As the first product manager, I defined and prioritized our MVP end-to-end.

My Accomplishments

My Role

It's hard for junior talent and hiring companies to fill open roles, but Smash makes it easy

Smash's founder hired me to get the launch product back on track after a year of scattershot progress. I worked with him to bring order to the chaos, leading the product through various roadmaps and business models, user research, design, until we shipped the MVP.

I collaborated with offshore engineer teams in Central, then South Asia to ship our core product, an SaaS Learning Management System (LMS), which became Smash's core product.

Product

It's hard for junior talent and hiring companies to fill open roles, but Smash makes it easy

Smash's founder hired me to get the launch product back on track after a year of scattershot progress. I worked with him to bring order to the chaos, leading the product through various roadmaps and business models, user research, design, until we shipped the MVP.

I collaborated with offshore engineer teams in Central, then South Asia to ship our core product, an SaaS Learning Management System (LMS), which became Smash's core product.

The LMS integrates project coordination, technical coursework, user groups, communication, and planning into a single web application. Projects provide real-world work experience, coursework teaches technical skills, groups allow information sharing, instructors receive analytics, while communication and planning facilitate multimedia collaboration.

Development

I started by conducting user research and competitor analysis to prioritize our feature set. After facing slow progress and financial setbacks, I found and negotiated the contract with an offshore engineering team specializing in the Open edX LMS platform.

Shifting our product strategy to an open-source approach was incredibly successful. In just 3 months, we had a product that met our user needs and business objectives at one-fifth of the cost quoted by local development companies on top of getting more functionality.

The product was delivered on time, resulting in revenue within 2 months and becoming Smash's core product.

An example of the final LMS product

Takeaways

• The importance of balancing functional requirements with business requirements

• How to manage offshore teams when time zones, communication, and cultural expectations are not straightforward

• The criticality of defining the product scope and ensuring shared understanding between stakeholders