasize enough. If you want to advance beyond senior PM, you need to think like a business leader, not just a product builder.
You can’t have it all at the same time, but you can have it all over time.
Stop trying to optimize every dimension of your life simultaneously. Pick what matters most in this season and give yourself permission to be mediocre at the rest.
Want personalized support navigating your PM career, developing business development skills, or making a major career pivot?
I offer 1:1 executive, career, and product coaching through tomleungcoaching.com.
Check out Amanda’s Substack “Drumchick Theory” for more insights on the intersection of music, startups, and unconventional career paths. And if you’re building products in the automotive seating, aviation, or medical device space, Kalogon is hiring PMs with deep domain expertise—reach out to Amanda on LinkedIn.
OK. Let’s ship greatness.
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Super cool. Nobody builds a city in a day. Great job to you both!