Michelle Dunlea’s career has followed the evolution of Vancouver’s technology scene, from scrappy startups to ambitious scaleups to globally competitive unicorns.
When Michelle Dunlea joined Vancouver startup Strutta, she was hired as a project manager. Before long, she found herself making product decisions, talking to customers, and taking on responsibilities that didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular.
She eventually discovered there was a name for what she was doing: product management.
Nearly two decades later, Dunlea is Vice President, Product Management at Clio, one of Canada’s most successful tech companies, helping guide its expanding product portfolio as the company enters a new era of global growth.
Along the way, she spent five years at Hootsuite, experiencing firsthand the growing pains of one of Vancouver’s most celebrated technology scaleups.
Speaking with Techcouver at ClioCon 2026 in Boston, Dunlea reflected on a career that has taken her through three distinct chapters of Vancouver tech—and how the lessons from each prepared her for the next.
Strutta: Learning to Build
Strutta, known for its online contest and promotion platform, was Dunlea’s introduction to Vancouver’s startup scene.
It was the kind of company where employees frequently wore multiple hats and formal organizational structures were still taking shape.
“I was hired as a project manager, actually,” Dunlea recalled.
As the company evolved, product decisions increasingly needed to be made without anyone formally responsible for making them. Those decisions began falling to Dunlea.
As she became more involved in shaping the product experience, she recognized that she needed to better understand the customers using the platform.
She began speaking with them directly, gathering feedback and making decisions about how the product should evolve.
Eventually, while reading a blog post, she discovered that what she had been doing was an established discipline called product management.
It was a formative experience in a startup community where entrepreneurs relied heavily on one another for advice, mentorship, connections, and talent.
Strutta would eventually be acquired, and Dunlea moved on to a company that had become one of Vancouver’s most recognizable technology success stories.
Hootsuite: Learning to Scale
When Dunlea joined Hootsuite in 2014, the social media management company employed approximately 300 to 400 people and was entering a period of rapid expansion.
Hootsuite had become a symbol of Vancouver’s ambitions to build globally relevant technology companies.
Dunlea spent five years at the company, experiencing the challenges of hypergrowth firsthand.
It was a very different environment from Strutta.
Rather than figuring out who should make a particular product decision, she was now learning how to develop products inside an organization growing rapidly in size and complexity.
The experience taught her important lessons about scaling a technology business, including what worked, what didn’t, and where companies could go wrong.
“I had learned so much about what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, what’s important,” she told Techcouver.
Those lessons would ultimately influence her next career move.
Hootsuite’s trajectory has been more complicated than the early enthusiasm surrounding its rise might have suggested. But its importance to Vancouver extends beyond its own business performance.
The company helped develop a generation of experienced technology professionals who would go on to apply their knowledge elsewhere.
Dunlea is one of them.
“I wanted to take what I’d learned about building and scaling products and teams and apply it at another SaaS company entering its growth phase,” she explained.
That opportunity came from a company that had been growing in Vancouver throughout her time at Hootsuite.
Clio: Learning to Lead
Clio co-founder and CEO Jack Newton had been encouraging Dunlea to join his company for years.
Initially, she wasn’t interested.
“Legal tech? That sounds so boring,” she remembered thinking.
It was an understandable reaction from someone working at Hootsuite during an era when social media was one of technology’s most exciting sectors.
But Newton’s encouragement wasn’t the only factor that eventually convinced Dunlea to consider Clio.
A former Hootsuite vice president to whom she had reported had since moved to Clio. Knowing Dunlea was considering her next career move, he reached out.
His enthusiasm for Clio’s team, leadership, and mission made an impression.
Combined with Newton’s earlier encouragement, the recommendation prompted Dunlea to take a closer look.
Drawing on other connections she had developed within Vancouver’s technology community, she spoke with additional people working at Clio.
What ultimately changed her perspective wasn’t necessarily the company’s software. It was the problem the company was trying to solve.
Clio was helping lawyers spend less time managing the administrative demands of running a business and more time practising law.
Dunlea became interested in the human challenge behind the technology.
She joined Clio in 2019, just one week before the company’s annual ClioCon conference in San Diego.
Almost immediately, she found herself working in the conference’s product lab, answering questions from customers despite having barely started her new job.
Seven years later, Clio is operating on an entirely different scale.
The company has grown into a global legal technology leader, expanding its product portfolio through internal development and acquisitions while moving beyond its original focus on practice management software.
For Dunlea, the challenges now involve bringing increasingly complex products and capabilities together into a unified experience.
And her earlier experience has proven valuable.
Take acquisitions.
Dunlea admits she’s naturally skeptical of buying companies simply to add functionality, particularly when integrating overlapping software products can become more complicated than building something internally.
“I’m a skeptic when it comes to most acquisitions,” she said.
The challenge often lies in the underlying data and systems that customers never see.
When two acquired products handle the same information differently, combining them without disrupting existing customers can require years of difficult engineering work.
But when an acquisition adds genuinely complementary capabilities, Dunlea sees enormous potential.
She pointed to Clio’s acquisition of vLex and the development of Clio Work as an example of technology that expands the company’s capabilities rather than duplicating existing functionality.
“When they are the right fit, it’s magic,” she said.
It’s a level of product and organizational complexity far removed from her early days at Strutta.
A Community That Grew Together
Looking back, Dunlea credits Vancouver’s technology community with helping make that progression possible.
She remembers the people who volunteered their time, organized events, mentored entrepreneurs, and connected the city’s technology professionals long before Vancouver developed its current profile.
“There were so many people like you on the ground that actually made it happen,” she told Techcouver.
Those relationships also played a direct role in her career. It was the recommendation of a former colleague, combined with connections developed across the local technology community, that helped bring her to Clio.
Her journey illustrates how Vancouver’s growing companies developed more than products and customers. They also produced experienced leaders who carried lessons from one business to the next.
Strutta taught her how to build. Hootsuite taught her how to scale. Clio has given her the opportunity to put those lessons to work inside a global technology leader.
It’s a career that tells a larger Vancouver tech story: the experience gained building one generation of companies can help the next go further.
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