Selected Projects
Case studies in new product categories, new customer experiences, leadership, extracting a product's story, and learning from mistakes
Reinventing earbuds
Convincing Bose to bet big on a new product category — and perfecting the design to advance the future of human-computer interaction
Expertise Tags: Turning tech into product, ID your customer, Concept validation, Customer-in-the-loop iteration, Extracting the story, Tough tech tradeoffs, Perfect your UX, What/when to launch
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
END RESULT:
Sequencing a customer-centric iteration loop to simultaneously:
Perfect the product experience through the right technical choices
Identify the right target customer (it wasn't who we thought!)
Validate the right marketing narrative for an unfamiliar new invention
Build the business case for an all-in — not "experimental" — Bose product launch
A unique new product that seamlessly merges your digital life with your physical world — and it's far outselling projections
Expertise Tags: Hiring, Innovation process, Product Strategy, Concept validation, Tough tech tradeoffs, Roadmapping, Process development, Productizing AI/ML
Leading the Bose earbuds business
Links:
Watch the Bose earbuds product page and the Bose app release notes over the next few years!
Managing 5+ products, a product strategy, and a category roadmap all at once only works if you cultivate strong relationships with every function in the company. Positive relationships allowed me to:
Identify blind-spot threats Bose was missing, and create teams to address them
Hire, onboard, and mentor great new senior product managers
Build credibility so I could go against the grain when necessary
Divide and conquer with my cross-functional leadership team
Commission and lead innovation projects to invent future earbuds
Create and eliminate company processes as needed
Build fluency in wearable tech (mechanical, DSP, ML, firmware, comfort) and design (ID, UX, UR) so I could make the right tradeoff choices quickly
Influence Bose's fiercely independent research division to invent the right new experiences
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
Leading Bose's largest consumer categories into a more successful future
An exciting multi-year roadmap with big new launches, small product extensions, and delightfully executed details — and a stronger company with fewer blind spots.
END RESULT:
Avoiding costly mistakes
Old and new companies, big and small — they all hit the same pitfalls, especially in integrated hardware-software products.
Expertise Tags: Avoiding mistakes, ID your customer, Hiring, Product strategy, Path to PMF, Concept validation, Customer-in-the-loop iteration, Prioritization frameworks
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
Over a decade building all-new products, I've seen it all:
Overbuilt products customers aren't willing to pay for.
Underbuilt products, flawed in a way that customers won't tolerate.
Products that solve problems customers don't care about.
Companies talking themselves into pet projects with no proof of traction.
Broken processes and the sunk-cost fallacy.
Too much trust in suppliers' B-teams.
Missing regulatory requirements and safety tests.
Schedules that are too slow to time the market or too fast to allow iteration.
Thanks to the pain of living through these, I can see them coming a mile away — and I can help you avoid them.
END RESULT:
Expertise Tags: Extracting the story, Tough tech tradeoffs, What/when to launch, Polished demos
The world's best noise cancellation
Links:
Designed for All Ears — Uniquely Tuned to Yours
*One version of the layman's explanation: Sound Shaped to You: Bose CustomTune Technology
Bose QC Earbuds II Review: Best Noise Canceling, Bar None (CNET)
With just 6 months until launch, the CEO put me in charge of our big turnaround product. My first act: diving very deep with engineers to fully understand the new tech turbo-boosting noise cancellation, so I could:
Make high-stakes calls balancing comfort vs. performance vs. usability,
Justify investing in legal validation of a World's Best claim, and
Articulate our invention in a way that would impress customers.
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
END RESULT:
Hardening a delicate invention for launch — and extracting the right story to hook customers
Wide recognition as the most powerful noise-cancelling headphone ever, jaw-dropping launch event demos, and a major increase in Bose's share of the earbuds category
Making a complex experience simple
Greenlighting a magical Spatial Audio research demo and guiding it through rapid iteration for a flagship launch
Expertise Tags: Turning tech into product, Customer-in-the-loop iteration, Extracting the story, Tough tech tradeoffs, Perfect your UX, Avoiding mistakes, Polished demos
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
END RESULT:
Proactive leadership with user-centric attention to detail.
Based on a promising demo from research engineers, I selected Spatial Audio as the core new feature for Bose's 2023 earbuds and headphones. That meant we had to be ready for prime time with unprecedented speed. So I:
Created a new cross-functional Spatial Experience team to speed up decision-making and catch issues faster
Commissioned an in-app onboarding experience to spotlight the feature in an intuitive way
Convinced the engineering team to build a new feature covering user-in-motion use cases
Made careful technology-experience compromises down to the last minute to fine-tune every detail
Give Bose Immersive Audio a try. Close your eyes and you'll be convinced you're not wearing headphones at all — it sounds just like listening to high-end speakers in an ideal listening room.
Expertise Tags: Productizing AI/ML, Tough tech tradeoffs, Perfect your UX
Customer-centric tradeoffs
Amazon's attempt at a battery-powered smart speaker had failed and a third-party product would be even harder — but I believed we could get it right by prioritizing these three customer-centric principles:
Don't break what customers expect from a smart assistant speaker: always available for commands, a clear mute button, and great visual feedback.
Preserve what makes Bose portable Bluetooth speakers the best: unbelievable audio in a convenient shape and size, ready to move anywhere.
When you can't have both of the above, fail gracefully and give great feedback so customers will intuitively understand what's happening.
THE CHALLENGE:
MY APPROACH:
END RESULT:
Winning where others had failed: the portable smart speaker
The Bose Portable Smart Speaker has been a top seller globally since 2019. Other industry leaders had produced confusing, underpowered, too-quiet or too-large products — but through thoughtful tradeoffs, we nailed it.