Notable in my first year at Roll20

Starting a Product Organization from scratch

The shift from “startup” to a company ready for scale is difficult for any discipline, but the Product craft comes with its own specific challenges. Among those is moving the responsibility of “what to build” from the existing structures into a Product Manager. I was the first person hired to focus on Product, but I was not totally in a greenfield scenario. There were the existing cultural and tactical expectations that I needed to maneuver.

I had prior experience doing this as both an external and internal member of the team. In this instance, I used the product manager’s greatest tool of empathy to survey and understand the operation before attempting any significant shifts. The work I championed were iterative and primarily grew business intelligence. My goal was to create the knowledge to have more faith in our decision making ability.

Externally, the notable enhancements and added features include:

• Quality of life improvements like better ruler tools with A Measured Update, releasing the results of our first Hackathon, and adding Pick Up Games, and using updates to the subscription and marketplace payment systems to increase revenue.
• Charactermancer and Level Up which both caught up with second-mover competitors, but also added value to one-time purchase items.
• A redesign and relaunch of the Jukebox feature generating increased revenue through additional demand for storage space.
• Aligning our interface with standard expectations on the web through the Zoom and Pan functionality.
• Adding value to top level subscription through a in-browser development environment for Charcter Sheets
• Fulfilling a top request from users with the Custom Token Marker feature and then creating new revenue opportunities with one-time purchases
• A major improvement and modernization of the primary revenue feature, while creating opportunity for significant advancement.
• Added value to the subscription and one-time purchase options with Compendium Selection.
• Build a Product Management organization and Product Design team from scratch