Every customer, use case, product, and feature is unique. Despite the challenges this creates, standardized processes can be used to ensure quality and value is delivered in the products we create.

I use a set of product development processes which I have found to be successful across products and organizations each time I lead a new project. This case study shows these processes in action for a particular project I led at Slice.

While at Noodle, I led the creation of a tool aimed at helping parents discover and compare schools within their public school district in order to make more informed educational decisions. This case study shows the product development process I used in developing the Noodle School District Search.

Starting in early 2015, Noodle took on the ambitious challenge of creating a tool which helps people find and make decisions about preschools. Prior to the creation of our product, the primary means of finding preschools included word of mouth and basic internet searches. Both of these means fail to help educate people about their many options that they have, and both fail to help people discover all of the relevant educational opportunities.

I led the design and creation of the Noodle Preschool Search, a product which matches people the most relevant of over 175,000 preschools based on twelve different criteria.

In the first week following the product's launch, over 250,000 people visited the preschool section of the Noodle site, representing over 40% of all of Noodle's traffic.

For a walkthrough of the Noodle Preschool Search, click the image to the left to view a promotional video about the product. You can also read some of the press we received on Education World. 

In the fall of 2013, Noodle participated and was a finalist in the New York City Department of Education School Choice Design Challenge. The purpose of the challenge was to create a product which would help students and parents navigate the difficult and often confusing high school discovery and application process in New York City. I led the product work related to the creation of the NYC High School Search as well as profiles for the individual schools.

The final search product allows students and parents discover the most relevant of the nearly 500 high schools in New York City. The search was a significant upgrade of the preexisting Noodle School Search due to an increase of data as well as specialized search criteria which are specific to schools in New York City. Each school also received an individual profile, which contained school specific content and information in order to help people make decisions about what schools to apply and go to.

The launch of these products lead to significant press for Noodle.

In 2012, I worked on a team of researchers at Brown University to develop products which aid in the physical rehabilitation of children with traumatic brain injuries.  We based our work on research relating to video games and motivation as well as research related to rehabilitation, and designed and tested devices which act as video game controllers, allowing patients to complete their repetitive rehabilitation work while having fun. My work included building functioning prototype controllers to prove that rehabilitation motions can be utilized effectively as inputs for video games, as well as writing the initial version of the patent which we applied for, #20140081432.