Previous projects & products highlights
I have worked on a variety of problems in 0 to 1 startups from the ground up to venture-backed growth companies, large corporate organizations, and with mid-size local entrepreneurs and companies. I also built three companies (and sold one!). I’ve worked with all kinds of people ranging from technologists, product managers, marketers, business leaders, writers, designers and lots and lots of customers. Some of my favorite customers have been builders, developers, and business owners who are building for their customers and audience. This page highlights some of my favorite projects over the years.
Microsoft Graph Developer Experience Tools (2021-2023)
Microsoft Graph is one of the world’s largest APIs, giving developers the building block to create experiences and run their businesses on the data and insights of M365. Our team build Kiota, an client library and API manifest generator, several SDKs across numerous programming languages (JavaScript, Java, C#, Python, PHP, Ruby), a UI SDK, an HTTP sandbox, and several other tools to make developers lives easier when building with Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.
Mina (2017-2020)
Mina is a market network for birth workers and families to find each other. We looked at companies like Gumroad, Airbnb, Lyft, and thought we could do that for matching birth professionals (midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, etc.) and new parents. The idea was born from first creating Hello Mom a text service texting words of encouragement, moving toward a full-fledged chatbot. We raised $250k, starting building revenue, corporate partnerships, and a team. We shut down at the end of 2020, many thanks to the challenges of the pandemic, but also timing and runway.
Hello Mom (2016-2020)
A text service for new moms. The goal was to create a text bot for new parents to receive encouragement and ask questions. It was a project of curiosity that accidentally went mini viral and we had to write a program to analyze the massive amount of feedback. Eventually we took this idea to create something a bit more real, and Mina was born.
Jason Carter Clinical Trials Program (2017)
Working with the Bust Out team and Be The Match, I had the honor to work on this very special project honoring Jason Carter and his family by building a platform for support in finding and joining clinical trials for blood cancers and blood disorders. The platform application takes data from a government API and makes interacting and understanding the data about available clinical trials easier to understand and find. These life saving trials help patients extend their life by days, weeks or months on the journey to find a cure for blood cancers. See more about it here.
Plandini (2019)
Working with the Bust Out team, I led the Plandini founders create their first prototype for making summer planning app to make the 12 weeks of summer easier to find childcare for kids during the summer breaks.
Query Builder (2012-2014)
Query Builder was a project for interacting with the Best Buy API documentation. We built this after feeling the frustration of developers at hackathons trying to work with the API quickly, but having to always refer back to the documentation. They say necessity is the mother of invention. Hackathon developers were slowed in writing valid API requests by having to read lengthy documentation. This tool is interactive and faster to use for simple requests.
Best Buy on IFTTT (2014)
The IFTTT interface lives at the intersection of fun and functional, allowing users to create custom notifications about the events that matter to them. Want to know when a price changes or your favorite product is available? Interested in popular products in a particular category? IFTTT will drop you a note as soon as the info is available. We built the Best Buy channel on IFTTT as an early step in connecting Best Buy to the IoT space, crafting customized alerts for changes in product status. For example, when your refrigerator senses that a water filter needs replacing, you can arrange automatic shipping and avoid the hassle of tracking down parts. Or on the fun side, you can change the color of your Phillips Hue light to Best Buy blue when there are new popular products.
Best Buy API Developer Program Transformation (2011-2015)
I developed the vision, product strategy, and roadmap for relaunching the Best Buy API program, essentially turning an afterthought into an essential piece of retail operations. I pitched to the executive team for funding to re-build the product, engineering, marketing and operations teams in a more efficient way. By replacing an outsourced team of 100+ with an internal team of 23 and instituting a zero-bug backlog, we saved the company $7.5M and launched 8 new products, including a rewrite of the developer.bestbuy.com website. API key enrollment increased 44% and test-first practices paved the way for the first automated continuous delivery pipeline in the company.
Wee Mentor
As a 54-hour hackathon project at Startup Weekend, my team tried to unite mentors and mentees in the moments that they need support by building a mobile app to close the gender gap through micro mentorship. See the pitch here. See our hustle on Twitter here. #SWTC6
Recommendations APIs
I loved this project because we took a truly experimental and pragmatic approach. We made available a small sample of what seemed to be the most useful of the Best Buy recommendations as a public API. Although we had several production customers, there was little traction after launch beyond those core users, so we devoted our time and money to other experiments. This allowed more exciting products to come to life while keeping the Recommendations APIs lean and simple.
Best Buy eBay Store (2011)
This project was focused on creating a Best Buy store on eBay to expand our consumer market. Launched in 2014, we added 27k SKUs and quickly hit $20M in revenue. This platform allowed us to upload the product listings and product details using our Product Catalog APIs and manage product deprecation and sales with our Commerce APIs. The future of the platform was intended to be used with a variety of marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.
Best Buy dotcom Platform Transformation (2010-2012)
The early transformation architects engaged me as a project manager fairly early in the effort. I focused on socializing the process and technical goals by establishing transparent relationships across the organization. I was a big champion of showcases (demos) by my team (as mentioned below under the Magellan project) and instilling agile and XP practices. Attendance at our showcases increased by 1000%, and we gave a two-week checkpoint with the business teams, both were was critical in selling these ideas and led to some indisputable improvements. Outsourcing became insourcing, and quarterly releases that formerly lasted 24+ hours became weekly lasting a couple of hours. I had the opportunity to work on transforming the product catalog APIs, product description pages (PDPs) and product listing pages (PLP).
Magellan (2010-2012)
Magellan was one of the highlights of my career. An incredible team that got to solve big problems, helping real customers, and tear down a previous outsourced development model that wasn’t working. I built relationships to collaborate across the organization and make things happen. The team was eight people (all engineers, with one product manager and one project manager) used many XP and Lean practices, including test-first and pair programming, to provide the catalog data to all of Best Buy in a robust and highly scalable manner. We maintained excellent code quality, endured few defects and tolerated no bugs in our backlog. We transformed the Best Buy product catalog from a single source database to a key-value data store with zero-downtime deployments, fail-over and redundancy that could serve the entire company rather than only the website. One of the things we were most proud of was core value of TDD and our test automation.
Boston Scientific Latitude CRM (2010)
This was my first project in healthcare. I learned a lot about medical devices, most specifically about how they work inside the body, how they are implanted and how they are read remotely. During this project I was immersed in Japanese culture and learned so much about the language, their culture and business. The business owners and customers were in Japan, the engineering team was in the US, and I was the system analyst working with both teams to write the system requirements of the CRM for heart patients with implanted devices and their doctors. We built the system that allowed patients to check in with a device at home, through which doctors are able to monitor the results, reducing the trips to the doctor's office for the patient and improving data for the doctors.
Boston Scientific iPad Rollout (2010)
It’s 2010 and iPad had just come out. We rolled out iPads and an application center for medical device sales reps to use with operating physicians to reference material with a quicker boot time (than a laptop) and in the operating room where wi-fi connectivity is low. We built the software, deployment schedule, and communication plan. Then we traveled the country to support sales field getting set up.
Best Buy Mobile Phone Upgrade Checker (2008-2010)
As a small experiment in 2008, we hacked together a quick prototype in three weeks that would allow Best Buy store employees at Best Buy to check phone upgrade eligibility for customers over the busy holiday season. If customers weren't eligible yet, they could opt in to get text message reminders as their eligibility approached. For the prototype we screen-scraped mobile carrier sites with data inputs from customers and then integrated with MyThum to manage opt-ins. The test had incredible results: we helped customers better understand their eligibility dates and created leads for selling phone upgrades. The project grew into building an open API to use across platforms (store, dotcom, etc.) and connecting to the carriers by API for more reliable data.
mIQ (2009)
In 2009, I worked with Dashwire, a Seattle startup, on building a mobile-to-web connected services platform called mIQ. The mIQ platform allowed users to use their phones from their computers, back up phone data, and easily switch devices without losing their data. The second release was built for Best Buy, which was an early investor, and I managed this project. Dashwire was acquired by HTC in 2011.
Best Buy Mobile | BEAST & Carrier Activation Platform (2008-2010)
Built a private API platform between Best Buy Mobile (a joint venture with Carphone Warehouse) and all major carriers in the US (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint) and Canada (Telus, Rodgers). The platform supported the guided sales tool for selling an activated mobile phone with a monthly phone plan. The program had several work streams from sales flow to revenue assurance to realize the revenue from the carriers. I was a project manager in the PMO across the program. It was my responsibility to run the weekly status across the entire program for VP & senior leadership, coordinate deployments, manage risks and issues across each work stream and ensure mitigation plans or escalation.