👋 Hey, I’m Elliot, a Product Lead with a knack for data.

I work at the intersection of strategy, UX and tech to generate business impact. I believe the best way to do that is through experiences that delight users. Here’s an overview of my journey so far.

Product work

• I'm currently a Product Manager at Handshake, the #1 site for college students to find jobs. As a PM within the international team, I help drive Handshake's European expansion.
• Before that, I was Head of Product at Envoy, a small and ambitious startup in the subscription economy. Envoy's mission was to transform the share button - often the most overlooked feature in content apps - into a growth machine.
• In 2020, I joined Rappi's Product team as a data analyst, and used Python to turn raw data into actionable insights. After 6 month, I was offered a Product management role, and was responsible for the discovery of products inside the Groceries experience.

Background

• Right after graduating in 2018, I built Fly to Japan, an app helping students get off their phones when studying. Since then, I've built a number of small projects, alone or with friends. Trading Rulz is a recent example I'm proud of.
• From 2014 to 2018, I studied at Edhec, a top finance school. I completed internships within Lazard and Deutsche Bank's risk departments, and graduated with an MSc in Risk & Finance. In 2017, a 2-month coding bootcamp at Le Wagon changed my life by sparking my interest in all things Tech.

Building product at Envoy

Mission statement (and blog posts to go deeper)

Envoy’s mission is to turn the share button - often the most overlooked feature in content apps - into a growth machine. Here are a few blog posts I’ve written on this:

• Starting with the problem: paywalls. Paywalls everywhere. Read on medium
• Turning sharing into a customer acquisition channel: Envoy’s secret sauce. Read on medium

A data finding that was instrumental in shaping our product

⏰ Timing is everything: the right time to cut the watch experience short

Surfacing a paywall or hard interrupt following a generous content preview will gross much better results than at the start of the experience.

Expanding on this line of thought, we’ve found that engaging potential leads with progressively obstrusive banners, up until a hard interupt 3 to 5 minutes into the content, works even better.

From Data Analyst to Product Lead: my two years at Rappi

Making sense of the chaos with the right data visualisation

Each month, the Groceries section of the Rappi app alone gets 15 million visits, which will result in about 3.5m placed orders.

There are many ways for users to add products and complete their orders: through store selection, by choosing a quick delivery, starting from previous order, etc. The abundance of options is great for users but makes it hard to have a comprehensive overview of the bigger picture internally.

I built a Sankey diagram using Plotly to help myself and others make sense of it all. It was widely shared around the company, and I was asked to run the CEO of this Latam unicorn through it just a month into the job.

Recognition over recall: the importance of surfacing the right products

As a Product Lead, I was heading the Product Discovery squad. My North Star metric was Non-Search Add to Cart rate - in other words, the share of users who would add a first item to their cart without having to search for it.

🧠 UX theory: recognition over recall

Psychologists make the distinction between two types of calling to memory: recognition (of a person or item when shown) or recall (that is, having to retrieve details fully from memory). UX research indicates that recognition is much easier than recall.

In the context of in-app shopping, this means users prefer having the relevant products or categories presented upfront rather than having to remember and search for them in the search bar. When the problem is framed in that way, what we needed to build appeared fairly easily:

1. Use AI to create personalised sections of products that users are most likely to buy. What works best are small variations on the list of products they’ve purchased in the past.
2. Create an browsing experience with filters and labels so that users get to their products by recognising these categories (rather than having to recall specific products)

One takeaway among many at Rappi

🛠️ The ‘building stages’ rule

Every project has a one-day version, a one-week version, and a one-year version. You build those in parallel, and in parallel with the bigger vision.

I want to thank Charles Carette, Director of Product at Rappi, for being an amazing mentor during my time there.

Things I’ve built

Trading Rulz (prototype)

Rewind to the early days of 2022: the crypto craze is fading, as bitcoin is crashing down after having doubled in value just a couple month ago. The traditional stock market is also shaky, on the brink of recession after a phenomenal year in 2021.

At the same time, we’re seeing the emergence of a new generation of amateur traders, using apps like Robinhood to speculate on the fluctuations of the stock market. What they lack are the tools professional traders use to get real-time market info. They also don’t have the sophistication required to understand complex market news.

The product challenge that drove me was to take something highly complex (like the range of factors behind stock movement) and, through great UX / UI, get it to the same level of intuitive ease-of-use that this new generation has come to expect from their digital products.

🌱 On simplicity

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”

John Maeda

I’m really grateful to Toby Gilles for helping me record this video.

Fly to Japan

UX designer Ulysse Sabbag and I built Fly to Japan, an iOS app enabling students to focus for long, uninterrupted strectches of time. Our mission: fighting screen addiction through a fun and gamified experience. Users would accumulate miles by putting their phone into Airplane mode and compete wit their peers.

Freelancer Protocol

The relationships between freelancers and their clients can be rocky at times. Freelancers worry about changing requirements and getting paid, on time and in full. On the clients’ side, lack of visibility often leads to unpleasant surprises at the project’s deadline.

Freelancer Protocol is a tool that aligns incentives for both parties and reduces the chance of suboptimal outcomes. It enables easily breaking down freelancing projects into intermediary milestones, and escrowing the cash until each milestone’s completion.