Leeo Product Strategy

Client
Leeo

When
2014

Team
Leeo C-level, Product Management, Marketing, IP, and Engineering teams, External Design Agency (Ammunition), External Web Development Agency (Noble Studios)

Role
Product Manager, Business Development and Partnerships Lead

In early 2014, I joined a small smart home startup called Leeo as a Product Manager leading our expansion into Enterprise Internet of Things (IOT). As the rest of our team worked on building and launching our first product, the Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight, a consumer, plug-and-play remote Smoke and Carbon Monoxide alarm monitor, I worked as a team with our co-founders to translate our company vision into our product suite, business, IP, and partnership strategy. In addition, I product managed our launch website, where I led the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners.

My time at Leeo was a huge personal growth experience. Before Leeo, I had primarily worked as an Engineer and Designer. However, at Leeo, I played significant roles in Business Development, Partnerships, New Product Exploration, Product Marketing, and Strategy. I joined looking to work on high-level problems and expand my skills and experience. I am fortunate to say that got exactly that, beyond what I had even imagined.

Research, Partnerships, and Strategy

As the sole employee out of our small team of twenty responsible for expanding from consumer to enterprise, I set the path for how to approach our growth. I began with a market survey of enterprise IOT and discussing our company vision with the Founders. Once I had a solid foundation of our goals, the market landscape in several enterprise IOT industries, and our existing partnership base, I selected a few high potential industries and dove into qualitative user research.

I interviewed 100+ individuals in the course of a few months to learn about various industries, different roles, and what their needs were in the IOT space. With our executive team’s wide-ranging contacts in Real Estate, we especially dove into all forms of that industry from Hospitality to Multifamily Residential Housing. This research spurred countless conversations with our leadership to determine company strategy for the coming months and years, resulting in numerous patents (see below).

What started as exploratory user research transformed into so much more as well. We began to form strong partnerships with individuals and companies who wanted not only to help us with our research but also to collaborate on projects with and even invest in us. For instance, after our meeting with one utility company about product collaborations, they invested and joined our board. Thus began my first experience leading Business Development and Partner Relationship Management, reporting directly to the Founding team.

Leeo Launch Website Desktop view on a Monitor

Leadership

As the value of my work shined, I was soon able to grow my team. I hired and managed a colleague, and together we accomplished deeper market landscape analysis and research. Our work served instrumental in securing investors down the line when asked for our due diligence.

As the only team member who had ever shipped a consumer electronic product before, I was also often tapped to give advice on hardware product design. It was an honor to leverage my strong hardware engineering experience to be a resource to the team as they navigated contract manufacturers in Asia and industrial designers in San Francisco.

Product and Marketing

Three months before we publically launched our first product, we were in need of a Web Product Manager who could reliably deliver in a short period of time. I took this opportunity to step up to product manage our launch website.

I led our teams through the feature definition, information architecture, user experience design, content strategy, and vendor development and design partners to ensure that we had a fully functional, responsive, product launch marketing page, e-commerce store, blog, support forum, and community forum to showcase our company and product in time for our mid October launch date.

This was yet another new growth opportunity for me. So far at Leeo, I had already had a significant impact in my roles in Business Development, Partnerships, and New Product Exploration. Now, I was offered another chance to play a leading role, this time in Software Product Management and Marketing, and I owned it. Our entire launch was seamless and it was rewarding to see how my work directly led to sales.

Leeo Launch Website on a tablet

Patents

WO 2016040378 A3: Environmental monitoring devices and methods
US 20160071196 A1: Systems and methods for transferring data and revenue
US 20160072891 A1: Sensor-data sub-contracting during environmental monitoring
WO 2016007680 A1: Fault diagnosis based on connection monitoring
US 20160071219 A1: Dynamic insurance based on environmental monitoring
US 20160070614 A1: Identifying fault conditions in combinations of components
US 20160071184 A1: Service-improvements based on input-output analysis
US 20160071183 A1: Environmental monitoring device with event-driven service
US 20160071148 A1: Alert-driven dynamic sensor-data sub-contracting
US 20160070276 A1: Ecosystem with dynamically aggregated combinations of components
US 20160070920 A1: Constrained environmental monitoring based on data privileges

WO 2016032465 A1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9092060 B1: Intuitive thermal user interface
US 9304590 B2: Intuitive thermal user interface

WO 2016018269 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic
US 20160034010 A1: Electronic device having a programmed electrical characteristic

US 8967855 B1: Electronic device for determining external temperature
WO 2016028295 A1: Electronic device for determining external temperature

WO 2016032457 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20160061640 A1: Fluid-flow monitor
US 20170038233 A1: Fluid-flow monitor

US 9213327 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9372477 B2: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20150268205 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9170625 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
WO 2016010529 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 9116137 B1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions
US 20160018799 A1: Selective electrical coupling based on environmental conditions