Evan H.

Turned around a struggling engineering department, boosting morale and productivity through process improvements and strategic hiring

• Vimeo hired me to address significant engineering and leadership attrition in a fast-growing business unit.

• Conducted interviews of the engineering team, CEO, relevant business leaders, and successful engineers in other teams.

• Identified issues in product development processes, technical skills, team morale, and team structure.

• Implemented solutions including team restructuring, hiring senior engineers, revamping the interview process, teaching agile methodologies, and building understanding between sales and engineering.

• Successfully hired six engineers and a QA analyst, with a 100% offer acceptance rate.

• Significantly improved engineering morale, velocity, and the department's reputation within the organization.

Guided product operations, development, and hiring for Accelpay's alcohol e-commerce platform

• Accelpay allows alcohol brands to sell directly to US consumers with their compliant payments and fulfillment platform.

• Researched, spec'd, and shipped key features, including compliant payments (with Stripe Connect), automated retailer payouts, marketplace sales tax, and consumer accounts.

• Accelerated product development by introducing agile processes and moving the team to Linear.

• Hired first full-time product manager.

• Collaborated with CEO to craft annual product roadmap and strategy.

Coached over 100 founders and product leaders across five programs

• Named “2023 All-Star Mentor” by Techstars Economic Mobility Accelerator.

• Mentored Techstars founders one-on-one and led workshops on behavior change, feature prioritization, and OKRs.

• Topics: product-market fit, outsourced development, user research, product metrics, and business strategy.

• Industries: B2B, education, recruiting, media, hospitality, dev tools, and sports

Planned and led the implementation of a trial flow to boost conversion from free sign-up to paid subscription

• Codecademy had strong activation to their free plan but low conversion to their paid plan.

• Introduced a trial flow where new members would start with access to pro features -- quizzes, courses, advisors.

• Collaborated with the product manager to scope the feature for an urgent deadline.

• Implemented access control changes, adjusted user flows to introduce upgrade paths, and created a hybrid role combining free and pro features.

• Led a 5-person team, contributed to front-end and back-end features, and managed project delivery.

• Improved sign-up to subscriber conversion rates and delivered the project on time.

Spec'd and designed features to foster a sense of belonging, increasing new user activation and retention

• Focusmate boosts productivity by connecting people with accountability partners for virtual coworking.

• Identified pain points through user interviews and product data analysis, revealing that new users were anxious about having a poor first partner and discouraged by awkward initial interactions.

• Spec'd, designed, and shipped features to create a welcoming experience, such as a welcome script, invite links, and in-session partner profiles.

• These enhancements significantly increased new user activation and 2nd-week retention.