Respondent

Respondent is a startup in the research recruiting space — operating a marketplace business focused on developing the best research panel in the world by allowing researchers and research tool providers to tap into a pool of growing participants.

Respondent homepage

My Role

Lead Product Manager

Sept 2024 – Dec 2024

I was promoted to Head of Product in September 2024 after successfully launching and scaling our public API product, leaning into company-wide strategy by mentoring other team leads, and taking ownership of the engineering team. I refer to the role as Lead Product Manager to better align with larger company organization structures.

Senior Product Manager

Dec 2022 – Sept 2024

I came to Respondent as a Senior Product Manager tasked with either driving products through their life cycle or contributing to the broader strategy at the company — I decided to do both. I started my tenure with some operational overhauls and moved on to thinking about big bets.

Key Operational Contributions

JIRA & Confluence Migration

  • Established custom projects, workflows, and automations for engineering, marketing, and support teams — resulting in a unified operational foundation with transparent escalation paths and SLAs.
  • Deployed 3rd party AI Release Notes JIRA service — automating the translation of internal launches into public API release notes.
  • Operated as Atlassian Administrator for all company configuration needs.

Product Discovery Implementation

  • Configured and deployed Product Discovery tools using a hybrid Weighted Impact Score and RICE Prioritization methodology — increasing the impact and transparency of customer needs.
  • Implemented a tiered review system — engaging engineer leads early in the ideation process to gain buy-in and assist with sizing estimated requirements.
  • Utilized aggregation of prioritized internal and external feedback to inform roadmap decisions and reduce legacy engineering backlogs.

Product Lifecycle Standardization

  • Defined the process and operations around continuous discovery, development, launch, growth, and iteration cycles.
  • Implemented standardized Product Requirement Documentation, tiered Go-To-Market testing, communication cadences, success metric tracking, and iteration cycles.

Oncall Escalation Process and Reduction

  • Established issue tagging and categorization with the support team to identify trends before they reach an organic escalation point.
  • Defined risk thresholds and corresponding SLAs to increase cross-function escalation transparency and divert engineering time to the highest value issues.
  • Partnered with engineering leads to set tighter deployment permissions and regulations resulting in fewer regression based issues.
Respondent API

Standout Projects

Recruiting API

Starting at Respondent I was transitioning from a background in advertising products at Twitter where one of my focuses was ads measurement; working closely with measurement partners like Nielsen and Moat.

Respondent's mission to become the go-to recruiting platform for UX research resonated with my experience working with "go-to" measurement partners for ads. I immediately questioned why there was no public API to access the recruiting services directly from the tools researchers were already using — and got to work validating whether or not the idea was worth pursuing.

Read the case study