As Product Manager for a fast-moving, early stage venture backed startup that had just received its A round, I led the company's products through several key strategic transitions managing all phases of the product development process.

Challenge 1 - GreenBuildingBlocks B2B Pivot

 In accordance with a change in the company's strategic direction I needed to manage a pivot of the initial year-old product, GreenBuildingBlocks.com (GBB) from a site for both green building professionals and consumers to a stricty B2B property. This needed to happen within two months of my start.

Solution

In conjunction with UX Design, I led a round of user research of our new sole target market, green building professionals, to generate a set of profiles that included key pain points and motivators etc. This formed the basis for the medium-term product roadmap I created for the GBB property. I presented this strategy and the roadmap to our executive team including our new CEO and gathered feedback, and ultimately the approval to pursue the strategy and roadmap as presented.

As our lead designer redesigned the site, the team of front end developers I hired built out the pages. I coordinated the efforts of my team, the design team and the back-end development team. We deployed the site within the two-month time frame we were given.

Result

The GBB site enjoyed a 10-fold increase in traffic (from a smaller target user set) over what it had achieved in its first year in operation.

Challenge 2 - Blue Egg Pivot

With the arrival of a new board/VC-chosen CEO, a new company name and brand, the company strategy was pivoting again to a more general consumer-focused mainstream media play. I needed to manage the transition of GBB to a new position as part of a larger set of media properties and also oversee the planning and deployment of the first of these new properties, the parent property: BlueEgg.com.

Solution

I integrated GBB's existing product roadmap into the more general BlueEgg strategy and in conjunction with senior executives, developed a master BlueEgg product roadmap.

With support from my team I executed the deployment over several releases of the new parent BlueEgg site which included the introduction of a newly purchased content management system. Both the CMS and the site itself, were deployed on time and within budget.

Result

Both the CMS and the site itself, were deployed on time and within budget.