About Me

I walked into Zynga in 2009, the same month FarmVille crossed 10 million players. No product experience, no idea what a DAU was. Within a year I was shipping features on FarmVille and building Mafia Wars' first mobile raiding system. The lesson that stuck: obsess over what players actually do, not what the roadmap says they should do.

After four years I'd contributed to some of the biggest titles in social gaming, but I was still a content manager. I wanted to own a product, not feed content into someone else's.

Jam City gave me that ownership. I launched a game and scaled it to 1M+ DAU and $50M in revenue. The insight that stuck: 20% month-over-month revenue growth came from running currency optimizations weekly instead of quarterly. Speed of iteration beat any single brilliant idea. But after scaling one game, I wanted to know what product work looked like at franchise scale, the kind where every decision reaches millions of people.

SUPERLABS (VR gaming, later acquired by Zynga), then Director of Product at Flow State Media where I drove eight straight months of revenue growth. Bandai Namco gave me the PAC-MAN franchise: 10M+ weekly installs, 1M+ MAU, 20% retention improvement. But franchise work means optimizing someone else's vision. I wanted to build from scratch again.

Big Fish Games deepened my analytics craft: reporting pipeline from scratch, multivariate tests that improved engagement 20% and session length 50%. Then I tested whether PM instincts transfer outside gaming.

AAA answered that. Mobile app to 6M members, $2M saved in annual call center costs, weekly C-Suite strategy presentations. Different domain, same core muscle: understand the user, ship fast, measure what matters.

Genies hired me as their first PM. 85-person startup, no product infrastructure, celebrity partnerships (Gucci, GIPHY), everything to prove. I built the creator ecosystem from concept to launch and an e-commerce storefront doing $100K/week.

Mythical Games and Treasure DAO took me deeper into digital marketplaces and developer platforms. Mythical: cross-title game services, +20% retention, +15% revenue. Treasure: quest system, marketplace, new chain on Arbitrum, +20% user base. Then, in November 2024, I was laid off.

I didn't jump back into the job market. I took a few months to decompress: lifting weights, overhauling my nutrition, fighting through anxiety and depression. And then I started building.

I co-founded Frame Story, a collaborative game studio modeled after Finji and Raw Fury, with recently laid-off developers and designers. Not just a creative project: I incorporated the company, set up banking and payment processing, wrote contributor agreements and IP assignments, and built the financial model from scratch. Five-year projections, investor pitch materials, a SAFE structure at a $3M cap, and a phased fundraising strategy spanning grants (Epic MegaGrant, Wings Fund), angel investors, and a planned Kickstarter.

I designed the go-to-market pipeline for our first title, Cluck: Steam Next Fest demos, indie festival submissions, content creator partnerships, and a marketing roadmap that ties wishlist campaigns to funding milestones. I wrote the 90-day operational plan covering business formation, MVP scoping, community growth, and live ops. Six months in, I was a full founder: zero-to-one with no salary safety net.

I also started freelancing for my local pottery studio, which planted the seed for Pottery Friends. After embedding at the studio six days a week for a year, I identified an unowned vertical: no one has built purpose-built software for craft studio communities. So I built it myself, a native mobile app, marketing site, analytics dashboards, and internal docs, using AI-assisted development with Claude Code to ship production features in days, not sprints.

150 beta members. Fifteen repos. Fifty-nine database migrations. Currently running structured user testing to validate product-market fit. All of it conceived, designed, built, and shipped by one PM proving that modern AI tooling changes what a single builder can do.

The common thread across 15 years: the best product decisions come from understanding what it actually costs to build. Not from a sprint planning estimate, from building it yourself.

I've led cross-functional teams at companies ranging from 85-person startups to organizations with 6M members. I write PRDs that engineers actually want to read, run sprints without micromanaging, and say no to features that don't move the metric that matters. My builder background means I can unblock technical conversations faster than most PMs. I don't need a meeting to understand why a migration is risky or an API design decision matters. That shared vocabulary earns trust with engineering teams quickly.

I prioritize by asking one question: what's the fastest path to learning something we don't know? Discovery and delivery aren't separate phases. They're parallel tracks. I define product success by behavior change, not feature completion. A shipped feature nobody uses is worse than one that was cut because the data said no.

I want a company where product drives growth, not a support function. The right fit: PM owns the outcome, team ships weekly, technical depth matters.

Seed-to-Series B startups in SaaS, dev tools, AI/ML, or consumer platforms. Bay Area, open to remote.