Hi there! I’m Franklin, a product manager who loves building great digital experiences! I blend technical know-how with an ability to see problems from the user’s perspective.
A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat. - Deep Nishar
I am an anthropologist turned technologist, and I have focused my career on building magical product experiences at consumer internet and entertainment brands. Part analyzer, part dreamer. I start by understanding the individual’s pain points and then leverage the power of design thinking, data, and machine learning to solve them. I’ve envisioned and helped build recommendation systems, personalization engines, and engaging user experiences that help fuel the growth of digital products.
I’ve started publishing little essays about my experiences in tech, working on recommendation engines, and career development.
Mapping User Persona to Personalization Product
How does an anthropologist end up building products in tech? Human behavior has always fascinated me, and it’s taken me on a winding path from grad school to Silicon Valley.
Anthropologists study, among other things, how humans interact with various tools. Think of some of the artifacts you may have seen in a history museum: spear heads, pottery, canoes, etc. Archaeologists in particular can reverse engineer human behavior based just on these relics. Software is a highly specialized tool, designed to handle all kinds of tasks. The most effective and impactful software builders are those who take into consideration the person or the end “user”, the individual who will ultimately be leveraging the tool they have created. My background helps me focus on how people interact with tools, and this understanding has been invaluable in my journey to becoming a thoughtful and empathetic product manager in tech.
After grad school, I transitioned into a product role at a digital agency. We made mobile apps, custom sites, and other digital products and assets for large-scale advertising campaigns for big brands. I loved analyzing user data, finding insights to inform design. I realized product thinking blended anthropology and technology beautifully.
Over ten plus years, I’ve focused on consumer technology companies, building entertainment, ad tech, and content discovery products powered by data. I’ve crafted the vision and executed the roadmap by facilitating cross-functional teams with designers, user experience researchers, data scientists, and engineers. You can read more about my resume on LinkedIn.
In the future I — well let’s be honest we probably all do — see a wave of digital products made smarter and more personalized by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Those humans using those products deserve experiences that are transparent, trustworthy, and creative. That means there will be a new class of technologists and product leaders seeking out ways to improve their Ai-backed software tools. These folks will likely look and sound a great deal like myself in 2015 when I launched my first machine learning product, and I hope to share some of my knowledge and lessons to help the field.
I like building prototypes and tinkering with things.
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