Gonzalo Mauricio Sáenz Vásquez

Small restaurants (around 40% of the total userbase) were online for around 60% of the schedule, starting a vicious cycle where they did not sell enough on the platform and ultimately left. The company assembled a SWAT team where I was the sole project manager, and we built a strategy that comprised many initiatives to reduce churn due to connectivity:

• We rebuilt the restaurant's order manager status interface. We discovered that statuses were not correctly reported, and restaurants thought they were online while they were not. This project also meant redesigning the status management for the whole company.
• We built an operational model to allow restaurants to receive orders even if the order manager was offline, increasing GMV by 10% and availability by 20%.
• We redefined penalties for cancellations and defects in orders that were causing restaurants to be offline and standardized manual processes around that.

Merlin Jobs was a hiring marketplace focused on blue-collar jobs backed by FJ Labs, Firstmark Capital, Uncork Capital, General Catalyst, and many others. When I worked there, the company operated in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
50% of Merlin's employers churned due to the low quality of candidates, and I was in charge of the core employer product and led research efforts to understand what they meant by that. We discovered that they meant candidates were good and responsive but were not showing up at interviews. Based on research, a good show-up rate was 30%, and we were at 15% at the time. My team and I designed an interview invitation flow that had the following goals:
• Track interview-related activity in the platform to have more data for optimization.
• Send automated reminders to candidates to improve show-up rates; also, based on research, we discovered that the best performers (employers) were doing that outside the platform.
• Work with the candidate's team to add a social contract in their app and some friction to the application process to influence candidates to attend interviews.

Note: The project URL is linked to the portfolio of the designer I worked with.

CONTEXT
Interseguro is one of the leading insurance companies in Perú, and in the past, their expertise was mainly in life insurance and pension products. The opportunity was great as the car insurance market in Perú is substantial ($400 million annualized premiums), underpenetrated (<30% vs. the total automotive fleet), and highly dependent on intermediaries (60% of premiums).

PROJECT
At the end of the discovery phase, I entered the project and was in charge of refining the value proposition with the team (prototyping, pricing, and packaging). I defined the MVP and supervised the design and development team to make it happen. I also worked alongside the marketing department to implement digital marketing channels and capabilities, reports, and trade marketing elements for offline marketing.

After the launch phase, I was in charge of growing the product sales and setting the vision and roadmap to align the company executives on the next steps. It's also worth mentioning that we worked with world-class partners such as IDEO, Globant, and Public Digital as advisors in implementing the product.

Medlink is a healthtech SaaS that assists hospitals, clinics, and independent doctors in managing their operations and providing superior customer service. Many of these organizations use omnichannel CRMs to interact with their customers. The primary use case is scheduling appointments, which often isn't integrated with their existing management software. This makes the process of creating medical histories and setting up appointments challenging. The CEO requires an experienced project manager to conduct a thorough analysis and provide a detailed roadmap for developing an MVP and planning the next steps.

The omnichannel CRM project included competitive and trends analysis, API integrations with a WhatsApp partner and VoIP providers, mapping out the MVP, and designing an experience that could be easily integrated into their current product. I coached one project manager and worked with a team of three engineers.

On Deck (Beondeck.com) is a company that builds online communities for founders, investors, and startup professionals. At the time I was at the company, they were scaling the number of programs, and the payments operation was breaking. There were many errors while processing payments, and payment traceability was a pain. The finance team took an entire week to make the payments conciliation and reporting.

I researched multiple payment providers and aligned needs with the CFO and the director of admissions to ensure the new solution also fits the need to experiment with packaging options for our communities to improve future conversions. Additionally, I provided a business case against a previously chosen payment provider. It would have cost the company around $100,000 in additional fees if it had been implemented.