Marie C. Cassandra

My Path to Product

I studied Psychology & Computer Science at The University of Texas in Austin and quickly realized that there was a need to bridge the gap between developers and business people. While I wasn’t sure what that role was when I graduated, I got involved with a shopping comparison startup Pronto.com) and found my way from working on their Search & Data team in Boulder, CO to becoming Director of Product in the IAC headquarters in New York City.

Hearst  17 Local News Mobile Sites & Apps

In 2013 Hearst Digital News was grappling with the questions of the era – responsive versus adaptive website? Native versus wrapper mobile apps? I joined the PM team and we put together a strategy to create new mobile websites which would then serve as the ‘mobile first’ design of responsive websites which would launch later. This way we were able to get a beautiful new mobile offering to market quickly with adaptive sites and then remove the adaptive “mdot” once the full responsive project was done. We also chose to build wrapper native apps around these new websites so that we could launch mobile apps alongside (especially as the market was still very split at this time). By building the app wrapper alongside the websites, we could ensure the two worked well together. As a central digital organization providing whitelabel sites/apps for the 17 local newspapers throughout the United States, we then proceeded to launch these new sites and apps in batches of 3-5 every week, so I had a couple of months of very exciting weeks as we went live.

Agoda Mobile Apps

I was hired at Agoda in 2015 when they had just started a revamp of their mobile apps. It was an exciting time to join the Product team since they were completely rebuilding their Android & iPhone apps, so I got to have a lot of direction into the UX and features of the apps. We also built our own mobile dedicated API service so that we could control the data formatting to be able to better achieve our vision (which then the rest of the UI teams wanted to use, too).

Amadeus Digital Product Manager of Developer Experience (DX)

After over a decade of being a User Experience Product Manager for digital web & apps, I shifted to the relatively new discipline of User Experience focused on Developers. This was a very interesting and welcome shift in focus, since the entire reason I got into Product in the first place is to help unleash the power of brilliant developers.

As a PM, I’m happy to sit in all the meetings and be the first line of defense of external teams asking questions to the development teams, because I know that all of that frees up developers to do what they do best. But most importantly, I make sure that their efforts and hard work don’t go to waste, because we’re building the right things.

It was also a bit more of a technical role than I had before since the Product I managed were developer frameworks and tools. But it was an exciting challenge to brush the cobwebs off of my technical background and start learning all the fun and interesting developments in software development since my days of learning OOP/Java (hellloooooo Reactive Programming….mind slightly blown).

See more on my Linkedin profile.