Experience
Wall Street Journal, New York, NY
Associate Product Manager, December 2010 - December 2011
- Understood, gathered, and documented concise user, business and product requirements for existing product enhancements and new initiatives, including scenarios, flows, edge cases, business justification and operational impact.
- Developed product roadmap and strategy.
- Effectively partnered with stakeholders through the product lifecycle including Engineering, Project Management, Design, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service.
- Innovated using a human-centered, prototype driven design thinking process, including customer research, synthesis, idea generation, rapid prototyping and user testing.
- Managed backlog to ensure requests are captured, prioritized, and communicated.
- Conducted primary or secondary research as needed. Created preliminary design concepts.
Ignighter, New York, NY
Product Manager, Interaction Designer and Software Engineer, February 2009 - June 2010
- Involved in all phases of development of new products for Ignighter, a group to group dating service, including front-end and back-end engineering as well as product management and user interaction design.
- Products developed include Ignighter's online magazine on dating, a site wide messaging system, member profile pages and user interface for Ignighter's subscription payment system.
- Took ownership of usability on www.ignighter.com - performed site wide UX audits, designed usability studies. Tracked, managed, prioritized, and documented user experience issues.
- Managed Ignighter's email marketing campaigns. Designed email templates, created HTML/CSS for emails, programmed the backend to schedule and send emails, performed A/B testing on variations, administered lists and subscribers.
- Produced visual design components including layouts, banners, online ads, and buttons.
- Helped establish QA procedures and policies. Refined Ignighter's QA process based on changing business goals.
Xanga.com, New York, NY
Product Manager, May 2007 - December 2008
- Worked directly with the CEO and a small team of engineers to launch new features for www.xanga.com, a social networking and blogging community with over 32 million users.
- Oversaw full lifecycle on all products, including managing developers, maintaining specifications, and performing QA testing.
- Designed and deployed www.momaroo.com, a social networking community for mothers, featuring blogging, groups, and forums.
- Added "Hot Topics" - daily top searches provided by Yahoo - to search, increasing search revenues by 23%.
- Designed and implemented the front-end for a flash based chat product for Xanga TV.
- Created "Xanga Plugz", a module that displays little ads for bloggers, making it easy for them to publicize their sites and for readers to find quality content on Xanga.
- Authored feature to let users recommend quality blog entries to their friends.
- Conducted usability and desirability studies to refine the design of several major features.
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Software Engineer, Sept. 2005 - August 2006
- Wrote most of the code (PHP, HTML, and JavaScript) for "ridenow", a ride sharing site enabling individuals to coordinate ad hoc rides.
- Added AJAX auto-completion feature for data entry fields.
- Added SOAP web services to provide a programming interface to core functions.
AYESAS - Subsidiary of L3 Communications, Ankara, Turkey
Software Engineer, May 2003 - August 2004
- Composed design specification for a Material Requirements Planning system for AYESAS's manufacturing department.
- Designed and implemented "e-voice", an add-in for MS Outlook, enabling people to attach voice messages to their emails.
- Developed various application prototypes using Java and C#.NET.
HAVELSAN, Ankara, Turkey
Software Engineer, July 2002 - March 2003
- Designed and implemented flight optimization module of the project "Information System for Turkish Air Force", Command Control Communication (C3) software that automates the air defense of Turkey.
- Performed business analysis and modeling using UML notation and OO methodologies.
Education
School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Master of Science in Information
- Specialized in Human-Computer Interaction and Information Economics, Management & Policy.
- Recipient of Rackham International Students Fellowship for 2007.
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Skills
UI Design:
Wireframes, Prototyping, Storyboarding, Comparative Analysis, Requirements Analysis, User Personas and Scenarios, Flow Diagrams, Site Maps
Usability:
Usability Testing and Analysis, User Surveys, User Interviews, Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, Vocabulary Analysis, Visual Analysis
Programming:
Java, Bourne Shell Scripting
Software:
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash, OmniGraffle, Visio
Web Related:
HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, MySQL, Actionscript, Drupal