Gavin Oxman

T-Mobile USA is one of the largest telecommunications operators in the United States, with over 100 million subscribers. I was the product manager for Netflix on Us, a benefit that provided a free or discounted Netflix plan to millions of T-Mobile subscribers. Netflix had recently raised plan prices, which represented a potentially significant cost increase to T-Mobile. Our team did not want to raise prices for customers or eliminate a much-loved customer benefit of free Netflix, so instead, we created and launched new plans that kept the Netflix benefit but minimized the cost impact to T-Mobile. I led the product implementation for this solution. My responsibilities included creating the solution vision, user requirements, and user experience flows for the new solution. Additionally, I communicated extensively with stakeholders from partner teams, including commercial strategy, legal, customer care, retail, accounting, engineering, and the senior leadership team (CIO, CMO). The new solution was implemented in under six months and was able to exceed goals for rate plan launch by +30% for new subscribers and +40% for Netflix usage.

Limeade is an HR SAAS product focused on improving the employee experience, with millions of end-users and over 200 enterprise customers. When I joined Limeade, analytics was a major customer pain point: customers were receiving weekly automated spreadsheets of summary metrics for their Limeade programs, with no ability to filter, learn from, or present data effectively.

Our product (a daily refreshed Amazon Redshift data warehouse and over 20 Tableau self-service dashboards) filled in these gaps and more, becoming one of the common promoter themes in NPS surveys, earning +100% annual increases in weekly active users, and contributing to +10% annual improvements in employee participation and well-being outcomes. Innovations included showing the relationship between employee well-being and business outcomes, and predicting turnover risk based on well-being metrics.

I was accountable for nearly all non-engineering components of this product including visioning, customer research, vendor selection, requirements, sprint planning, training, communications, go-to-market, and optimization. I also helped build a strong team by aggressively recruiting engineers and designers to build our 8-person team and meet tight timelines.

Limeade had traditionally been a US-focused company but was expanding into new markets and geographies. I led the efforts to globalize our product so that it could be used by customers in over 60 countries and 11 languages. My responsibilities included overhauling all product documentation and content to be appropriate for a global audience. I drove a cross-functional team from legal, customer success, customer support, marketing, and sales, to ensure that all parties knew about our global capabilities and roadmap commitments. Last, I led the translation of all product content into over 11 languages by hiring translation vendors and a customer board of native speakers who could experience the product and provide contextual recommendations for language and content. After these changes were implemented, Limeade successfully launched with customers from over 60 countries with no major issues.

Limeade's R&D backlog of non-roadmap items had grown significantly in the 18 months since switching to JIRA from an older system. Frustration with the backlog was high; triaging and grooming were inconsistent, and the process was seen as a 'black hole' by business teams who submitted tickets and rarely heard updates. I volunteered to improve this process for the company.

My improvements included creating a motivated stakeholder team with representatives from partner teams (e.g. sales, ops) who could prioritize requests from their teams and participate in triage meetings. I also established a regular cadence of triage and review among PM and R&D. I made these meetings more fun by offering free lunch, introducing a bell that people could ring when issues were closed, and creating a friendly competition across teams to close the most items over time. I created public dashboards of progress and communicated backlog results to the company every two weeks, which helped employees understand the work, prioritization, and progress that was taking place.

With these improvements over six months, we were able to reduce the overall backlog by 30% and improve the number of completed items by 50%.

Microsoft Visio is a diagramming tool used by millions of people globally. As the product planner for Microsoft Visio, I was responsible for providing market and customer insights that informed product decisions and investments. As part of a product strategy review, I led a market sizing study. I conducted a global survey of thousands of enterprise customers to learn more about their diagramming habits and practices. With these data, I was able to determine the addressable market for Visio's future growth in addition to sub-markets based on users' habits related to diagramming frequency, importance, and satisfaction with current tools. From this analysis, our team was able to identify specific target markets and diagram types to further invest in over the next three years.