What is Tealium?

Silicon Valley Bank & Battery Ventures funded startup. Tealium is a B2B SaaS company that helps orchestrate and enrich your data to over 1000+ integrations. I was the an early member of the core engineering team responsible for building iQ, AudienceStream, EventStream, and Think

We were a very small startup…

I got hired as employee 30 at the time we had just secured a Series B funding, which eventually grow to a 500+ person team today. Being at a startup, I wore many hats, experienced late night calls, and coded using various technologies from vanilla JavaScript, to the ancient jQuery UI, to Backbone (+ Marionette), to ReactJS. Chrome Extension Development and Tampermonkey scripts were occasionally tossed in there.

As the company evolved, so did I

After a few years in, I recognized we had a huge opportunity to improve the user experience of our product. My role transitioned into a Lead Product Designer — which in reality, was more like a Hybrid Product Management / UX Designer / Software Engineer role.

Today, I work closely with 2 other designers and various product / engineering teams to discover, define, and craft solutions for our suite of products.

It started with my existing frustrations…

In 2013, I had taken on the role of being the Southern California Director for the ADYA — a non-profit organization that serves to bring middle eastern communities together. There were over 600 registered members, and our team created a system that would host networking events every month in Los Angeles for the next 2 years.

The challenge we faced was working with the national board. They had new management that had gotten elected that year that unfortunately created an agenda that was different than what the community wanted, causing many long-time volunteers to leave. I stumbled upon a secret: if you put together an itinerary, members will follow. So what if we had itineraries that members can participate in without the influence of a board? I was willing to give it a shot.

Ideas after ideas after ideas…

The project had gone through countless pivots and iterations. Surveys after surveys showed people were interested in having real, inspiring itineraries provided to them to save the time from planning. Joytime (from “enjoy-time”) could serve as that application that provides crowdsourced itineraries for date nights, families, “me time”, and any mood you can think of. I wanted “wants” and “emotions” to support users.

That idea turned into a prototype

…and a lot of user research! Prototypes were created in InVision, and customers were surveyed in malls, parks, and public places. I even hosted a meetup to further test hypothesis that I had.

This helped further define what Joytime was supposed to be.

Joytime was born

I had paid a development firm to speed up development, spent countless hours between my own personal time designing, developing, and pitching. It eventually got released as a private beta, but embarrassingly incomplete.

The product failed to gain traction.

Like every business, how were we going to make money? I was facing a multi-sided market — anticipating users were going to use the product for FREE, businesses were going to fund based on deals and coupons. They were also going to refer other businesses to create “the ultimate business”

Some businesses bought in to the vision of Joytime. Other businesses were too busy focusing on their own operation and would rather not spend time on overhead that didn’t promise ROI. Every business also had different objectives they wanted to meet.

After 2 long years, the product had to be retired

If I went back in time, I would have chosen to spend more time with potential customers, and build an MVP that resulted in a service, rather than an app, to validate early and automate into what eventually becomes a platform.

My Old School Portfolio

Below are samples of my work that I’ve worked on prior to Summer 2012. Many of these designs were made for desktop / mobile before Google’s search engine began to prioritize listings based on a mobile-first experience.

My Old School Portfolio

Experiments

I wanted to create a better web by data-scraping content and creating a fluid experience to “skim” through your site. Here’s what that looks like.