“Per Ardua ad Astra“
Royal Air Force
I grew up in a mom-and-pop restaurant and learned the art of listening to customers early on in life. My parents worked hard to ensure their children would never have to work in a restaurant. Early on, I learned about entrepreneurial spirit and how to listen to customers with empathy to build relationships.
A few years after the 2008 recession, I graduated from school and went where any new grad would: The restaurant industry.
I started out as a general manager at Panda Express, where every day consisted of serving up meaningful experiences for guests and cultivating an environment of growth for my team. After being promoted to a Training Leader, I was responsible for the top grossing location in Southern California while also training future store managers. However, I found myself yearning to solve bigger problems; Problems that stretched beyond just the locations I managed.
In order to make a larger impact, I joined the Guest Relations team at headquarters, managing a team of five in the Contact Center. Through our voice of customer (VOC) programs, I was able to listen and glean areas of opportunities across the company and quickly became a data insights team that served both the corporate and operations sides of the business. As the supervisor of the newly transformed Consumer Insights team, I launched a brand new operations analytics dashboard to all 2100 locations, plus hundreds of field leaders.
When my wife and I relocated to the Bay Area. I realized that the work I was doing at Panda revolved around finding problems and mobilizing cross-functional teams to solve them. I became a Product Manager and joined Zenput, an enterprise B2B SaaS startup, where I utilized my hospitality background to help build new mobile app experiences that made it easier for operations leaders to not only keep track and complete their work but also helped field-level managers measure and coach their teams. At Zenput I learned how to listen to users, lead an engineering team, and validate hypotheses through an iterative Agile approach to product development.
At the beginning of 2021, I jumped into HR tech with a Series A startup called Blueboard. My first year at Blueboard consisted of building and optimizing our internal tools platform, to empower customer-facing concierges to do their best work, while reducing friction around the experience booking process. I also launched the very first Scrum team and lead Blueboard’s Agile Transformation, with a pod of eight offshore developers based in Ukraine. In my second year, I made the jump to the B2C side of the business, aka “recipient experience” where my roadmap revolved around 3 key strategic objectives: Make it easy to surface relevant experiences, reduce friction around the booking process, and send more people #Blueboarding.
If you’re looking for a scrappy, user-centric product manager, with an extensive background in end-to-end product development ownership, I’m your guy. I’m looking for a company solving large, complex human problems in the FinTech, and HealthTech sectors (but open to others!) and are aiming to level up the way they interact with their end users.
