I'm Devin Blong,
and I'm a Product Manager and Master of Information
About Me
I've spent the last seven years delivering mobile apps and services for consumer and enterprise. I believe in moving startup fast through ideation, vetting, building, and GTM. I’m inspired by products that change their industries and have a personal love for the ideation and prototyping phases of the product life cycle. I have a Master's degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information (thus the cheeky title).
Experience
Role: I founded, launched, and grew OUTTA, an augmented reality mobile app, as part of the Catalyst Foundry incubator.
Accomplishments: Conceived, built, and launched Outta - a social augmented reality mobile app based on computer vision and geolocation.
Raised seed funding from startup incubator, managed team of eight, drove social marketing and analytics.
Scaled user base from 0 to 30k users.
Role: As part of the New Product Organization, my responsibility was to create and prove out business opportunities based on a newly built enabling layer. Drawing from users and market analysis, my team and I transformed ideas into products that we prototyped, tested, and piloted. During my time here, I worked on products across a variety of verticals for both consumer and enterprise, including social video, identity, advertising, and payments.
Accomplishments: Defined and delivered first version of b2b2c identity service targeted at 100m Verizon subscribers.
Created GTM strategy and led pilot for enterprise service that turns customer service calls into web and app actionable inputs with $125m projected revenue.
Lead product discovery and definition for video app social model. Managed first Android version buildout.
Role: Cardflick was a mobile app that allowed users to create and share beatiful, digital, business cards directly between devices. Joining as part of the founding team, I drove speccing, analytics, and opperations.
Accomplishments: Won Techcrunch Disrupt Audience Choice day 1.
Scaled user base to 120k users, with 300 themes including corporate cards for companies including Apple, Twilio, Uber and Adobe.
Defined architecture and user experience for sites and apps with clients in consumer, enterprise, and educational spaces.
Education
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2009
School of Information, UC Berkeley
Masters in Information Management and Systems with a focus in IA and UX design
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2007
UC Berkeley
BA in Mass Communications, with focus on technology in communication.
Skills
Hobbies
Patents
Selected Portfolio
Outta, was a social augmented reality app for iOS. Built on the goal that AR should be simple, fun, and accessible, Outta let users create virtual “spaces” at real world locations. Users could then add stickers, messages, gifs, photos, and filters. When another user opened that space at the location, they would see the virtual objects overlaying the real world. Subsequent releases when on to add sharing functions such as the ability to capture what you see in spaces, as well as collaborative editing of spaces
As founder, I conceived, pitched, specced the product; then lead the team through launch and subsequent iterations. I also managed analytics and marketing efforts, bringing the product to market.
Outta, was a social augmented reality app for iOS. Version two of the application was released as a response to user feedback and usage patterns. While users liked the experience of viewing the virtual objects overlaying the live world, they were unwilling to travel to the locations to view them. Connected to this was feedback that that users thought the app would be most compelling to capture and comment on specific life experiences.
Based on this, version two of the app would progressively capture and stitch together the background of what they creator saw as they were building their space. These spaces were then made viewable from anywhere.
IVR Instant Access was a new product for the Verizon IVR (interactive voice response) system. IVR systems are used to help customers get the help they need quickly and save companies money by automating the customer service call process. IVR Instant Access created value for both parties by allowing customers to open the company’s app or website to the relevant page directly from the phone tree.
Core to this project was securing buy-in from various cross-company teams, developing an architecture to take advantage of existing assets and capabilities, and developing a working prototype that could be handed over to biz-dev for marketing.
Cardflick was a mobile app designed to bring business cards into the 21st century. The app helped you to create beautiful, digital, business cards and share them to another device with a swipe. Cardflick offered the personal branding and style of the business card, with the convenience of digital. Cardflick launched at Techcrunch Disrupt 2011, winning Audience Choice day one.
My role on Cardflick was handling the daily product operations. This meant managing analytics, customer service and outreach, as well as testing and documentation.
