Maureen Sarewitz

Sunny makes gathering competitive intelligence quick and painless for growth marketers. Traditionally, this has been a tedious and time-consuming task, and there is no way to know when a competitor launches a new ad without proactively checking. With Sunny, users can add companies to track, set up email alerts, and view their dashboard whenever a new ad is launched or anytime they want. It also offers powerful features, such as the ability to favorite, filter, and save ads.

I was engaged by Five Four Ventures, a venture incubator, as an entrepreneur in residence to take Sunny from zero to one. I led the development and rollout of the beta product, then leveraged data and user insights to build the requirements for our MVP. Leading a team of front-end and back-end engineers and a UX designer, I built and launched the Sunny MVP in May 2022.

Rover.com is the world’s largest marketplace for high-quality pet sitters. As the company quickly grew, its homepage became cluttered and less effective at communicating Rover’s value and why visitors should trust them to find a reliable pet sitter.

Our stakeholder, user, and data research and analysis guided the homepage redesign with insights, including the need for:
• User testimonials to build trust,
• A more straightforward search bar,
• Content to showcase our domain authority,
• Personalization by customer type and country, and
• A different experience for returning users.

We created a “north star” vision for the homepage and a roadmap for getting there. Phase one of that roadmap significantly reduced the homepage bounce rate and delivered higher search and conversion rates.

Starbucks did not have a way to deliver truly personalized offers and recommendations to its 20 million loyalty program members. Its ability to provide segmented offers was limited to emails, despite almost all its members using and transacting via the Starbucks app.

As the Starbucks product lead for formation, a joint venture between Starbucks and BCG, I collaborated with data scientists, engineers, and designers to build an AI-driven personalization platform that leveraged collaborative filtering models to provide truly 1:1 offers and recommendations to loyalty program members. I also adapted specific offers deployed via email only for the mobile app experience. Together, these efforts delivered over $24 million of incremental revenue during year one.

As a product management player-coach at Rover, I collaborated with a PM on my team to develop this new funnel. Our conversion rates had suffered, and the codebase for that part of the product was challenging. The B2C onboarding funnel needed to be more complex than most because we had to screen prospective pet sitters and walkers to ensure they would provide safe, reliable service.

After considerable user research, including prototyping, and extensive collaboration with our engineering team, we developed a solution and requirements that would improve conversion without adversely impacting quality, namely simplifying several parts of the funnel and creating a more intuitive user experience. We also ensured that the new funnel was extensible to Rover’s new international markets. After six months of complex work, we launched the new funnel that boosted conversion rates by over 20% and improved applicant quality.