My Story
You could say it was luck
Coming out of college and having worked 7 years for the family business, YESCO, it was clear that my future was to be in a different direction. Through a seemingly bland interview, with my dad’s friend doing him a favor, eventually he noticed “President of the University of Utah ski club” at the bottom of the resume. 2 hours later, Dan Nelson takes a bet on me and brings me on as the 15th employee at TravelPass Group.
Booking a hotel
Starting out as the “bug finder”, I quickly learned from those around me in AB testing, web analytics, user research, and agile methodologies. Throughout my growth there, I was able to turn around ReservationDesk.com from the least performant brand of the business to the most profitable in under a year. One win came from a youtube video I made using Adobe After Effects that got +20,000 views and made a 15% lift on Hotel Booking conversion with high confidence.
While continuing to grow as a Product Manager at TravelPass Group, I worked to receive my MBA while taking night classes. It was an incredible experience to learn about computer science, data warehousing, accounting, financing, and economics at night and then apply it again during the workday. The greatest lesson that I took from the program was a new desire to constantly learn and grow, and to always look for new perspectives and opinions.
Near the end of my time at TravelPass, I was entrusted to lead out on hiring for those on my cross-functional squad, including design, data science, and associate product management. We were able to move the needle and “save” the business with a 37% lift on ReservationCounter.com, the companies flagship site through multiple iterations of testing and redesigning.
Connect to your government
During my transition from TravelPass, I sat down with two friends and we discussed our frustrations in local government and how dramatic the gap was between governments and their citizens. From that simple lunch at Arby’s, our idea morphed into a survey where we knocked on over 400 doors to see if citizens in Utah actually wanted to be connecting to their cities, counties, and state. The result was shockingly in approval of some mobile solution to do this, so we started Assemble.
Partnering then with Millcreek, UT and later with Vineyard, UT and Utah County, UT, we set out to create a platform for governments to inform the public, the citizens to voice their opinions, and the government to be able to respond to each topic provided. We were able to design, using Adobe CC & Sketch, and build, in React Native, our MVP in under 7 months.
The outcome was incredible, with retention rates comparable to Twitter and Facebook, as well as 25% household adoption in the community we existed. Primarily the +3,000 app users came from word of mouth where the content was king, but also the door hangers, flyers, and events that we attended. The engagement we got from Polls in the app exceeded any other medium of community outreach including public meetings and social media by 20x. On top of that, it was really exciting to see the community rally around our little start-up, and talk about, unprovoked, on social media how much more they felt involved in their city and county.
Our failure came later in the sales of this product to other cities. It was clear that the staff in each locality were uninterested with our solution, and although we garnered strong interest with mayors and council members, their excitement was quickly dissipated by the boots on the ground, where they were able to halt months of nurturing swiftly and efficiently dozens of times.
We do feel that we reached PMF with this solution from a citizen’s perspective, but couldn’t crack the nut on the government end. We closed the business in 2021.
Buying & selling a home
At Homie, I was able to take all that I had learned in my 6+ years at TravelPass and Assemble and make an immediate impact in the Real Estate sector. I was able to help lead out to create a testing culture at Homie, and to foster a mindset of learning. We were able to make great strides in the searching experience as well as the listing experience of the apps.
Once our CPO was hired, I was able to support and drive where the product department needed to grow. We implemented and onboarded everyone to start using Heap Analytics. I was also able to begin supporting those around me in a leadership role and gradually to the point where I was leader 4 squads, which were primarily over the customer-facing parts of the platform from both the buyer’s and seller’s perspective.
With the people in the right place, we were then able to focus on implementing the appropriate processes to help ensure standardization, predictability, and best practices within the discipline of product management. This included frameworks in hiring, onboarding, goal setting, reporting, bug prioritization, discovery briefs, and the SDLC.
In 2021 at Homie, we were able to make great strides through lifts nearing double performance in attaining tour requests, more than tripling buyer engagement of the platform, and a 73% lift in seller conversions. These lifts are all scalable, and as the company moves to new markets, the company will succeed at that given rate.
Theory vs practice
With burn rates catching up to Homie, I sought to find my next endeavor in agriculture which was seeking to help farmers stay profitable. With this prolific mission and a product-led interview process, it was clear that this was a company I wanted to be a part of.
Going in, I knew that ProducePay was quite chaotic. The strategic whiplash, long hours, short deadlines, and the need to wear many hats were expected with a startup, but what I didn’t see coming was the difference in how Product Managers were being interviewed vs being driven at the company. Now in a Director-level role, I would have interviews with PMs where the focus was on empowering PMs to be strategic but would then hop on the next meeting finding our CPO dictating all work down to the teams and not seeking any further validation.
The CPO and I tried to work through our differences, but I made the decision that this was not an environment that I could be successful in, and left 2 months in.
Keyboards & accountants
At Entrata, I was able to join a much more mature environment but was quite immature as it pertains to vision, strategy, and product-led. Founded in 2001, Entrata is a system of record and one-stop shop for enterprise-level rental property management companies. What had gotten Entrata to a $500MM investment in 2021, was being sales-led and task-taking in order to close the deal. While this enabled a consistent growth trajectory for the company, it was necessary to grow faster and more scalably.
The accounting section of the product was basic, and there was considerable question as to which opportunities should be solved for next. Which this predictament I sought out to define the vision and strategy for the accounting suite. Following a framework starting with an understanding of the current offering and then gather qualitative and quantitative customer data, a vision and strategy was defined leading to a proposed roadmap pending company investment.
We took the vision and strategy to our executive leadership group to garner alignment and request additional investment. The structure and transparency of where the accounting suite should go and how was critical in garnering trust and buy-off from the executive team, where that investment was approved.
I’m very proud of the work we were able to do in 2022, but there was a clear over-staffing of leadership in the product org, and it was decided that the middle-management layer be completely removed at the company in March of 2023.
