About Cindy Alvarez

There's nothing more exciting to me than taking a new or struggling idea and growing it into a fully-realized product.

Serious About Launching Great Products?

  • I've had ten years of success in taking raw ideas and turning them into fully-realized highly usable products that meet business objectives.
  • I've lead multiple teams in quickly turning around specs and click-through prototypes, and getting an entire global team "on the same page" and fired up to execute.
  • "Best idea wins" - I give all stakeholders a voice, and drive consensus based on customer needs, business goals, and feasibility.
  • I have excellent rapport with engineers and proven success in negotiating scope and collaborating to keep product development schedules on track.
  • I celebrate all the small victories - but keep a high bar on how much better we can still get. My teams have risen to meet incredibly high expectations and they continue to surprise me with what they accomplish

Cindy's Philosophy

It's all about the experience. I'm excited by companies who "get it" - that consumers don't separate user experience from features and benefits of a product when they decide whether or not to use and recommend it.

But "the experience" isn't just about consumers - it's a dedication to ongoing improvement in how you work together and communicate and empower your teams. Everyone has to know where we're going in order to get there.

That requires effective communication and a shared vision across multiple teams who often don't "speak the same language". I evangelize a product experience-driven development process - in a nutshell:

  • Answer "Who is our audience? Which of their problems are we trying to solve?"
  • Tell the story through a pitch, rough storyboards, or a clickable prototype as soon as possible
  • Make sure that everyone involved in the development process understands what we're building and why
  • Encourage internal discussion and debate - teach everyone to "think like a consumer"
  • Incorporate "quick and dirty" usability testing throughout the process
  • Iterate early and often
  • Continually check back to ensure that the product is still in line with the original goals
  • Validate with the target audience that the original goals were correct in the first place!

How I Got Here

You could say that I've always been interested in the way people think.

I chose to major in psychology at Harvard because I was interested in the theory of multiple intelligences, which posits that intelligence consists clusters of skills that allow people to excel at certain types of tasks.

This notion, simple as it is, suggests a simple yet revolutionary rule: not every audience is alike, and the product feature set and interface need to work for the audience you have. (Marketing seems to "get" this more than product management, in my experience.)

I worked in various tech support environments during college and shortly after, which was a great experience in terms of watching how frustrated people -- real, intelligent, successful individuals -- get when working with poorly thought-out technology.

I started in product design, and designed a full community software platform for a startup called TeamSphere Interactive. But I quickly realized that getting a product right started earlier in the progress - that the best-intentioned interaction design couldn't make up for a feature set that didn't make sense. When teams were short-handed, I started stepping in as a "pinch hitter" product manager. My coworkers saw it, too - one told me, "You're not a designer dabbling in product management - You're a product manager who just happens to be great at design."

Now I consider myself to have the best of both worlds - an ability to appraise the market, drive user research, pitch to analysts and customers, and plan out product roadmaps that make sense and drive revenues.