Give Good Deeds
Brief
In early 2020 philanthropist and serial entrepreneur Bill Pecoriello founded Good Deeds as a new way for consumers to generate money for the nonprofits and causes they care about. The app would work similarly to Cashback apps such as iBotta, Rakuten and Cash App, but instead of generating small funds for one user, users would group together to generate money for Nonprofits.
My Role
I joined Good Deeds early and then quickly took on the task of finding a launch scope for the project. I worked closely with our founder, CTO, VP of Nonprofits and VP of Brands to find an MVP we could bring to market before the Christmas holiday season that same year.
Even with the MVP scope, the aggressive timeline meant we had to move at light speed, so I set the team up with a Kanban style workflow where I kept a healthy backlog of tickets so that platform teams could focus on “getting shit done” without any distractions. The plan was to get to a minimal functional product as quickly as possible and then start an iterative process working in sprints from there. It was my job to make sure our stakeholders business needs were met and the requirements for the platform teams were clear. I managed the short-term and long term project plans as well as different ceremonies to keep our team and process healthy.
Complication
This project was a very ambitious undertaking. The project had 7 major artefacts that each needed their own dedicated developers. We started with the iOS and Android apps supported by a back-end system that could ingest Affiliate Links, manage cashback for users and donations to nonprofits. Secondly we started building web apps for nonprofits and brands to manage their presence on our platform. Lastly we started adding a Web Client and Browser Extension to help users shop on their desktop as well. The amount of interacting apps and systems were a challenge in itself, and we hit some roadblocks along the way, including the aging technology of commission on Affiliate Links, aggressively growing our team to keep up with stakeholder expectations and figuring out the best way to position our brand and marketing strategy.
Resolution
We successfully hit our Alpha, Beta and Release dates and started transitioning to an iterative process, and restructured our platform teams into cross functional teams, each one focused on a different OKR. One team for increasing the conversion rate from users seeing our app promoted by nonprofits, and a second team for increasing our MAU and retention rate.
Media
