University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

VP Product at BARK

Grew and led a team of Product Managers and Product Designers responsible for all Bark digital products as well as internal technical operations.
 
During my tenure:
- Grew the team from 6 people to a total of 15 people and included the hiring of a Director for the Design team.  
- Instituted the first formal performance review process for the team, including the creation of expectations for each role at different levels.  Took a very active role in leadership, management, and mentorship for my team.  The team experienced high retention and career growth.
- Instituted the first formal quarterly goal setting and planning process resulting in the first product roadmap with strong buy-in from all stake holders.
- Implemented a change to various process including the structure by which product squads were formed, how they worked, and how we managed launches.
- Worked closely with other department heads to ensure strong communication and collaboration with the product and engineering teams.
- Worked closely with the Data team to ensure all product launches were instrumented and measured.  Heavily used a/b testing and analytics to ensure every launch was contributed to our goals.
- Supported existing growth efforts while at the same time carving out space in the roadmap to focus more solely on UX.  Used that to grow an additional product led business line contributing nearly $12m in annual revenue and growing rapidly every quarter.
- Worked with stakeholders to scale the team, process, and technology to support the company's successful IPO.

BARK

VP Product

Led product teams focused on location and local product experiences.  During my time, I led both high growth mobile products with global scale as well as early stage product experiences.

- Led the local sharing team, a product with 10s of millions of daily active users.  During this time, we took a product with declining year over year growth and changed the usage trajectory, ultimately doubling the daily active users over two years.
- Led a team to bootstap and ultimately launch a new sharing product to enable users to crowdsource local place recommendations from their friends.
- Spun up a team to rapidly build and launch a product to enable people to transact with small businesses directly on FB.  We went from idea to launch in under 3 months working both with internal engineering teams and external partners.
- Led a team working on local search ranking.

Facebook

Product Manager

Led product and technology teams.  Designed workflow and process and set product strategy and roadmap.  Worked w/ CEO on fundraising efforts.

Loosecubes

http://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/chapters/nyc

The Awesome Foundation, NYC Chapter

Trustee

Product and technical mentorship for NYC Techstars companies.

TechStars

Mentor

As a co-founder of Meetup, I was initially very hands on in dev ops, software engineering, product, and hiring.   I transitioned into CTO and Head of Product role after five years and served in that role for five years.  As CTO and Head of Product, I was responsible for strategic technical leadership, as well as responsible for leading Meetup product, both in strategy and in execution.

During my tenure as CTO and Head of Product:
    - more than doubled size of my team with over half the staff reporting up to me
    - hired and developed a senior team, adding 1 VP, 3 Directors, as well as several leads
    - Meetup grew to multiple colocation facilities for maximum redundancy and performance
    - Meetup product development process moved from a monthly launch to smooth and lightweight process w/ near continuous deployment - multiple launches per day
    - Meetup dev team now has an onboarding process which has a new Engineer launching production code on day 1
    - oversaw the creation of the Meetup API
    - Meetup product grew to over 10 mil users, 2 mil RSVPs per month (peak ~ 2 per sec), 1 mil group joins per month, and millions of dollars running through Meetup ticketing systems
    - Meetup achieved profitability on its core Organizer business.
    - At time of my leaving, team was executing on my product strategies and seeing the execution driving record growth in core growth metrics (group joins and RSVPs)

Meetup.com

Co-Founder & CTO / Head of Product

Managed and oversaw build out of large technical infrastructure.  Also contributed as software engineer.

Greg Whalin