Sidewalk Labs
Sidewalk Labs
Product research & development for community participation in placemaking.
Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company that improves quality of life in cities by incubating technology for place-based sustainability, affordability, and social infrastructure.
I worked in product and business development on the civic innovation team, focused on early-stage R&D for digital tools for civic participation. I led a year-long research and product development process to advance the company’s nascent civic tech investment thesis.
I led a lean R&D, product strategy, design, and prototyping process for a digital toolkit for civic participation in urban planning and real estate development.
COLLAB TOOLKIT: PRODUCT CONCEPT
A digital toolkit for equitable, participatory, and efficient neighborhood planning and development.
User problem: Community engagement in urban planning and real estate development is an inaccessible and broken process that spurs distrust, miscommunication, underrepresentation, and counterproductive dynamics, leading to growing resistance to development (NIMBYism) and canceled projects. These vicious cycles impede key quality of life components in urban communities: affordable housing, economic growth, civic engagement, and social infrastructure.
Business insights: Developers who want to do inclusive engagement struggle with political acceptance for their participation exercises and want to partner with cities on this work. Forward thinking city government agencies and developers lack tools to move the needle on root cause barriers to meaningful and representative participation, and participatory planning is increasingly seen as a critical competitive advantage. Across the board, potential users expressed that better technology can raise the bar for participation and set new standards in a space that’s ripe for change.
Learnings: There’s a significant opportunity to generate higher quality participation through thoughtful technology-based solutions that are both 1) purpose-built for real estate and land use planning and 2) capable of scaling. Next generation placemakers are changing the tide, and they need values-aligned tools that help activate their vision for inclusive and participatory cities.
FEATURES
Mobilize Neighborhood Networks
Collab’s platform coordinates and mobilizes neighborhood engagement networks that connect city planners, community organizations, and developers with community members.
Online and Offline Outreach and Engagement
City planners and community leaders can easily reach their constituents to participate and co-create their community vision for the neighborhood, using online and offline outreach channels and multilingual engagement materials like surveys, polls, and asset mapping that make planning and real estate relevant, accessible, and compelling. These materials are purpose-built for planning and development, and help educate communities on the benefits, trade offs, and constraints for change in their neighborhood. Sidewalk Labs Proprietary Information 1 Shared Data and Accountability Collab’s shared platform tracks outreach performance, participant demographic representation, and community input insights in a centralized, transparent, and collaborative live dashboard for city planners, community leaders, and developers. Save Time & Money Collab saves these teams time and money by making outreach, communications, and feedback analysis faster and more effective, leading to more efficient engagement operations, smoother project approval, and long-term community stewardship.
Shared Data and Accountability
Collab’s shared platform tracks outreach performance, participant demographic representation, and community input insights in a centralized, transparent, and collaborative live dashboard for city planners, community leaders, and developers.
Save Time & Money
Collab saves these teams time and money by making outreach, communications, and feedback analysis faster and more effective, leading to more efficient engagement operations, smoother project approval, and long-term community stewardship.
OUTCOMES
For cities: Smarter neighborhood plans
Make development and land use conversations more relevant and accessible to get more people bought into engaging with long range planning and real estate.
Hear from a larger and more representative audience with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis.
Build trust and ownership in the overall process, leading to more valuable projects and thriving communities.
For Developers: Smarter project proposals
Realtime, hyperlocal priorities and sentiment context to inform the diligence and site selection process.
Hear from a larger and more representative audience with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis. Garner more actionable, rich feedback to incorporate into project plans with less time spent on outreach and feedback analysis.
Build trust and ownership in the overall process, leading to more valuable projects and thriving communities. Demonstrate representative participation to build legitimacy in the entitlements process.
(Product design and concept are property of Sidewalk Labs)
Levelset
Levelset
Products to bring construction payment help to a mass audience.
Levelset is a B2B SaaS platform that empowers construction companies with tools for prompt payment, including payment document automation, legal resources, and an online community. Our products deliver intuitive help for a broken and complex process plagued with red tape, cultural inertia, and an industry starving for innovation.
As the third product hire, I've evolved alongside the team as we've achieved 100% year-over-year revenue growth, expanded from 40 to 160+ employees, and raised over $15M in venture capital since I first joined in August 2016.
PAYMENT RIGHTS ADVISOR
Free public tool to give anyone chasing payment in construction an easy way to assess their payment rights, get a custom recommendation on which documents they need, and order their documents instantly.
User problem: Figuring out if you’re eligible for leveraging lien rights in a payment dispute is complex and confusing. Going to a lawyer for help is expensive.
Business value: The tool is one of our highest engaged features on the website, and the tool has some of the best lead to SaaS customer conversion ratios of any of our free tools and resources.
Learnings: Coordinating between a remote web developer and our application engineers to set up a public-facing version of one of our core product features had communication and logistics challenges that were solved with tight project management in Trello, Asana, and Jira.
project pages
A 1-stop shop for contractors and suppliers to get all the information and tools they need to protect payment rights on their specific jobs.
User problem: Finding out the right person to send the right document to the right way in order to protect your payments in construction is a stressful goose chase.
Business value: This was our first foray into publishing our own dataset to drive organic traffic. We gained valuable insights for our demand generation strategy.
Learnings: This experiment taught us that project data on its own wasn’t meeting search intent for our audience, although once users were exposed to the information they found it very helpful. Our takeaway was to build a public-facing database one level up from projects, so that visitors could reach companies first, then associated projects.
free account dashboard
Created one place for free account users to get resources and guidance for construction payment help.
User problem: After a new user interacts with Levelset’s retail platform once, they’re not sure how to utilize the product moving forward.
Business value: This was our first foray at driving conversion from one-time retail customer to engaged free account user to paid SaaS account user.
Learnings: The dashboard did not drive signficant engagement from retail customers towards becoming free account users. We realized more education was needed to help these one-time reactive customers realize the value of ongoing payment support, and that the freemium model wasn’t the best growth strategy for our business at the time. We shifted away from self-sign up freemium towards sales team-led growth.
Tom Tom Founders Festival
Tom Tom Founders Festival
Tom Tom Founders Festival is a non-profit music, arts, and innovation festival that happens in Charlottesville, Virginia each April on Thomas Jefferson's birthday week. During Tom Tom, hundreds of artists, bands, start ups, visionaries, investors, and civic leaders converge to celebrate creative founding and to ultimately leave lasting artistic and business impact on the region.
As the organization's first Student Outreach Coordinator, I was charged with increasing student engagement with the festival. I led a team of four in developing initiatives and events that encourage student organizations to partner with our organization in co-promotion and event production. My team also planned experiential branding events in advance of the festival to increase awareness, and created a 30-student board to advise our organization and act as brand ambassadors on campus in promoting the festival. My team developed an annual mass outreach strategy, in which we reached thousands of students via social media, email newsletters, out of home activations, and presentations to dozens of groups across campus. Since I joined the Tom Tom staff in 2014, student awareness and attendance increased drastically each year.
I oversaw the recruitment and coordination of 300+ volunteers each year to staff 50+ events over the course of the festival. I was also responsible for recruiting the new class of Tom Tom's student fellowship program. I managed the recruiting process from application through on-boarding to hire nine new fellows.
HackCville
HackCville
Forge (fka HackCville) is a non-profit clubhouse and community for entrepreneurial students at the University of Virginia. Forge has been entirely student-led since March of 2014, when I took charge as the first student Managing Director and hired 8 other students to run the organization's operations, finances, marketing, membership program, events, and programs.
In one year, our staff helped members craft their own self-directed and experiential education around entrepreneurship with 100+ events and workshops in partnership with 50+ organizations and companies. Forge serves to centralize disparate innovative and creative communities around the university through our robust membership program. With our bootstrapped house and 100+ talented and passionate membership base, we managed to launch a rebranding campaign, raise over $12,000, double our staff size, and receive over 150 applications for membership.
I stepped down as Managing Director in May 2015 to allow new leadership to develop, and Forge is doing better than ever! Watch our welcome video for an overview of the organization.
Internships
Internships
In Summer 2013, I interned at the Golden Triangle Business Improvement District. The Golden Triangle B.I.D. is a non-profit organization that fosters economic development in a premiere business district in Washington DC by maintaining a clean, safe, and vibrant neighborhood. I assisted in various projects, including streamlining operations processes for the neighborhood street team, staffing community engagement events, compiling a monthly newsletter, updating website content, and participating in community stakeholder meetings.
In Summer 2014, I interned at The Riverside Company, an international private equity firm, and at the Impact Hub Bay Area, a co-working space for social entrepreneurs in San Francisco. At Riverside, I performed industry research on various sectors, compiled data for due diligence, and developed an investment thesis and presentation. At the Hub, I helped the Head Host plan and execute community-building initiatives and activities including volunteer events and a neighborhood walking tour.
In Summer 2015, I interned at Universal McCann, a global media agency in New York City. As a J3 Studios Activation Intern, I assisted the Account Management team with implementing various programs for Johnson & Johnson clients including Neutrogena, Tylenol, Clean & Clear, and Acuvue. I helped plan out production schedules, brainstorm creative concepts, manage talent contracts, track social media engagement, and build presentations for clients. You can check out the finished product for the main campaign I worked on here.
In Fall 2015, I interned at Caribe Juice, an exotic cold-press juice startup. As an Events Manager, I coordinated and staffed experiential marketing promotions, including in-store sampling and demonstrations and event partnerships with organizations on campus. I also developed a market research strategy to gather data on consumer sentiment for the brand.