Cindy Alvarez - Product Management, Design, and User Experience Executive

Responsible for global 15-person organization that owns the user experience and common platform for the entire Yodlee product line, encompassing multiple product management, product design, and technical publications teams. Teams are based in Redwood City, CA and at the company's offices in Bangalore, India.

• Created and led unified platform product management and design group that serves as primary interface between line-of-business product marketing managers and the 100+ person engineering organization.
• Recognized gap in engineering execution on front-end product requirements and drove creation of new UI engineering group to evangelize accessibility, standards compliance, and reusability of front-end code
• Shaped multiple global operating best practices and process improvements that help enable Yodlee to perform end-to-end web product development - spanning product management, design, and engineering activities - for portions of its platform entirely in India. Yodlee is one of the few US-based web companies of its size to do so.

• Guided evolution of flagship Yodlee PersonalFinanceSM product, whose now widely-emulated user experience is setting the industry direction for how consumers will eventually bank, pay bills, and manage their finances online
• Launched version 1.0 Mobile Banking product and multiple platform components
• Co-inventor on new patent-pending Bill Pay AcceleratorSM product, evolving it from concept to clickable prototype to working product before transitioning it to one of my product managers. Launched with first customer (Capital One) in Oct. 2007

• Instrumental in landing multi-million dollar custom co-branding and platform integration engagement with top 10 financial institution
• Led joint 10-person internal and customer team to deliver bill pay product prototype; solution received rave reviews from multiple usability testing sessions and is in development for early 2008 delivery
• Re-engaged top 10 credit card issuing customer, resulting in new strategy to drive consumer adoption and commitment to multi-million dollar marketing campaign promoting the co-branded service

Led 7-person design team handling all aspects of user experience, interaction design, and user research for the entire suite of Yodlee products. Hired as company's first dedicated software design professional.

• Built strong product design organization from "one-woman shop" to 7-person team handling interaction design, visual design, and production of all design deliverables for entire Yodlee suite of applications
• Pioneered company's user research program with $50K annual budget, conducting one-on-one usability testing, surveys, and market research
• Instilled a "user experience culture," gaining buy-in across multiple organizations that product quality directly drives user adoption

• Grew product line from a single product with narrow market focus to a suite of five products with mainstream appeal and world-class financial institution customers - increasing active end users from 1MM to over 3MM
• Doubled success rate on application registrations and account setup through user research and redesign
• Drove re-invented flagship Yodlee PersonalFinance^SM product from early vision to customer launch, pioneering a new, innovative approach to rich online banking and web-based personal financial management

• Strong pre-sales involvement in multiple Fortune 500 customer deals resulting in over $10MM in bookings
• Presented at annual Customer Summit to an audience of EVP and SVP-level executives from company's largest financial institution customers on online banking trends and Yodlee's market-leading user experience approach
• Won 2006 "Best of the Web" online banking award for Bank of America's deployment of Yodlee PersonalFinance^SM

TeamSphere was a venture-backed video games tools and development company that enabled video game publishers and developers to quickly and cost-effectively add persistent online features and premium services to their console, PC, and mobile games. Customers included SEGA, Vivendi Universal, and ESPN Videogames.

DESIGN DIRECTOR
1999-2002

As one of three founding members, responsible for interaction design, visual design, and information architecture for web-based software platform encompassing 200+ screens, including a dozen modular portlet applications and an innovative co-branding engine for which a US patent application was filed.

• Led end-to-end product design vision and implementation, including production of all deliverables: storyboards, wireframes, and dev-ready HTML/CSS
• Internally drove adoption of design-driven iterative software development process, resulting in improved UI/UE consistency, more efficient engineering, and higher product quality
• Coordinated client engagements to co-brand the platform to fit seamlessly with their existing style standards and user experience
• Supervised junior interaction designer