Ali Daftarian
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
San Francisco, CA, United States
Toptal member since November 9, 2018
Ali has diverse experience working at reputable companies to successfully deliver top-rated mobile applications, engaging web experiences, robust APIs in both B2B and B2C business models. Ali has extensive experience as an agile scrum product owner and has led teams to iteratively deliver at an increased velocity and high quality. Ali exhibits the right balance between being visionary and insisting on the subtle details that delight customers.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Go-to-market Plans
- Product Design
- Product Management
- Product Marketing
- Product Roadmaps
- Product Strategy
- User Research
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
Quanata
- Partnered with stakeholders to develop the strategic vision and crafted the roadmap for an AI/ML-powered behavior-based auto insurance platform, focusing on user activation, engagement, and retention.
- Led cross-functional teams (designers, researchers, data scientists, engineers) to deliver features that boosted app engagement to 50%+ WAUs and 70%+ MAUs.
- Led features from concept to launch that reduced distracted driving by 3% and led to $2.95 billion in annual savings across insurers, emergency services, and users.
- Designed A/B experiments in Optimizely that improved customer retention rates by approximately 4%.
- Partnered with an agency and led research to validate the market need for a 0-1 product.
- Partnered with insurance and finance teams to build a business case for introducing new incentives to help promote safer driving.
- Built data visualization dashboards in Amplitude and Tableau for product health monitoring and SQL-based metric tracking.
Product Management Consultant
Wells Fargo
- Helped lead key components of a banking product called Greenhouse, targeting the underbanked.
- Partnered closely with design and mobile engineering teams to develop the deposit allocation feature that helped customers better manage their money and budget for monthly expenses.
- Led cross-functional teams to provide the option for customers to fund new digital accounts using debit/credit cards.
- Partnered with the internal fraud team and CyberSource to implement fraud-mitigating solid controls.
Senior Product Manager
Freedom Financial Network
- Reported directly to the VP/GM and led all products of a $30 million mortgage lead generation business (Bills.com), including consumer-facing mobile and websites and APIs used for lead scoring and lead routing.
- Collaborated with UX and led the development of four new mortgage lead gen sites on mobile and web with 1 million monthly visitors, generating 100,000 high-intent monthly leads for mortgage providers.
- Served as a key leader in developing the customer experience and back-end framework to segment consumers into cohorts based on intent and benefit of refinancing into new loan options, resulting in 2x higher prices, maintaining the same lead quality.
- Built and led the ongoing infrastructure management, running 10+ new optimization experiments per month utilizing testing platforms like Optimizely, Intellimize, and in-house tools to increase online form conversion by 30%.
- Managed custom API integrations to securely and reliably send leads to mortgage providers while maximizing revenue and maintaining above-industry-average lead quality. Supported marketing in configuration and spend optimization of pixels in GTM.
Product Owner
Western Union
- Led the delivery of high-value features using agile methodologies. Owned the APIs powering consumers to send money through the web and native mobile apps.
- Spearheaded efficiency improvement for an API used for retrieving money transfer services and prices, supporting on average 30 transactions per second and resulting in a 25% faster load time on mobile and web.
- Enriched an understanding of customer behavior that resulted in optimization efforts by leveraging the data derived from monitoring tools and analytics, including SiteCatalyst, Tealeaf, and Splunk.
- Researched and defined business requirements for complex money transfers to reduce friction and provide a fantastic Omni-channel user experience for online and retail customers.
- Helped expand a product for cruise ship employees to receive their salary securely and efficiently, used by Carnival and other notable cruise lines. Helped launch the first native WU app in Australia.
- Was a key leader in building a two-factor authentication system used for customer verification and password reset. This achieved increased revenues of over $2 million annually that were previously lost income.
Product Manager
Simplikate
- Managed development and timely delivery of customized mobile apps with integration with content management systems for business clients that included Macerich, Triple Five, and Delivery.com.
- Led an Agile team of developers, quality assurance, and graphic designers and collaborated with the UX team for new feature design and user experience improvements.
- Managed product roadmap development, product milestones, development of functional requirements, technical specifications, and client management to ensure satisfaction.
- Achieved success with the delivery of five customized mobile apps on iOS and Android for small and large eCommerce clients that include West Edmonton Mall, Tysons Corner Center, Delivery.com, The Opp-Guide, and Paul Jr. Designs.
- Developed functional prototypes for pre-sales and diversified portfolios for post-sale opportunities. Phunware acquired the company in June 2014.
Business Analyst (MBA Intern)
Stitch Media
- Managed research and analysis on industry and competitors, similar product lines, with financial projects and capital planning.
- Developed a business analysis report that enabled the company to receive $600,000 in funding from the Canada Media Fund.
- Provided financial projections for new product offerings.
Project History
Long Form Mortgage Lead Product
https://youtu.be/6AHNxk2zKvULed a new mortgage lead product from concept to launch that was sold at a premium and helped gain deep customer insights.
Greenhouse
Streamlined deposit allocation flow to provide a better customer experience.
2FA Services
Revamped password reset flow to improve customer conversion.
Education
Master's Degree in Business Administration
Saint Marys University - Halifax, NS, Canada
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University of British Columbia - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Certifications
Certified Yoga Instructor
Yoga to the People
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Atlassian, Optimizely, OmniGraffle, Balsamiq, Trello, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Software Testing, B2B2C
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Consumer Products
Other
Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-market Plans, User Research, Business Models, Product Design, Product Marketing, Product Frameworks, Innovation, Product Ownership, Product Discovery, Cross-functional Collaboration, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), App Product Management, B2B Product Management, Technical Product Management, Data Analytics, A/B Testing, Amplitude, Project Management, User Interface (UI), Product Development, Market Research, Competition Research, Loans & Lending, Prototyping, User Journey Maps, eCommerce, API Integration, Roadmaps, User Journeys, SaaS Product Management, Mobile Apps, Fintech, Digital Payments, Mobile Payments, Behavioral Economics, Data Science, UX Design, Customer Research, APIs, Competitive Analysis, Mortgages, Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales, B2B, Revenue & Expense Projections, New Product Development, Wireframing
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