Kate Makrigiannis, Product Manager in San Jose, CA, United States
Kate is available for hire
Hire Kate

Kate Makrigiannis

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
San Jose, CA, United States
Toptal 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.

Project Highlights

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.
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.
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.

Expertise

Work Experience

Principal Product Coach

2022 - 2024
Kaiser Permanente
  • Catalyzed KP's product transformation with product executives, group leads, and teams alongside key cross-functional data, design, delivery, portfolio, program, and platform partners.
  • Reimagined annual, quarterly, and monthly planning processes to focus on delivering measured value.
  • Ran strategic experiments to hack SDLC processes to be more value-driven, faster, and more efficient.
  • Developed a growing, dynamic suite of interactive product discovery, strategy, OKRs, prioritization workshops, and educational content with hands-on activities to practice and moments to reflect.
  • Ignited product-focused communities with engaging workshops and events for product group leads, product managers, and coaches to connect, share ideas, and grow together.

Lead Product Coach and Consultant

2022 - 2023
Sagely
  • Established Sagely's modern product leadership and team coaching program to support technical education and growth in the US Department of Defense.
  • Curated evergreen product coaching and consulting curriculum for client engagements.
  • Managed executive thought partnership and vision alignment across product development and consulting.

Senior Product Manager, Growth and Onboarding

2022 - 2022
Gatsby
  • Streamlined product onboarding and cloud UI/UX to increase adoption and retention.
  • Led competitive/market research and design workshops for 1st-time, admin, and pricing UX.
  • Launched a new agency pricing plan, agency directory, and automated CMS data provisioning.
  • Facilitated site transfer discovery—prototype usability tests and customer feedback interviews.

Senior Platform Data Product Manager

2020 - 2022
Zendesk
  • Led product discovery, definition, and release planning for platform data, triggers, and automation teams, allowing customers to weave crucial business data into workflows.
  • Performed competitive analysis, user research, content strategy and design collaboration, and roadmapping.
  • Polished and launched the new Custom Objects feature from beta to general release.
  • 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.

Product Consultant

2020 - 2021
B Lab Company - Nonprofit
  • Guided B Lab IT leaders through a digital transformation from a feature-request model to a more user-centered, outcome-driven approach focused on global board objectives.
  • Created user journey maps informed by user and stakeholder interviews to uncover pain points and opportunities in certification and impact management.
  • Hired and onboarded a lead project manager to continue the work full-time.

Senior Manager, Product Management

2016 - 2020
VMware
  • 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 their own product ideas.
  • Delivered a 2-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.

Product Owner, CRM

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.

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

https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6395&context=etd

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.
2008 - 2012

Bachelor of Arts Degree in Theatre Arts, Psychology

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University - Blacksburg, VA, USA

FEBRUARY 2020 - PRESENT

Good Clinical Practice Training for Social and Behavioral Research

Society of Behavioral Medicine

FEBRUARY 2014 - FEBRUARY 2016

Certified Scrum Master (CSM), license 000307899

Scrum Alliance

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring