pine

Software built by and for immigrants.

I co-founded pine with Jay Tolentino (who is also my wife) to build software tools that give agency to immigrants going through the US immigration process.

Contribution

As co-founder and product manager for Pine, my key responsibilities include market research, product strategy and roadmapping amongst other things. A big part of my role is to ensure we have a key set of features we need to build to get to our beta launch. I have also been running our alpha tests with a small group of users as we have been building the core feature set over the course of 2021.

Timeline

March 2021 - Started work on R&D and prototyping

October 2021 - Launch MV to test with a small group of users

February 2021 - Launched closed beta to around 20 active users

August 2022 - Shut down due to family relocation to Berlin :(

Features

The feature set is meant to be an easy way for immigrants to get ready for three crucial stages by doing the following:

• Smart Checklist

• Deadlines and reminders

• document storage

A combination of these three key features will ensure users are prepared and feel less stress as they know what needs to be done and in how much time.

 Key Takeaways

• Successful alpha testing, pivot and beta launch

• Launched Instagram channel with educational content that have ~1000 views per video

• Adjusted product roadmap, features and ORKs based on learnings every quarter. Some pivot highlights include:

  • We realized the importance of proactive notifications for beta launch as the product might turn into a glorified checklist otherwise.

  • We realized how hard it was to create and post content on Instagram which lead us to modify our marketing OKRs to more sustainable numbers

  • We moved away from a visual timeline based layout to a more functional layout for checklists early in the engineering process as it required more dev resources

Process

Research - Synthesis - Ideation - Design - Dev - Test - Launch

Since we were building a brand new product we started off with parallel primary and secondary research to cover the following:

• Find the right market fit

• Perform a competitive audit

• Talk to potential users to understand pain points

Secondary research was focused on stats and data that would support a strong business case for us. Primary research was conducted with seven potential users over 1 hour interviews. This whole process was very insightful and set us up with plenty of insights that drove product strategy and data to build our business case.

After the synthesis phase, we were able to setup personas that guided our ideation process. We also used our personas to guide market size estimation.

Our next major step involved building our Roadmap and OKRs that will get us to our Beta launch in Feb 2022. While the beta focussed on product, we also did a lot of work to setup a marketing channel on Instagram which acts as an education tool that draws uses and we have also been articulating our business case and product vision in a pitch deck.