Sara McKinley Torti

Sara Torti is a senior product and operating executive who has focused extensively on creating and scaling technology-based businesses that require a combination of detailed execution, business insight and technical acumen. She has grown products from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, built and launched products to billions of users, and grown and scaled teams to thousands of people.

Sara joined Harvard Business School as a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit in 2023, where she designed and teaches a MBA course on Product Management. Prior to Harvard, Sara was a Clinical Professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth from 2021-2023. 

Prior to academia, Sara spent over 14 years at Google where she was most recently COO of the Google Operations Center, a Google ‘bet’ and independent company she was recruited to design, launch, and grow from a concept into an operating business. Prior to her role as COO she was a senior product executive with expertise in platform and app-based monetization, subscription services, and consumer engagement. She led the team responsible for the initial development and expansion of the “actions” features in Google Maps and Local Search that grew the number of transactions on these platforms from zero to over a million per month. Previously she led the teams responsible for developing the Nest App and subscription service and was responsible for both the technical development of the app as well as the business leadership of the subscription service. Earlier in her career she worked on the Google+ social network team and was a member of both the Global and regional Asia-Pacific sales-strategy teams. She began her career at the World Bank.

Sara graduated with an BA in a Special Concentration: International Healthcare and Economics, from Harvard University and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is a co-founder and previous co-chair of the Google Women in Product Group, founding sponsor of the Harvard College Innovation Challenge funding undergraduate entrepreneurship, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Gluten Intolerance Group.