Work experience

Hey there!

Thank you for taking the time to look at my work experience.

Here, you will find information about my professional work experience, skills, education, and writing.

In a nutshell, I have over 7 years of experience helping B2B SaaS companies build the right things for the right people.

If you'd like to connect with me, feel free to get in touch on LinkedIn.

The run-down

Current - Aristotle HQ (Growth Product Manager)

• Aristotle HQ is a product and service hybrid company that helps B2B SaaS founders find high-quality leads through hyper-personalized cold emails. As a growth product manager, my role involves identifying key growth features to drive product adoption for both internal teams and external customer-facing entities.
• Using the Shape Up product development methodology, I collaborate with leadership teams to determine the most promising growth levers and guide founders on positioning and messaging to achieve language market fit. I work closely with development teams to shape the demand perspective, identify customer pain points, and implement novel solutions that ship on time and on budget.
• One of my significant contributions at Aristotle HQ has been streamlining the lead approval process, transitioning from a Google Sheets-based workflow to a lean approval flow with a custom front-end and back-end developed using ReTool. This has improved the overall efficiency of the process and reduced the burden on customers.
• Additionally, I have been involved in projects aimed at reducing manual data entry work for growth hackers, enriching leads with data, and utilizing generative AI to draft personalized cold emails more efficiently.
• By constantly experimenting to find growth levers (through features) and achieve product-market fit, I have helped Aristotle HQ craft an irresistible offer that attracts clients and positions the company as a leader in a niche market.

ClassBubs (Product Manager)

• ClassBubs is a Singapore-based platform that connects parents with extra-curricular child enrichment services, such as dance, fitness, and coding classes for kids.
• While at ClassBubs, I helped the founders launch their B2B-facing product, guiding them through the complexity of bringing it to market. Many founders struggle to understand their audience, leading to constant changes that deplete precious runway.
• I conducted a discovery process with 10 educators to gain a deep understanding of their underserved needs, goals, and the tools/services (competition) they currently use to make progress.
• With this knowledge, I worked backwards to prototype and validate potential product experiences that educators would say they'd be disappointed if they didn't get built. This gave the founders confidence to move forward with their product vision.
• I also collaborated with a team of designers and engineers to scope out complimentary features to strengthen the overall value proposition. This directly impacted the company's pricing strategy and revenue potential, making it more attractive to investors during their fundraising round.

Kloud Scrapes (Project Manager)

• Kloud Scrapes offered a data scraping service to startups in the EU region, helping them to accelerate their growth by providing valuable insights for market expansion and sales lead generation.
• To differentiate themselves in a saturated market, I helped the company to develop a clear and compelling positioning and messaging strategy. This made it easy for prospective clients to understand their value and jumpstart sales engagements and lead generation.
• With a well-crafted position in hand, I collaborated with a team of freelance designers and developers to quickly build out effective landing pages that could be discovered by search engines.
• To streamline development time and reduce costs, I managed the parallel design and development process at Kloud, ensuring that outcomes were delivered at a steady pace.

Koko & Ark Construction (Growth Consultant)

• Peter Drucker (father of management thinking) famously stated that the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling. This leads to a disconnect between what they sell and how consumers utilize it in their lives.
• To address this issue, I worked with Koko, a "buy now, pay later" platform in Sri Lanka, to interview their most valuable customers to gain insight into their motivations for using the platform.
• This research helped the Koko team identify customer pain points, discover how customers learned about Koko, and determine which features attracted them.
• By the end of the project, I provided the Koko team with a set of marketing and product challenges, as well as my recommendations, to help them progress towards product-market fit.
• Similarly, I also worked with a new construction company in Sri Lanka to understand why a specific segment of customers chose to build a house instead of buying, renting, emigrating, or living with their parents.
• Since this company was new, I recruited and ran a discovery session with 9 recent home owners to understand the pain points around their experience of building a home.
• The Ark project yielded similar outcomes to Koko, with the company receiving actionable insights and recommendations to improve their product and marketing efforts.

Very Bad Wizards (Co-Founder, Product Strategy & Design)

• I co-founded a design consultancy called Very Bad Wizards. Our approach was to collaborate with clients and work alongside their teams to rapidly build prototypes to help solve their innovation challenges.
• Unlike most companies that often spend six or more months building before testing with their target audience, we shortcut the process by rapidly moving from idea to learnings. Removing the build phase altogether.
• As a part of Very Bad Wizards, my primary role involved conceptualizing design solutions, conducting rapid prototyping and testing with potential customers. Additionally, I facilitated design thinking workshops with highly talented individuals on occasion.
• We worked on two significant projects: Healthnet, which is an online medicine delivery app in Sri Lanka, and EQ Works, an ad-tech company based in Canada.
• With our help, Healthnet achieved a 27X increase in user adoption compared to their previous platform. They also won the Seedstars competition and received $500,000 in investment for their growth and expansion.
• For EQ Works, we simplified their complicated LOCUS product, which helped media buyers with audience creation and analytics. We turned it into a self-serve product, making it easier for customers to use on their own.
• These are some video testimonials of executives who went through our approach.

WebCo Pty Ltd (Frontend Developer)

• During my time at WebCo, an Australian web development and marketing agency, I served as a frontend developer on multiple software projects.
• However, many of these projects were removed from the end consumer, which left me feeling unfulfilled. I found it frustrating to work on projects that didn't gain traction or adoption.
• It was this experience that inspired me to explore a design and strategy role, seeking to work more closely with end-users and ensure that the products I help develop have a greater impact.

Foodie.lk (Frontend Developer)

• During my time at Foodie.lk, I was a frontend developer specializing in coding with Angular 1.x. Foodie.lk was the first food delivery startup based in Sri Lanka and my work involved developing the web frontend of the platform.
• Through my contributions, the platform gained a foothold in the market, with over Rs. 1,000,000 in revenue generated per week through referral traffic.
• This experience not only honed my coding skills but also helped me gain the ability to create a shared language between developers and overcome technical challenges in order to create a desirable user experiences.

Technical skills

In order to achieve the outcomes stated above, these are some skills that I use regularly.

Product discovery (what to build)

• User research (planning, recruiting, facilitation of problem discovery or usability testing).
• Analysis and synthesis of research findings.
• Quantitative product analytics (utilisation of customer journey mapping + pirate metrics to diagnose fundamental product issues).
• Design sprint facilitation.
• Rapid Prototyping.

Product delivery (how to build it)

• Visual Design
• Information Architecture
• Design Systems
• Figma (Auto-layout 3.0, scalable component design, utilisation of variants and properties.)
• HTML/CSS/Javascript
• Product management through agile sprints or Shape Up (preferred)

Education

• BEng. Software Engineering from Sheffield Hallam University United Kingdom.
• SLIIT Diploma Level, Information Technology.
• Lyceum International School Cambridge Ordinary and Advanced Level.

Writing

In addition to my professional experience, I'm also a passionate writer. I have a newsletter on my website (shavinpeiries.com) that provides easy-to-read, detailed guides to help founders, product managers, and designers develop their product intuition.

Articles from the newsletter has been featured on the front page of Hacker News, and it has subscribers from product leaders at Google, HP, Productboard, Aha.io and Monzo.

If you want to build the right product, for the right people, I'm your guy.

To get in touch with me, connect with me on LinkedIn.