Below are summaries of some products that I owned and was responsible for the vision, problem definition, solution definition, success metrics, and launch unless otherwise noted. See my CV for a full list of products I've managed. Additional information such as entitlement, tech specs, market research is available upon request.
Digital Publishing
Kindle Page Numbers
Company / Role: Amazon, Senior Product Manager
Problem: At Amazon books, I worked in the Specialty Reading group that had initiated a program called Great on Kindle to highlight nonfiction books that had high quality features such as high resolution photographs. One of the criteria for the program was that a book had to have page numbers; however, lack of page numbers was the 3rd highest reason why books were not included in the program. I also discovered that over 6M reflowable eBooks did not have page numbers and instead used Kindle Locations which was a measurement of the amount of content in a book. These Kindle Locations caused confusion with readers because a book whose print equivalent was 200 pages would have 20,000 Kindle Locations and was also one of the top reasons customers contacted Customer Support for eBook issues.
Solution: I defined different methods that could be used to create synthetic page numbers in eBooks and used root-mean-square-error (RMSE) to assess how close a sample of eBooks paginated with each method was to its print counterpart. I also examined how books were paginated in different scripts such as Chinese Han or Arabic to understand any localization issues. I ran informal mental model assessments of readers to understand how they used page numbers and also collaborated with my UX Designer to run a usability test with two methods: one where the page number incremented with each page 'swipe' and one where a page was fixed to a consistent amount of content. I reached out to stakeholders including Kindle Direct Publishing that relied on page numbers for author payments, vendor management, legal, and Kindle PMs and UX to review my approach. Lastly, I rolled out the product in phases over a 6 month period to prioritize high impact issues such as applying Kindle Page Numbers to Great on Kindle books.
Results: I was able to roll out the first stage in 4 months with 0.75 tech resources and completely eliminate all book rejections to the Great on Kindle program due to page number issues. As a result, the program was a top contributor to our internal goals for the program. After 6 months, the top 95% of books without page numbers were backfilled with page numbers and after 3 more months all 6M books without page numbers were fixed.
Launched: 3/2020
E-Commerce
Read Now from search
Problem: In addition to the issue solved above, readers who acquired a reading subscription such as Kindle Unlimited but rarely used it (non-active users) were more likely to cancel their subscriptions than more active readers of books in the subscription service.
Solution: Include a 'read now' button in the search results in the Amazon Store for any book the reader had access to through their subscription service.
Results: Non-active users who saw the 'read now' button were significantly more likely to maintain their subscription service than those non-active users who did not see the button.
Launched: 4/2022
Screenshot of read now button in search results
Customized book recommendations
Problem: Readers reported that book recommendations were too generic and confusing. They wanted the ability to easily find books based on a single or multiple books that they selected.
Solution: I collaborated with my designer to create a phased approach to solve this problem: 1) a widget that showed book recommendations and the books acquired by the reader that were used to generate the recommendations; 2) a library of all book acquisitions (bought, borrowed, read) across all formats (print, eBook, Audible, CD/tape) that a reader could select to generate book recommendations.
Launched: TBD
Platform
Nautilus
Company / Role: Amazon, Senior Product Manager
Problem: The platform used by internal businesses for the manual investigation of transaction fraud had been pieced together over several years and across multiple teams. As a result it was difficult to develop for and work with, which hampered innovation and improvements.
Solution: I collaborated with a Senior Developer to create a new platform, Nautilus, to disambiguate core services from business content (logic, UX) and provide an easy/self-service onboarding process for developers.
Results: 85% of developers reported that they clearly understood how to build for the platform compared to 40% with the prior tool; 90% of businesses using the old tool migrated to Nautilus; and 5 new businesses onboarded to the platform. See the automation section for more discussion of the vision I created for Nautilus.
Launched: 3/2017
Productivity
Family Protector
Company / Role: Intego, Senior Product Manager
Problem: Parents are concerned and frustrated with their children's usage of cell phone: using them during family time such as dinner, accessing inappropriate content, or making unwanted purchases.
Solution: I collaborated with an engineer to design a product that leveraged Intego's infrastructure for deploying device management certificates. Parents then could install these certificates on their children's iOS devices to manage them via a web, iOS, or Android app.
Results: The product received good reviews (4.5/5 stars)and parents liked that they did not need to 'jailbreak' their children's phones which was required by many competitors.
Launched: 6/2015
Screenshots of Family Protector (iOS app)
Company / Role: Intego, Senior Product Manager
Problem: Intego did not have a presence in the Mac app store due to the technical need to directly install their security products. Moreover, I found that a majority of app store users were not even aware of Intego.
Solution: I spun off the duplicate finder component of Washing Machine as a fast experiment to test out the app store and to generate leads for our security products.
Results: Duplicate Zapper had a rating of 4.4 out of 5.0 stars on the Mac app store and a 20% conversion rate from leads generated through app.
Launched: 6/2014
Screenshots of Duplicate Zapper functions
Company / Role: Intego, Senior Product Manager
Problem: Mac OSX features to improve performance and productivity are fragmented or non-existent.
Solution: I worked with an engineer and designer to create a dashboard that unified and enhanced Mac functions such as duplicate finding, removal of unneeded system files, and organizing the desktop.
Results: The product complemented Intego's suite of security products with a productivity app, added value to software bundles, and enabled us to spin off a smaller version to test out the Mac app store.
Launched: 10/13
Screenshot of Washing Machine finding unneeded files for removal
