Kate Griggs, Product Manager in San Jose, CA, United States
Kate Griggs

Product Manager in San Jose, CA, United States

Member since September 14, 2020
Kate is a storyteller and product manager who leads cross-disciplinary teams to deliver game-changing products. She has led projects for tech startups, a major hotel group, and the US Air Force. Along with her flair for making technical concepts accessible and understandable, she loves to synthesize key takeaways from mountains of data points to drive decisions and move forward. Kate delivers excellence by empathizing with business stakeholders, software engineers, and end users.
Kate is now available for hire

Project Highlights

Expertise

  • Backlog Management
  • Pitch Decks
  • Product Roadmaps
  • Product Strategy
  • Product Vision
  • Stakeholder Management
  • User Research
  • User-centered Design (UCD)

Employment

  • Senior Platform Product Manager

    2020 - PRESENT
    Zendesk
    • Designed and developed beautifully simple front-end experiences for Zendesk Sunshine user profiles, events, and custom objects. Sunshine is an open and flexible CRM platform native to AWS.
    • Led a cross-functional team comprising platform, product, program, engineering, UX design, accessibility (a11y), internalization (i18n), marketing, and documentation.
    • Delivered the Sunshine Admin Center for onboarding, settings, and configuration; the Agent Workspace for end-user data display and manipulation; and instrumentation/observability across all interfaces.
    • Developed an early-access beta application for provisioning and customer support.
  • Senior Product Manager

    2016 - 2020
    VMware Pivotal Labs
    • Coached client product managers and cross-disciplinary teams in greenfield product discovery, Lean solution ideation, and Agile development implementation.
    • Guided teams in their use of extreme programming techniques (pairing and test-driven development) to ensure they delivered the right features (Lean) using the right processes (Agile).
    • Led Agile prioritization and backlog management: What should we build first? Why? How can we isolate those elements as lean, vertical slices that still deliver value? How can we best communicate deliverable expectations with software engineers?
    • Conducted initial discovery interviews and personal development: What’s happening in the current problem space today? Who are the people involved? What problems with existing tech are out there?
    • Evaluated hypotheses and risk elimination via prototypes and usability testing: Can we validate our assumptions about this solution—directly with users—before we build anything? How will we measure failure versus success?
    • Led solution framing via designing user flows and interaction screens: How quickly can we solve the top-prioritized problem? Which solution do we think we can deliver value with the fastest?
    • Performed stakeholder management: What value are the business stakeholders aiming for? How can we tackle a user problem in a way that also delivers that business value?
    • Managed product consultants on top of day-to-day product management consulting work. Discussed current and upcoming work lives on client teams and found ways to level them up professionally through internal and external career growth opportunities.
    • Collected and synthesized feedback from each direct report's peers to help them become better teammates, consultants, and practitioners.
    • Established a weekly "Product Management Campfire" meeting to bring all product managers together to share resources and new learnings and to workshop product strategies for live software and real team problems.
  • Instructor: Product Management and Agile Software Development

    2017 - 2018
    General Assembly
    • Taught a 10-week product management class with eight students learning product management by doing. Students were graded on weekly homework assignments where they practiced concepts on product ideas of their own.
    • Delivered a two-hour Agile software development lecture and interactive product management classes each month to small and large groups of General Assembly students.
    • Spoke on panels about breaking into product management and personally mentored product and design students through career transitions.
  • Agile Product Owner

    2016 - 2016
    InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)
    • Owned two products within the CRM team, used globally by 5,000 hotels to enhance guest experiences on-property. The products set internal stakeholder expectations in North America, Europe, and China.
    • Consulted with product teams to transition from Waterfall methodologies to a more rigorous Agile cadence, beginning with status update adjustments and backlog management enhancements.
    • Led the discovery and development process for a new hotel offers tool: finalized user flows, UI designs, and feature prioritization for a reinvented hotel scheduling and redemption experiences.
    • Oversaw design and development of an arrivals information tool: graphic design, product backlog management, feature development, and metrics reporting processes.
    • Prioritized the product backlog and budget-based release schedule through an increasingly agility-focused process.
  • Certified Scrum Master

    2013 - 2016
    Three Five Two
    • Facilitated and coached teams on Agile (Scrum) software and web development methods for numerous projects.
    • Led product roadmaps, backlog refinement, release management, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, closeouts, and team retrospectives.
    • Oversaw and conducted user experience research and testing. Developed and delivered stakeholder presentations.
    • Led the development of PlanningPoker.com from ideation, to Agile product development in partnership with Mountain Goat Software, to monetization and beyond. Assisted with QA testing and user research sessions and handled customer support tickets.
    • Served as the lead scrum master on the company's largest client project to date. Managed two teams comprising development, design, and UX (25 team members) on a multimillion-dollar automotive project.

Project History

  • Mobile App Design and Development | Prescription Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
    Led the design and development of a medical mobile app for a startup to prescribe cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to patients with chronic pain. For example, lessons in meditation. I also helped define the architecture and content strategy.

    BACKGROUND
    Existing prescriptive drug treatment options for patients with chronic pain can often cause more problems than they solve. Therapy is expensive and can require more effort than patients can expend; plus, scheduled appointments don’t treat unplanned flare-ups.

    CHALLENGE
    How might we deliver effective CBT to patients wherever they may be in their relation to their condition?

    GOALS
    - Implement an educational content consumption flow for acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) by establishing the program architecture for Android and iOS native apps.
    - Provide interactive moments for patients to reflect on their condition and record responses for later.
    - Construct a lean, YAML-based content management system for text, audio, and image content types.
    - Establish pacing goals for patients to consume content, analytics to track actual patient pace, and nudging and gating features to course-correct patients to the “right pace.”
    - Maintain focus on HIPAA compliance and clinical best practices throughout development, including preparation for a medical device quality management audit before the FDA pivotal trial.

  • Revenue Growth | Strategic Product Upsell and Fulfillment Roadmap and Development Plan
    Led research and development strategy planning to encourage and enable coworking space customers to purchase package add-ons in a front-end experience and to enable the company and its employees to fulfill the add-on requests.

    BACKGROUND
    With very little insight into available add-on products, coworking space members are unaware of the enhancements and services that are available for purchase in addition to their base memberships. Members request maintenance or IT services when there’s a problem, but the process to fulfill those requests require signed contracts and handholding between members and their building managers.

    GOALS
    - Develop an MVP for member-facing add-ons: which add-ons to start with based on current demand, average monthly revenue, fulfillment effort required, and where to surface add-ons to members.
    - Establish the request-to-fulfillment flow to include the elimination of the contract process and collection of fulfillment information upon request.
    - Develop a strategy for add-on price variants based on coworking space location.

    Desired Outcomes for Coworking Space Members
    - View and request relevant, enticing add-ons.
    - Get add-ons fulfilled with little to no back and forth communication.

    Desired Outcomes for Internal Business Users
    - Make changes to add-on offers to experiment with new variants.
    - Enable finance and legal to approve or deny offering requests and ensure accurate revenue tracking for approved requests.

  • Product Design and Development | US Air Force 3D Airspace Allocation
    Led the product design and development for 3D airspace provisioning for Air Force missions, with a major focus on integration and eventual deprecation for legacy software.

    BACKGROUND
    To prevent mid-air collisions, certain complicated missions require precise airspace planning to ensure that certain airplanes fly in the right places, at the right altitudes, and at the right times. People who request airspace don’t have a ton of visibility into existing airspace libraries and often don’t specialize in airspace knowledge, which leads to messy and incomplete requests. Airspace managers need an easy way to deconflict airspaces that overlap in location, altitude, and time.

    GOALS
    - Standardize airspace request formats to include all the necessary information.
    - Give airspace requestors a chance to deconflict their own airspace requests systematically.
    - Give airspace managers an easier way to manage more complex airspace conflicts.

    Desired Outcomes for Airspace Requesters
    - Fill out complete airspace requests digitally.
    - Receive alerts on potential conflicts and tools to troubleshoot on their own.

    Desired Outcomes for Airspace Managers
    - Receive and review pending airspace requests.
    - Understand how to troubleshoot issues on their own and more easily locate the affected parties they need to talk to when they need to fix complex airspace conflicts.

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts Degree in Theatre Arts
    2008 - 2012
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University - Blacksburg, VA, USA

Certifications

  • Good Clinical Practice Training for Social and Behavioral Research
    FEBRUARY 2020 - PRESENT
    Society of Behavioral Medicine
  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM), license 000307899
    FEBRUARY 2014 - FEBRUARY 2016
    Scrum Alliance

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