Stephen Conn

While at Shippo, I was lucky to work with some of the largest eCommerce brands in the world. Here, I led the development and launch of a custom shipping solution for a large eCommerce customer. The commercial and product implementations were complex and high-risk for both parties and involved several challenging deadlines that could not be moved. Staged rollouts and other common methods of derisking a product launch were not possible as they are typically so we had to work extremely closely with engineering departments both internally and with the customer to be fully prepared for loads of product and server usage at the deadlines.

Additionally, we had to make subtle and challenging product development decisions during protracted negotiations with the customer, exposing the delicate balance of being customer-centric in your approach to developing product and ensuring that your product development is extensible and strategically leverageable for other customers and across verticals.

At the start of founding my second company, I developed and launched an MVP using best practices from Lean product development, including demand testing (using landing pages and smoke tests), testing marketing channels to developing models for CAC and LTV, and soliciting feedback from early users to inform product development. I also optimized ad and marketing campaigns across Facebook, AdWords, Reddit, and direct email.

This project led to significant traction (both revenue and subscribers) which led to seed funding from Vegas Tech Fund and 500 startups.

In this project, I pioneered—using metrics and measurement—to guide product development and an early-stage, venture-backed startup. The previous product development had been informed by qualitative conversations with customers and some aggregate data from the customer service team but had lacked in-product measurement of core metrics of the product's success.

I developed a plan for defining these core metrics and then implementing them using client- and server-side tools. I then used this data to develop hypotheses about how the product could be improved and led the design team in developing redesigned UI and UX flows to test these hypotheses following a lean software development process.

Over the course of six months, these product-development cycles resulted in significant improvements in the core product metrics which was reflected in improved customer feedback (e.g., NPS scores) and improved product engagement.