MY EXPERIENCE
Where my adventures have taken me
Syng
Director of Product Engineering
Ring/Amazon
Head of Mobile
Grindr
Chat & Realtime Product
FANiAC
Head of Product
zeezao
CEO & Founder
Paramount Pictures
Executive Director
Lucasarts
Director
Walt Disney Studios
Senior Manager
KPMG LLP
Manager
TALK TO ME
My Case Studies
What I did to make things better
Guided technical product teams to innovate and deliver user value
Grindr had gone through 3 tech stack iterations (read complexity and cost) however the value proposition of product had not changed for 6 years (one trick pony).
My full stack team of 14 (engineers, design, qa, agile in 5 countries) set out to change that. We successfully implemented rigorous XP/TDD (evangelized to other teams and CTO.) I encouraged solutions from the entire team to solve real user challenges.
I started small, promising, sometimes secret, ideas and nurtured them while we learnt more about their behavior and value. We introduced new technologies to production scale incrementally; including the world's largest elixir/phoenix based messaging micro-service.
We made better products as a result of this close product engineering collaboration.Built delightful technology things to make people awesome
No one wants to loose chat messages, particularly when you are setting up a date. This was a problem.
We made Grindr chat more reliable (30% growth in sessions). I encouraged the team to tirelessly reduce complexity (and cost saving $500k pa), while all time increasing utility. In conjunction with marketing, we created Gaymoji. Building only what we needed, leveraging our existing systems applied in a different way, to create a simple but highly effective method of expression without relying on a third party solution. We then added linked sponsored content that we could target to any geographical area and started a unique advertising revenue stream of sponsored emoji.
During user testing we found that Grindr users would were often receiving messages with mismatched intentions. Mood, created under my design philosophy of actionable relevance, is the first dating feature for people to find what they want, where and when they want it in realtime. Interestingly, Mood was a cover for us to develop a performant replacement for the apps elasticsearch/redis powered user discovery platform (saving $1M+ pa). Simultaneously reducing system complexity and allowing a path for growth in developing markets like India via a ‘lite’ version or progressive web app of Grindr.
Cared about the mission:
It is life threatening to be gay in 36 countries, there are another 73 where Grindr users are at risk.
I worked with the CEO, Grindr4Equality, Article 19 and the Guardian Project to understand user safety issues and initiated the development of solutions to protect our users. Features such as Discreet App Icon, PIN, AutoDestruct, Disappearing Messages resulted from this collaboration.
Grindr was not considered as an engineering company. Recruiting was challenging. Focus on product engineering culture is critical. Working with other engineering leaders we reinstated an engineering blog, my team were the first contributors. I organized meet-ups in the LA office and we started to talking at conferences as a platform to share our work, to raise the communities awareness of our excellent engineering culture.
