Managing consumer products at Hive AI (2015 - 2018)

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Hive Logo Monotone.png

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Third employee at Hive, an AI software company currently valued at $2B. Moved up from lead iOS engineer to become a product owner that determined the roadmap for multiple products as the company grew.

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Selected sub-projects

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Kiwi, iOS Lead -> Product Manager, 2015 - 2018

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A social question and answer platform that reached #1 in the App Store in 70 countries, 11M downloads on iOS (46M total). Transitioned from lead iOS engineer to product manager. Managed creation of topics and local questions features to improve quality of content. Built initial internal processes.

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Visuals

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Screenshots

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Snapshots of some team brainstorming work

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Trying to improve user experience by determining what types of content are higher quality
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Discussing information architecture for the different types of content
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App Store rankings

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kiwi-1-overall.png
Date: June 1, 2017

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kiwi-ios-rankings.png
Source: data.ai

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Plaza, Product Owner, 2015 - 2018

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A person to person marketplace product (compare to Craigslist). Focused on user safety as key differentiation (using in-app payments and messaging). Pushed growth in South America, where similar solutions were not yet popular, and a mobile service is preferred over web. 4M total downloads.

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Screenshots

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Wireframe example: Onboarding (drawn with Balsamiq)

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Outlet, Product Owner, 2017 - 2018

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An e-commerce platform (compare to Wish). Took product from conception to release. 700K total downloads, achieved $30K monthly GMV.

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Screenshots

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Product design and development

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Acted as the bridge across product design and engineering to ensure they shared a clear and sensible information architecture, and that the tradeoffs were understood and the team could move quickly.

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Translated high level product guidance from executive team into actionable product direction, breaking down long term goals into incremental releases based on priorities.

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Determined product KPIs, and directed a/b tests. In a fast moving environment, had to make good assumptions to focus testing only on only the highest ROI questions.

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Created an environment for designers to express their creativity within functional requirements, while still leading aesthetic direction and cohesiveness as needed (e.g. through emphasizing target demographics).

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Worked with designers in Sketch, Figma, and Zeplin. Built wireframes in Balsamiq.

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Team and process management

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Became manager as company grew from 6 to over 50 employees. Moved to become a product manager because my disposition was to find opportunities for efficiency improvements across teams, and be accountable for the final product.

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Managed 10 person team including product managers, engineers, designers in San Francisco, and testers in New Delhi.

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Created tests for hiring process.

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Improved the work environment for team members by shielding employees from unhealthy pressures from executive team and being judicious about pushing urgency.

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Worked with the team to iteratively implement better processes to improve employee quality of life, and stop regressions from being released. This also meant incrementally adding process improvements as the team grew, while not hampering the fast-paced development.

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Deciding where to place checks and balances was the core of the process improvements.

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If you’ve ever tried to deal with workflows in Jira, you’ll find these snapshots mildly interesting…

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Intrateam Workflow (issues that don’t need approval from other teams)
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Bug Workflow (issues that need QA sign off before closing)
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Led by example for a young team, demonstrating standards for interpersonal communication and effort, and soliciting feedback on my own performance. In general, this meant operating with warmth and sympathy; leading with others’ successes and my own mistakes.

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Strategic impact and growth

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Grew multiple apps worldwide, totaling over 50M downloads, consistently 50K daily active users, and $1.5M yearly revenue.

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Turned abstract product ideas into opportunities to differentiate and corner markets (e.g. user safety features, targeting outside the USA for Plaza).

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Streamlined onboarding and made lean products that were optimized for growth.

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Worked with developer to build web scraper to source large sets of product data (using RabbitMQ, and plenty of scraping hacks).

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While growth was the company’s main priority, I took it as my job to champion user experience improvements within these growth optimized products (e.g. finding ways to reduce harassment on Kiwi, prevent scamming on Plaza, or generally using on-device machine learning models for moderation).

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