Welcome
Hello there! You've stumbled into my little corner of the internet. Hopefully, you're not lost. If you're looking for cute cat videos, sadly, you're outta luck. (Hey, no judgments for a quick detour to fulfill your feline fix.)
You're likely thinking, "Oh joy, a product manager portfolio. How utterly thrilling." Hear me out, my friend, because this isn't your run-of-the-mill, all-style-no-substance site. Think of it more like a phoenix – embodying wisdom, resilience, a visionary spirit, and a knack for uncovering truths.
Here, you'll gain insights into my skills, diverse experiences, and ability to rise from challenges like that mythical beast. (Besides, aren't we all tired of unicorns?) I solemnly swear to keep things interesting, injecting forward-thinking and non-traditional approaches. Who knows, you may even stumble onto something that sparks your imagination.
Please sit back, relax, and enjoy the scroll through my digital wonderland. If you're searching for a talented and lighthearted consultant transformed into a product manager, you're in the right place.
Let's see if we are a match made in the whimsical realms of HR heaven.
Behind the Screens
Who's the product manager behind the screens? My name is Gina, and I'm not your average product manager. My background is in business coaching, facilitation, and design, making me a triple threat when it comes to creating products.
My true passion lies in creating products that make a real impact in people's lives. I'm talking about products that solve problems, fill unmet needs, and make people say, "WHERE have you been all my life?"
My skills go beyond just dreaming up ideas. I can turn user needs into actionable insights and navigate even the trickiest stakeholder situations. I build teams that blend analytical data with designs that are smoother than James Bond's martini. The results? Customer-centric outcomes that shape the future.
So, if you're looking for someone to help you identify new product opportunities or improve upon existing ones, you've come to the right place.
Product Management Case Studies
Prepare to be transported to the frontlines of strategic decision-making and creative problem-solving, where brilliant minds and sticky notes battle treacherous timelines to create innovative products. In the case studies, I transition between PM and business coaching roles. Yet, my approach is consistent - I strategically approach problem-solving while collaborating closely with clients/teams, and we remain laser-focused on user-centric product development.
Grab your favorite caffeinated beverage and delve into a world where problem-solving becomes an art form, collaboration is the key, and users reign supreme. Select whatever case study strikes your fancy:
Creating a Product to Empower At-Risk Youth
Situation: A non-profit client wanted to build an online mentorship platform to help at-risk youth. The client allocated an eight-weeks to complete this ambitious project phase.
Approach: The project required coordinating 40 remote volunteers across five teams - each with their superpowers: UX designers (mind control), UX researchers (mind reading), developers (web-slinging), content designers (persuasion), and a product team (clairvoyance). We used an agile design process to run two-week sprints faster than Usain Bolt, held daily stand-ups, and tracked tickets and our backlog through an omniscient Kanban board.
Solution: As the Lead Product Manager, I spearheaded the project's vision and strategy. Our vision was to develop a professional mentorship product that provided at-risk youth a safe space to seek career guidance, form long-lasting professional relationships, and create meaningful and valuable experiences for mentors and mentees. Simple, right?!?
We began by channeling our inner detectives, investigating existing mentorship offerings, and gathering insights from mentees, mentors, and stakeholders to understand the needs of our users. Our research showed that users wanted to feel safe, empowered, and engaged. Armed with these valuable insights and a collection of secret handshakes, we shaped our product roadmap, prioritized our most impactful features, and continued our sprinting adventure.
Next, we crafted mid-fidelity prototypes that would have made Piccaso jealous and subjected them to multiple rounds of usability testing. Feedback guided us in refining the designs and enhancing the user experience. Once the prototypes were pixel-perfect, we prepared them for the developer handoff.
During the early stages of UX design, our development superheroes built the backend platform. Once the UX designs were finalized, they transitioned to focus on front-end development with copious amounts of coffee and unyielding love for coding. And, of course, we couldn't forget the grand finale: QA testing, where we unleashed the mighty bug hunters, ensuring a smooth and glitch-free user experience.
Results: By employing a strategic approach, fostering cross-collaboration among our remote team of heroes, and leveraging user-centric insights, we delivered our phase of the mentorship product. Our team's dedication, a wee bit of madness, and collective ownership resulted in a successful phase, marking a significant milestone for the non-profit organization's project. The platform helps the organization deliver on its mission to empower and uplift vulnerable youth, making a lasting difference in their lives.
Designing a Product to Encourage Breast Cancer Survivors
Situation: Breast cancer survivors face significant challenges in navigating life after treatment, struggling to find trustworthy sources of information and support for their physical, mental, and emotional post-treatment needs. Many healthcare professionals lack a comprehensive understanding of long-term treatment effects. Some survivors turn to social media. Let's say, the advice there can be as helpful as a bicycle to a goldfish.
Approach: Over six months, I designed Expert Survivor, an app to provide breast cancer survivors access to trusted experts specializing in survivorship issues. My vision was to create a user-friendly platform that offered personalized information, advice, and resources tailored to the specific challenges faced by survivors. The solution addressed the existing information gap and established a foundation for future growth opportunities, including expansion to other cancer survivorship areas and partnerships with relevant organizations.
Solution: I channeled my inner Olivia Benson and dove into research. Competitive and user analysis verified the market gap and the opportunity for survivorship support. The findings also highlighted the importance of trusted experts, personalized advice, and a safe space for survivors to seek information.
Using the research, I crafted my product roadmap and prioritized features. I then created user personas, user journey maps, and user flows. These tools helped me see the app from the user's perspective, leading to more thoughtful product decisions and improved design experiences.
Using an iterative design process, I continually sought user feedback to enhance usability and the user experience. Usability testing provided valuable insights that I absorbed like a sponge and led to iterative design changes that addressed areas for improvement. Preference testing confirmed the success of design iterations, with 88% of users preferring the updated designs. Finally, I implemented a design language system for consistency. It was like giving the app its unique language, ensuring every button, icon, and color told a cohesive story. It was a dance of pixels and aesthetics, as graceful as a ballet performance.
Results: Although Expert Survivor started as a mere boot camp design project, I am passionate about transforming it into a real-life solution. Along the way, I experienced the heart-wrenching loss of three individuals I had interviewed. Their memory became the driving force behind my mission, reminding me of the urgency and importance of supporting breast cancer survivors.
Expert Survivor, if realized, would provide survivors with a trusted resource, offering them support, guidance, and a community of experts and fellow survivors who intimately understand their unique challenges. The platform's potential impact extends beyond the project, aiming to raise awareness and provide much-needed support to an underserved group deserving of assistance.
Restructuring a Product Portfolio to Fuel Revenue Growth
Situation: A renowned Bay Area firm was in a perplexing predicament. Despite its sterling reputation, it was losing market share to smaller competitors. I was hired to find the cause of the decline and identify ways to increase revenue.
Approach: With my insatiable curiosity, I researched the company and its existing products. I interviewed people within the company, as well as reviewed their past and current proposals. Additionally, I spoke with a variety of existing and potential clients to understand their points of view. I analyzed the competition and their customers to get a complete picture of the market landscape.
Solution: I discovered a fascinating pattern as I pieced together the puzzle. My findings showed that projects went through four phases, with the third and fourth phases being the most profitable and representing the vast majority of the project's profit. (Cha-ching!) But - there was a catch. Only 48% of my client's clients reached those phases.
The competitors had a clever strategy. They charged low flat rates in the first and second phases, using them as loss leaders to attract and convert more customers. They then compensated for the loss by charging higher hourly rates in later phases. (Bait and switch, anyone?) The costs of my client's initial project phases were higher, but the hourly rates ranged from 28% to 42% lower than the competition's in the later phases. This made my client's bids appear much more expensive, even though the overall cost for the entire project would have been lower for a superior product. This significantly impacted how buyers perceived proposals and the value of perspective offerings.
With these insights and my trusty wand (aka spreadsheet), I worked my magic. I restructured my client's offerings by unbundling certain products, revising project phases, and adjusting hourly pricing to reflect market rates. To seal the deal, my client and I collaborated to reposition the firm as the premium provider and develop compelling sales materials to communicate this distinction with supporting quotes from my client interviews. Finally, we set OKRs for sales conversions and market share.
Results: And just like that, the impact was immediate and remarkable. My client experienced a significant increase in sales conversions. Ultimately, it translated into a remarkable 57% year-on-year revenue growth for the firm, reestablishing its position in the market.
Developing a Product to Drive Revenue and Collaboration
Situation: My client, an international corporation, faced a momentous challenge at the outset of the recession, as it was one of the first sectors to be impacted and the last to recover. Previously, my team had been advising the global leadership group on the company's strategic direction and growth. When conditions deteriorated faster than cotton candy in water, we pivoted to navigate leadership through the economic turbulence.
Approach: With nerves of steel, we jumped headfirst into the challenge. The company held a portfolio of service offerings. Yet, we noticed that different service lines communicated like ex's after a breakup - hindering cross-selling opportunities and revenue generation. I conducted research to understand the barriers and motivations behind the behavior. The findings revealed that sales staff perceived other service lines as competition and feared losing control of client relationships. Additionally, many salespeople were young, had never worked through a true market downturn, and were at a loss for how to find opportunities.
Solution: Outfitted with this knowledge, we gathered with a team of internal and external stakeholders to devise a brilliant product strategy to unlock the untapped potential across the company's portfolio.
The solution was an intensive boot camp designed to build relationships and trust between salespeople across service lines. (Think: business casual Jedi mind training) It focused on educating participants on the other service lines, fostering understanding and empathy, and addressing individual concerns related to client ownership. The product implementation involved multi-faceted experiences for participants, combining interactive workshops, team-building activities, and personalized coaching sessions. It was an intense roller coaster of growth with highs, lows, and only a few screams.
By fostering relationships and reducing the fear of losing client ownership, the boot camp removed the primary barrier to client referrals and cross-selling opportunities. Then, like a pro-bowl football team, rivals became teammates determined to score and celebrate with epic touchdown dances that would make even the strictest referee crack a smile.
Results: The product implementation team scaled the training program across the United States and key international markets. The US Teams hit the field and played every game like it was the Super Bowl. In the first twelve months, the US program generated $40 million in confirmed revenue. Yet, it wasn't just about the money. The program transformed the company's culture by fostering collaboration and significantly enhancing the client experience. The product proved that even in the darkest times, a spark of collaboration can ignite a roaring fire of success.
Devising a Product to Teach Resilience
Situation: A medical professional wrote a groundbreaking book on resilience and post-traumatic growth. Recognizing the opportunity to capitalize on the book's popularity, the author tapped me to help secure more speaking engagements.
Approach: Through my product manager lens (do PMs look at the world any other way?), I saw a bigger opportunity than speaking engagements. I devised a strategic plan to develop a product strategy around her remarkable methodology and to position my client as an expert on post-traumatic growth and resilience.
Solution: Armed with boundless curiosity, I dove into the depths of research in the resilience realm. Collaborating with my client's PA, we interviewed clinicians and support groups to understand their approaches to post-traumatic growth, existing tools, and patient challenges. Our findings showed there was an unequivocal need for my client's methodology, as little post-traumatic growth methodology existed to support trauma and crisis survivors.
Using the information collected, my client and I designed targeted resilience workshops based on the book's research and methodology. We also created supplementary products, such as workbooks and study guides, giving attendees support materials and providing my client additional revenue stream. (Win-win!)
Based on the success of the workshops, we created a certification program for clinicians. The program certified healthcare professionals in her resilience methodology, thereby expanding its adoption and creating a network of professionals versed in her approach to post-traumatic growth.
The magic didn't stop there. We then pursued licensing agreements with national organizations and hospitals granting them access to the materials for training and implementing resilience-focused programs. These agreements allowed my client's innovative methods to reach broader audiences and positively impact clinicians and patient care.
Results: My client is now one of the leaders in the field of post-traumatic growth and resilience. She has worked with survivors of traumatic events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing, veterans with PTSD, frontline responders, and individuals recovering from life-threatening illnesses. She is a sought-after speaker, has been a guest on popular podcasts, and has hosted engaging webinars.
And, her story doesn't end here. She has continued her research and recently published her second book. Stay tuned because this amazing woman's journey is far from over...
Let's Connect
Wow - you made it all the down way here?!? That's fantastic!
Do you want to identify new product opportunities or improve upon existing ones? Are you ready to drive business growth and bring products to life that truly make a difference?
Send me a message! Let's chat and see what's possible together!