Irfan is available for hire
Hire IrfanIrfan Ebrahim
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Toronto, ON, Canada
Toptal member since October 11, 2019
Bio
Irfan's successfully launched many web/mobile products over the past several years across various B2B and B2C industries, including consumer health, eCommerce, fintech, and real estate. He's developed product strategies and roadmaps and led teams as large as 15 through the entire discovery and delivery process. With his strong tech and UX background, Irfan works deeply with designers and developers to solve complex problems with simple solutions.
Project Highlights
Event Add-ons
Took the very complex world of add-ons and distilled it into a simple MVP that saw 50% adoption growth MoM while in beta.
Account Dashboard Revamp
Increased usage of the feature by 210% by leading the discovery process.
Tiered Ticketing
Delivered an in-demand feature that other teams had shied from due to its interaction complexity—it was successfully adopted.
Expertise
Work Experience
Vice President of Product
2019 - 2019
Vouchr
- Defined the company's product strategy and short-term roadmap.
- Overhauled the entire product development process including road mapping, customer discovery and delivery processes which resulted in 30-minute sprint kickoff meetings instead of 90 minutes without any loss of output (the developers still fleshed out and validated/tested the designs and specs).
- Helped the company ship its first stable release for six months within a month of starting at the company.
- Used the following tools: Productboard, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub, Slack, and Sketch.
Senior Product Manager
2017 - 2019
Universe
- Originally started as one of the B2C PMs and was promoted to own the entire B2B product roadmap.
- Increased the usage of an underperforming core feature by 210% using a discovery process.
- Successfully delivered the company's most technically challenging projects: assigned seating (a requirement to entering a $70 million market) and selling merchandise (usage grew by 50%, MoM).
- Increased the revenue by partnering with Facebook to build an FB event integration, bringing in 90% of revenue for some event organizers.
- Successfully delivered complicated features that other teams in the past could not deliver, helping the sales team close certain leads.
- Used the following tools: Jira, GitHub, Sketch, Abstract, and InVision.
Co-founder
2016 - 2016
IT Werks
- Defined the company strategy/positioning (i.e., purpose, target market, and unique value/selling proposition).
- Identified and launched three products based on pain points discovered during customer research and sales calls.
- Closed the company's first three new clients as well as set a record for most clients closed in a month.
Product Manager
2015 - 2016
Hightower
- Increased engagement for the landlord persona on the web app, using the jobs-to-be-done framework and by overhauling key underutilized key features and introducing new features to promote daily usage and utility.
- Used with the iOS team retention cohort analytics to identify a serious retention problem for both new and existing users, leading to the development of a new onboarding flow and new notification triggers to bring users back to the app through reminders and location-aware prompts.
Product Manager
2013 - 2015
Bookspan
- Took over the company first's mobile app project with the aim of wining the eBook rights from publishers and quickly released BookNow in 2.5 weeks for iOS and Android.
- Was promoted to product lead for Readwell, the official companion app for all the book clubs owned by Bookspan and oversaw every aspect dealing with eBooks—from designing and executing the app experience, the online eBook eCommerce experience, and working with publishers and internal teams to build the delivery and reporting infrastructure.
- Created Club Hoopla as an MVP to test how to sell long-tail literature, learnings shaped how we created and launched a DVD club and book-of-the-month club.
- Led the complete redesign of an underperforming web property, which included revamping the business model and content strategy—successfully delivered the project on time.
- Designed and launched the loyalty program, the most demanded customer request, on schedule. The launch was so smooth with almost no customer complaints that the executive team thought the feature was broken.
- Increased signups by 28% using an acquisition-focused homepage.
- Led the engineering and DevOps teams for the first 12 months until a CTO was hired.
Junior Product Manager
2012 - 2013
Everyday Health, Inc.
- Owned the South Beach Diet member site relaunch project and met the aggressive launch date by prioritizing essential features and bugs.
- Reached and maintained the highest signup conversion rate (69%) on SouthBeachDiet.com and increased visitor return rate by 50% by prioritizing on quick wins within three months of launch.
- Helped redesign the Mayo Clinic’s corporate wellness experience with ownership of converting one-time users into engaged, long-term users.
- Managed the post-design phase of the Jillian Michaels' iOS 7 app redesign to help the team focus on core functionality and flawless experience, as well as launching the new run-tacker feature to motivate runners to keep on pushing.
Project History
Event Add-ons
Took the very complex world of add-ons and distilled it into a simple MVP that saw 50% adoption growth MoM while in beta.
Based on user behavior, I came up with the idea to allow event organizers to sell non-ticket items (parking, t-shirts, CDs, and more) through the platform to capture that revenue instead of losing it to other platforms.
After leading discovery on the project, I determined a 4-phased approach with phase 1 being the MVP. The MVP was so successful, that instead of waiting 1-2 months before investing in phase 2+, we had enough user feedback to start phase 2 and 3 immediately!
After leading discovery on the project, I determined a 4-phased approach with phase 1 being the MVP. The MVP was so successful, that instead of waiting 1-2 months before investing in phase 2+, we had enough user feedback to start phase 2 and 3 immediately!
Account Dashboard Revamp
Increased usage of the feature by 210% by leading the discovery process.
My goal was to help event organizers to sell more tickets. With this in mind, I examined all of the legacy features and determined that the account dashboard was a quick win in terms of user value and low development effort.
Customer interviews confirmed the data and my hypothesis. After speaking to ten customers, I quickly determined a 3-phased approach to increase engagement with phase 1, acting as the MVP.
Working closely with my designer and development team, we quickly iterated over designs with customers and launched Phase 1 after a month of development. We immediately started to see the metrics improve, and the customer interviews confirmed that we were on the right track.
Before we even started phase 3, our customers were raving about how useful the dashboard now was, and some also said it was their homepage!
Customer interviews confirmed the data and my hypothesis. After speaking to ten customers, I quickly determined a 3-phased approach to increase engagement with phase 1, acting as the MVP.
Working closely with my designer and development team, we quickly iterated over designs with customers and launched Phase 1 after a month of development. We immediately started to see the metrics improve, and the customer interviews confirmed that we were on the right track.
Before we even started phase 3, our customers were raving about how useful the dashboard now was, and some also said it was their homepage!
Tiered Ticketing
Delivered an in-demand feature that other teams had shied from due to its interaction complexity—it was successfully adopted.
Music festivals and conferences often have different ticket groups that are dependent on other ticket types selling out, e.g., only show the general admission ticket sell out only if early bird tickets sell out or once a specific date has passed.
The platform, at the time, forced organizers to manually manage the availability of such ticket groups so most customers wanted a less-involved way of managing the tickets to reduce lost ticket sales.
Previous PMs attempted this feature but decided against it as it would require rebuilding the event creation flow. Given the amount of time the rebuild would need, I thought of splitting the feature into two components and due to the slight complexity of this idea, making it part of the pro and custom plans (which had an account manager).
Because I was able to deliver this feature, it forced large clients on legacy plans to upgrade to the new pricing plans to unlock this new feature. We also saw smaller, individual users self-upgrade to unlock this feature!
The platform, at the time, forced organizers to manually manage the availability of such ticket groups so most customers wanted a less-involved way of managing the tickets to reduce lost ticket sales.
Previous PMs attempted this feature but decided against it as it would require rebuilding the event creation flow. Given the amount of time the rebuild would need, I thought of splitting the feature into two components and due to the slight complexity of this idea, making it part of the pro and custom plans (which had an account manager).
Because I was able to deliver this feature, it forced large clients on legacy plans to upgrade to the new pricing plans to unlock this new feature. We also saw smaller, individual users self-upgrade to unlock this feature!
Education
2007 - 2012
Bachelor's Degree in Systems Design Engineering
University of Waterloo - Waterloo, Canada
Skills
Tools
Jira, Trello, Slack, Sketch, GitHub, Figma
Paradigms
Requirements Analysis, Kanban, Agile Product Management
Industry Expertise
Consumer Products, Health & Wellness, Commercial Real Estate
Other
Product Vision, Product Roadmaps, Product Discovery, Consumer-facing Product Design, Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Requirements & Specifications, User Requirements, Lean UX, Lean Startups, Agile Sprints, Product Owner, User Research, Dual Track Agile, Roadmaps, Strategy, Customer Research, Customer Discovery, Native Mobile Apps, Web & Mobile Applications, eCommerce, Wireframing, Mockups, Product Management, UX Design, Financial Modeling
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