Product Manager | Executive Virtual Assistant (E.V.A.) | Berkeley, CA | 2019

• What team or product did I work on?

A friend and I started to explore possible solutions for an application something like concur that would make it possible to itemize receipts for business executives, given this is the most tedious aspect of the job of an executive assistant.

• What was the impact of this project or team in relation to the company?

This was our only product or feature and the purpose was to eliminate the need for concur and manual data entry.

• What did I work on?

I worked on exploring the laws around digital (electronic) receipts in California and the feature development roadmap of the concur premium product. We also explored the possibility of creating an application that would allow large parties to book dinner reservations online because that is not currently possible. When you book a large party you have to contact the host and figure out if there is space on the night that you want and you must call around a lot.

• Who did I work with?

A friend who was at the time an executive assistant with Uber.

• What assumptions did I make coming in?

I didn’t know what an executive assistant was so I had to do a lot of listening to understand the job.

• What technology or tools did I use?

We didn’t build a real prototype it was simply an exploratory analysis.

• What hurdles did this team face? Exploring the concur API was challenging.

• What was the outcome of the project?

Electronic receipts were stated to be mandatory in the next 5 years but there were too many places where execs typically travel that did not require them yet making the product execution not plausible at that time.

• What external courses or educational resources did I use to skill up?

Product blogs and websites like techcrunch were useful. We built out this product and its features using the Y-combinator start-up school.