508-560-1823
My writing (which I do more inconsistently than I would like)
I’ve been building consumer software products in Product Management roles for 11 years. I started my career in Intuit’s Product Management and Marketing rotational program, spending most of my time on financial services and banking products for small businesses. After getting my MBA at Stanford, I joined Stride Health as their first Head of Product and helped expand the product from a health insurance recommendation engine in 7 states with a couple thousand members to a complete benefits platform for self-employed individuals that worked across all 50 states, with nearly 1M members. I built both the Product and Design teams over 3 years, leading a team of 8 full time employees by the time I left. For the last 4 years, I’ve been at Wealthfront where I lead our Product Team. During my tenure, we’ve grown assets under management by more than 3x and revenue by more than 4x, reaching profitability in late 2022. My contributions include scaling our Cash Account from 0 to $8B in assets in ~6 months, then leading the 0 to 1 development of our banking features. More recently, I’ve led the effort to refresh our investing product strategy and vision with a focus on personalization and customization of our automated portfolios, and charted a push into self-directed investing to open up our addressable market.
I get a lot of energy from building, motivating, and leading high-performing teams. I love being hands on and collaborating with product, engineering, design, and marketing teams when they’re stuck trying to craft a compelling product experience, navigate tough tradeoff decisions, or make sense of customer insights and data. I also enjoy operating at a more strategic level, collaborating with other executives to identify insights about our business or market that might shift how we think about our strategy. I excel at driving structured, rigorous product decision-making and communicating a crisp, focused product vision and strategy.
Leadership
Dan has many strengths that he exhibits in a casual and modest way. He has good business acumen and is perceptive, articulate, quantitatively oriented for his role, intelligent, independent, and can make his way around data in sql. On top of this, he has an approachable and warm demeanor and is naturally charismatic. The combination of these many traits make Dan a natural leader.
Throughout the last 6 months, one of the highest impact things I think Dan has delivered is a real sense of focus to our overall product strategy. He's been extremely clear with the team and leadership about our top priorities, helped the team ruthlessly focus on those, and helped line up multiple teams efforts behind it.
When things get challenging…
One thing that really impressed me this half was seeing how affected Dan was by hearing accounts of frustration/disillusionment with cross-functional partners in the area. He immediately went on a listening tour to hear everyone's perspectives, wrote a doc outlining the challenges he was hearing, and help lead an effort to reset on how we work together. I thought it was very cool to see the level of ownership he took not just over the PMs he manages, but culture within the area as a whole. This had the effect of seriously improving morale in the area and building trust within the team.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Dan's a fantastic product leadership partner. He's strategic, maintains composure under pressure, cares deeply about our users and the business, holds a long-term view, and is always thinking 2-3 steps ahead. He also has a natural bias for action and proactively engages me to think about audience opportunities, experiments, positioning and how to better align Marketing and Product. Lastly, he shows a genuine interest to deepen his marketing knowledge despite everything else on his plate, and provides thoughtful and valuable feedback in creative reviews and quarterly planning.
Dan is really great at leading complex discussions filled with ambiguity and controversy. I've significantly improved on this dimension through exposure to Dan's leadership.
Dan has helped resolve several cross-area collaboration issues between Growth and Investing. Dan's proposed framework for handling projects that span both areas should help with clearly establishing ownership at the outset.