Dan Fragiadakis

Here is why I would be an incredible asset to your team:

1. I’ve been designing, running and analyzing tests for 14 years. I can do far more than run a simple A/B test. For example, the first test I designed at Upwork–a platform for clients to find freelancers to complete remote work–involved splitting traffic into 4 different treatment groups and 1 control cell to simultaneously measure 5 effects. My expertise in testing also landed me a seat on Upwork’s committee that reviewed the plans for every single Upwork test (not just the ones submitted by members of my team).

2. I have identified and solved problems for 13 years. In grad school and as a professor, I was responsible for not only solving hard problems, but discovering untapped research areas in the first place. This made me a successful PM at Upwork, since I knew how to identify customer pain points and opportunities for building successful features. For example, at Upwork, I owned Boosted Proposals, an auction where freelancers can spend extra on their job applications to compete for sponsored slots that are pinned to the top of the client’s list of proposals. I saw that initial bids in our data were quite small. My expertise in behavioral economics convinced me that this was because we were not displaying current bid amounts. I thus worked with designers and engineers to build a table showing live bids to freelancers, which led average bidding to nearly triple. Please watch me explain this awesome table in this LinkedIn video.

3. I’m customer obsessed. At Upwork, I had our support team feed user feedback into my Slack, which shaped our roadmap and let us find bugs immediately. I loved it.

4. I’m a fun, outstanding communicator, motivator and salesman. Teaching all sorts of students for 7 years taught me to get through to just about anybody. I’ll get the buy-in.

5. I’m an incredibly fast learner. At Upwork, I relied on Google, my brain, and my colleagues to learn Looker, JIRA, Confluence, how to write feature requirements and sprint-plan, to name just a few new skills. Most importantly, however, I proved to myself and to my colleagues that I can learn anything I need to in order to be great at any job.