Alex Wykoff

hire@alexwykoff.com

Summary

My path to Product Management was carved through Quality Engineering and Design Research. I have always enjoyed blending science with the arts and am driven by curiosity with an aim to continuously improve. My product philosophy is that we build our best products and services when we design WITH our users. I love diving into research, observing user behaviors, listening to their concerns, and then using the synthesis of that data and abductive sensemaking to drive those innovative leaps which cause user delight. At work, I revel in making solid connections with my teammates and sharing their passion and excitement as we dive into new tools, build new prototypes, and try different flows as we innovate toward success.

At my core, I am a hacker who is pushing into the latest technologies and connecting with my community in Austin, on Twitter, or by making my own like community.brave.com and more recently Distributed.Camp. I have taken products from concept to launch and strive to be in a position where I can continue to turn imagination into successful products that bring users joy.

Skills

Total Product Lifecycle Management - From thought to market and finally, sunset

Analytical Talent - A deep personal enjoyment of the dive into Quantitative and Qualitative data to drive insights and evaluate future options

Technical Talent - Programming experience in multiple languages, DevOps chops, and robust depth in cryptocurrencies, mobile and desktop technologies, and interaction design patterns

Excellent leadership abilities, superb collaborator

Strong communication and writing skills

Creative problem solving with attention to detail and projected outcomes

Work Experience

Product Manager, Rewards, Brave

07/16-05/20

Brave is a privacy preserving browser which uses it’s own cryptocurrency to reward users. It has over 15 Million users monthly and growing.

Promoted twice in my tenure at Brave for over three years, starting as employee 21 and grew with Brave to what is now 125 employees.

Responsibilities: Brave Rewards UI/UX Brave Rewards is the largest connected digital wallet network in the world, where users are rewarded for browsing and referring their friends and family. Brave Rewards is supported on every major desktop and mobile OS. I drove the primary research on Brave Ads which grew from a private beta to a system that now runs in every non-embargoed country on Earth.

Creator Program | Rewards The Brave Creator program is the fastest growing publisher network in the world with over 745,000 creators including Wikipedia, The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc. to small creators that get paid by Brave users for their content or can refer their friends and family to earn referrals. I delivered the rate card program for referrals which saved the company millions while maintaining growth. I also managed the addition of Reddit and Github accounts and organized an internal hackathon which staged many more publishers and platforms for addition.

Community I personally drove the creation and adoption of the Brave Community for support, user outreach, and research. This scaled the support flow and grew to over 500k monthly views under my administration (currently over 1M monthly views).

Test Automation Engineer, Spiceworks

12/14 - 06/16

Spiceworks provides free software and community to IT professionals while serving targeted ads.

At Spiceworks, aside from building up test plans and suites in TestRail, I have also improved automation coverage via Selenium Webdriver in Ruby and JavaScript. Specifically, I used watir-webdriver and webdriver.io to automate browser use and drive test cycles from days to hours.

I was a founding member of the UX initiative. I created materials for and ran workshops on user research, usability testing, and prototyping for the development teams. Hundreds of employees were trained on my materials.

I also led numerous usability tests and have conducted user research in the field via contextual inquiry, this has led to direct improvements to our product.

Education

Austin Center for Design

Certificate in Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurship

Lock Haven University

Bachelor of Science - Computer Science

Achievements

Distributed Camp

While in the middle of a global pandemic, I created & organized a 3 day virtual conference on technologies which will drive the future of the Internet. You can check it out here

Guest Speaker, University of Texas, Austin

Owner and founder of Bimo Studio