Head of Product, Nextdoor

In July 2022 I joined Nextdoor as one of their four Head of Product, overseeing 3 areas of the business – Trust and Safety, Identity (Account Creation, Verification and the Profile Experience in App) and Knowledge Graph, the AI-powered inference graph for the local neighborhood.

Responsibilities Included:

• Establishing the mission and 5-year strategy for Trust & Safety (product, policy & ops) 

• Establishing metrics for monitoring the health of our moderation (prevalence, view-based prevalence, accuracy including appeals rate, cost, sentiment, speed of review) and goaling metrics for the broader product org (view based prevalence and view-based prevalence of low-quality, non-violative content)

• Hiring ML engineers and establishing the Knowledge Graph team within the AI Org 

• Overseeing company Welcoming Platform efforts, which focused on diversity, equity and inclusion internally and within the product 

• Developed a content quality framework and measurement system (weighting on each post and comment with thresholds of risk) to help empower other teams, particularly Growth and Engagement, to understand how their ranking and distribution was impacting views of content that may negatively impact people or the brand, which had short and longterm impact on growth, engagement and revenue. 

• Partnered with Growth and Engagement on reducing exposure to non-policy violating low quality content, with our ML engineers partnering to improve notification quality and feed ranking. 

• Improving verification to dramatically increase the number of new verified users who were able to join the platform; the team was responsible for majority of Q4 WAU increases 

• Launched genAI empowered Kindness Reminder to help users rewrite uncivil comments

• Rewiring the moderation platform to ensure all actions were taken via an action layer and not individuals performing unrecorded hard actions on accounts or UGC  

Director of Product Management, Twitter

Focus: User-facing trust and safety experiences. External Legitimacy, Transparency, User Safety, Regulatory Compliance, Consumer Privacy & User Trust

Responsibilities Included:

• Leading a team of 10 PMs focused on user-facing trust & consumer privacy work 

• Setting product strategy and setting up the team structure for work related to increasing user understanding and trust of Twitter’s content moderation

• Designed the system architecture for a rewrite of the moderation system to improve queue prioritization, accuracy & speed (approved but paused when the company was acquired and taken private)

• Updating the reporting experience to be symptoms first which resulted in user reports being 94% more actionable and reduced top line report volume by 59% which also reduced operational costs

• Launching @mention controls to increase privacy & safety 

Group Product Manager, Facebook: Central Integrity

Focus: External Legitimacy, Transparency, Oversight, Regulatory Compliance, Content Regulation & User Trust

Responsibilities Included

• Driving cross functional alignment on a unified definition on ML fairness for content

  moderation enforcement decisions across the family of apps.

• Developing our company-wide product strategy for global regulatory compliance, as it relates to online safety, content moderation and government content take-down requests. Partnership with senior legal and policy leads to develop the company’s product approach to compliance and then oversaw the teams working on implementation on tight deadlines.

• Product Lead, Bulding Facebook’s Oversight Board to be the final decision body on content and account decisions,

• Developing a metric to track the overall public perception of the legitimacy (trust, credibility) of Meta’s content moderation system; Developed & launched for tracking.

• Developing the strategy for addressing polarization and “filter bubble” safety issues in the Groups / Communities products.

• Age of Consent company-wide strategy and implementation for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

• Updates to reporting, transparency and appeals processes, including adding additional context on reasons.

Product Management: BRanding. uI/UX. Internationalization.

In May 2016, I was hired by a Texas-based firm to "infuse some Silicon-Valley hustle" and structure into the design and development of a new charitable giving platform. I was also given the responsibility of overseeing the re-brand and UI. Over the course of 3 months, I led a team of 11 (4 engineers, 4 designers, 3 Business Analysts) in the design and development of a two-sided giving portal for needs in emerging markets (GoFundMe for individuals living on less than $2/day). I organized our first weekly team meetings, conducted market search, led daily scrums with the design team, participated in daily calls with the developers, and oversaw UI design based on the requirements developed by the BAs.

I reduced monthly burn by 30K/month through increases in efficiency, and participated in moving us from zero lines of code to a working beta release in 3-months. I had the privilege of developing and conducting the first product training for 30 end-users from as many countries. The platform is being beta tested in 75 countries as of October 2016.

Founded deliberateLIFE Magazine

In 2012 I returned to my Silicon Valley roots to launch a consumer-facing technology company, deliberateLIFE. The company’s first product, a digital magazine app available on iOS and Android, has been downloaded in over 52 countries and boasted a 12% conversion rate with .03% churn.

I went from concept to a live app (and first issue of the magazine) in 60 days. Since then, my team and I have published over 250 pages of original content, and developed other web-based tools for consumers. During our first Community Action, our readers also raised $10K to build a school in Kenya.

Each issue of the magazine focused on a theme and included the following sections: Daily Life, Work, Engage (Community Engagement), In the Know (an in-depth look at a social issue from a domestic and international perspective), Features, Kid's Corner, Travel, and Things We Love (product review).

I recruited and managed over 40 contributors, 12 interns, and a core team of eight. I developed the strategy, presented to over 60 VCs and 100 angel investors, oversaw overall app design, PR and social media, served as Editor-in-Chief, and built external partnerships. The company has been featured in the New York Times, FastCompany, Inc., and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Founded A National Dinner Discussion Series

Following the verdict in the Mike Brown murder, protests sprung up in my town (Oakland) and across the country. Feeling the urgent need to take the conversation offline, I posed the question to friends: Who would like to meet for dinner to sit down and discuss what is happening in our country? Within hours hundreds of people had expressed interest and Deliberate Discourse was born. I believe that face-to-face dialog is a simple and powerful way to increase understanding, grow in empathy and discover new possibilities. Our first topic of conversation has been race – our experiences of it, how racism affects our lives and the lives of others, and how we can move through our conscious and unconscious biases to create a more equitable society. 

I hosted our first dinner in Oakland, California in January 2015 and have since helped plan and hosted hundreds of people at dinners across 7 cities in the United States. Groups have gathered in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Read coverage FastCompany and feedback fro attendees. In 2016 I began hosting dinners for corporations.

Redesigned a Health & Wellness App

While working on deliberateLIFE we looked at acquiring a wellness app. The original design included a system based on motivating healthy behaviors, from exercising to calling your mom, through reminders and social reinforcement.

After speaking with a handful of individuals who downloaded the original app, we found one consistent theme in the feedback from people who had downloaded the app but weren't using it regularly – the number of features were overwhelming and it hadn't become part of their daily habits.

I did some quick mock-ups of how we could redesign the UI of the app.

As I considered acquiring their stack and user base, I took a stab at thinking through how we could make the app simpler and more accessible.

The intended audience for this app was wellness departments within large companies like Twitter, MobileIron and Mulesoft.

Consumer Guide Concept (Print)

Example of Product Development Process

Part of deliberateLIFE's mission is to promote conscious consumerism.

To educate and empower consumers to make more informed choices around every day consumption, we developed the initial outline for topical guides, starting with coffee. 

With the intention of developing a series of printed guides that could be collected, I mocked up potential color pallets for each guide. Included are a few images we selected for the coffee guide, along with initial illustrations.

The print guides were never brought to life due to funding constraints.