The Wharton School

Claremont McKenna College

Bloc

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Product & People Leader  -  Wharton MBA Candidate

Afresh mission: Eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all. 

Our product helps grocery stores leverage AI to stay in stock without over-ordering. Afresh has already helped reduce millions of pounds of food waste. It drives incredible business value by reducing shrink by 25% and increasing revenue by 3%.

Afresh

Director of Product

Led product for Buyer's Brokerage, Redfin's largest and most profitable business line. 
Managed team of 5 PMs (30+ including eng, design, analytics) across 7 product areas: Growth, Quality, Tour Fulfillment, Appointments, Associate Agents, Brokerage Deals, and Service Matching.

Redfin

Senior Manager, Product Management

People Leadership
Led and developed a team of senior product managers, providing feedback and coaching to grow their skills and careers. 

Product Ownership
Oversaw a portfolio of product areas for all platforms (rWeb, iOS, and Android): 
  - Pickup & Delivery Discovery funnel (End-to-end shopping journey)
  - Homepage 
  - Navigation (Departments, Services, header/footer)
  - Page strategy (Category pages, manual shelves, topic pages, etc.)

Vision and Strategy
Established a compelling direction for teams based on a deep understanding of key customer use-cases and pain points, stakeholder needs, and overall business strategy. Created frameworks that drove decision-making based on our vision and strategy for key product areas. 

Stakeholder management
Collaborated closely with key stakeholders across the organization and gained alignment with senior leadership. Effectively balanced competing interests by driving and communicating a clear vision with guiding principles and key tenets to align stakeholders. 

Execution
Enabled teams to execute by clarifying goals and objectives and establishing the guiding process and milestones for teams to achieve. Drove project planning and timelines by aligning on scope, and engaging partner teams to gain commitments and expected delivery dates to ensure accountability.

Walmart Global Tech

Group Product Manager - Discovery

Online Grocery is the fastest growing vertical in Walmart eCommerce with multi-billion in revenue and millions of users:

Merging Walmart Online Grocery App with New Walmart App: 
- Successfully led large-scale migration of customers from Walmart Online Grocery app (ranked #1 across all Shopping apps in U.S.) to new Walmart app. Resulted in completing migration project 6 weeks ahead of schedule with above-expected financial results. Required aligning with senior executives (SVP level) weekly on strategy and metrics, collaborating with marketing to synchronize on strategy and timing, adapting execution playbooks with engineering teams, and communicating updates and outcomes to broader organization. 
- Owned all requirements for multiple key product areas including search, browse, item page, and item tile for rWeb and mobile apps during major phase of building new Walmart app. Involved alignment with senior leadership across business lines and creative problem-solving for merging features and capabilities into a single app. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-kills-grocery-app-to-make-online-shopping-easier-2020-5

Improved Grocery Shopping Experience: 
- Led quarterly planning process for pre-transaction funnel. Achieved cross-functional alignment on organizational goals, prioritization of ideas, and finalizing agreement on commitments within several weeks. 
- Built complementary recommendations to help users discover new items and grow their basket sizes. Involved leveraging purchase data to build machine-learning models to generate high-quality, personalized recommendations. 
- Launched merchandising tools to enable merchant team to create more campaigns for customers (e.g. promote seasonal items) to increase basket sizes. Required collaboration across multiple engineering teams and technical understanding of how data flows through our various systems to ensure features met our business needs.

Senior Product Manager - Online Grocery Team

Course Hero has helped millions of students and was named a Fastest Growing Company in North America on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 list and a winner of MediaPost Appy Award for Best Education App. Joined as ~40th employee and helped company grow to over $1 billion in valuation. 

- Product and people management responsibilities, reporting directly to Chief Product Officer.
- Led new Graph Intelligence Group (search, data, and machine learning) to identify opportunities to personalize our products as one of the company’s 5 key strategic bets of 2018. 
- Responsible for bridging our major technical investments with solving critical customer problems.
- Worked closely with back-end engineering and machine learning team leads to identify opportunities to leverage ML and AI to personalize our products. 
- Built long-term and short-term roadmaps, including plans for acquiring training data for ML models, and launching MVPs to validate new products.

Course Hero

Group Product Manager - Graph Intelligence Group

- Oversaw nearly 20 people across engineering, design, operations, and analytics, and reported directly to Chief Product Officer.
- Led vision and strategy for multiple product teams, including the company's 2nd largest business line. Grew Q&A annual revenue by 5X and grew Q&A content by 5X over 3 years.
- Directly managed and mentored first time PMs into Senior PMs by helping them successfully accomplish major projects, consistently hit their team goals, and avoid scope creep.
- Taught training for ~50 engineers on user empathy, solving user problems, and pitching ideas using data.

Group Product Manager - Study Tools and Services Group

- Reported directly to Chief Product Officer. 
- Increased Q&A product activation rate by 50% as a result of successful growth projects based on user insights, including launching a new site-wide widget for users to ask questions throughout the site and launching daily missions for new users to earn rewards.
- Launched a $1M national sweepstakes campaign to give away $1M of free tutoring at 100 schools, which involved heavy coordination with marketing, legal counsel, and engineering teams.

Senior Product Manager - Experts Product Team

- Set vision and strategy for 2 product roadmaps: Experts Q&A (our fastest growing product) and launched a new Marketplace product that allowed users to upload and monetize their own content. Owned end-to-end launch from requirements to marketing plan.
- Launched new question type that eventually became the main question type for the Q&A product.
- Conducted user research, wrote user stories, prioritized backlog, and led sprint planning.

Product Manager - Experts Product Team

We generated over $1M in revenue with a team of 10 people. 

Responsible for helping our pre-revenue company find product-market fit and grow our team from the ground up, which included customer development, feature prioritization with dev team, creating processes and playbooks, generating sales, employee training, building internal tools (sales tracking), and dashboards (analytics software) to scale effectively. 

Our technology provided seamless freight tracking capabilities for shippers, freight forwarders, and independent drivers in the logistics space.

Intrans

2nd Employee at Startup (Product, Operations, Sales)

Managed portfolio with 70+ companies (each with up to $20 Million in credit exposure) in the NW territory. Borrower profile consisted of middle market private and publicly traded companies that report between $10 Million and $5 Billion in revenue annually in industries including commercial real estate,  manufacturing, insurance, wholesale, technology (start-up), life science, retail, non-profit, and more.

Wells Fargo

Financial Analyst

Built one of the first location-based, mobile dating apps. In a time when online dating had a stigma and meant creating a static online profile, we built a way for single people to find local hot spots (bars and nightlife) where groups of single people were in real-time. 

Engaged in product development and user experience design with technical team during the phases of conception, wire framing a minimum viable product, and successfully launching the first version of the mobile application on the Apple App Store. 

Managed company brand and reached users and bloggers through various social media platforms during pre-launch (Twitter ~ nearly 1,000 followers in first 6 months, Facebook, etc.) and maintained relationships with influential media players; resulted in published articles and free marketing for MojoMapp. Tracked analytics to capture social media marketing effectiveness and improve understanding of target user base.

MojoMapp

Startup Founder

Evaluated borrower performance and assessed probability of loan default by analyzing business risks and mitigants, and financial performance. Underwriting involved reviewing financial statements and metrics including profitability, fixed cover charge, leverage, cash flow, and ability to service debt. Due diligence entailed industry and company research, etc. Completed financial statement spreads and quarterly trend analyses using Moody’s RiskAnalyst and tested a wide variety of financial covenants for compliance as specified within credit approval documents.

US Bank

Portfolio Management

An Association of Professionals in Finance, Credit, and International Business.

Developed marketing plan for a start-up branch with focuses on strengthening and leveraging existing customer relationships, and proposing new marketing strategies for penetrating the Shanghai credit market. Consulted with company sponsors and incorporated feedback in practical strategies for improving membership, customer services and company website. 

Constructed customer contact directory, marketed events and services, and managed relationships with existing and potential new customers. Attended and assisted in organizing banking and credit risk management seminars.

FCIB

Marketing and Business Development

Commercial Loans Services

Managed West Operation’s participation in project to replace outdated employee computers. Developed time study strategy, compiled computer systems data for 170 stations, and successfully demonstrated cost savings resulting from improved efficiency. Wrote proposal explaining budgeting plan and recommended timeline for replacements; resulted in 60 new computers in 2008. 

Devised new inventory tracking and ordering systems, and managed activity for 100 entries online for supply exchange. Contributed as part of a 3-person employee development team in establishing a new employee university training program; involved project management, team collaboration, and evaluation of over 30 banking and management courses in a report.

Operations - Commercial Loans Services

Proposed volunteer-run community building project and secured full donation of supplies and location use, allowing for free to subsidized (max. cost $5 per student/summer) student enrollment of pre-schoolers in the community. Program provided children an opportunity to develop social skills and engage in learning activities with their families for little to no cost. Managed program logistics (including recruitment of volunteers), developed weekly curricula and taught classes with volunteers to preschool aged children.

STARS Summer Program

Founder

Jumpstart is a volunteer program that recruits and trains college students all over the country to work one-on-one with preschoolers to ensure children from different socioeconomic backgrounds have equal opportunities to education. Engaged in weekly team planning, group trainings, leading classroom sessions, and creating family newsletters. Developed and instructed writing, reading, and social skills building curricula appropriate for preschoolers.

Jumpstart Program

Corp Member

Researched legal statutes for cases, compiled new client information, and completed initial preparation of affidavits. Facilitated administrative duties, including directing clients and managing communications and financial invoices.

Nancy Farah