Hi, I'm Patrick Stephens

I'm a Product Manager with years of work experience, years working for industry-leading SaaS companies, and years building valuable products with great teams. My product career started by solving growth problems so users would find our site on Google. I've also built Search, Recommendation and AI Copilot products to solve discovery problems so users can find information they need. Regardless of what I work on, I always seek to provide value to my business and customers.

Do you need an evidence-based product strategy that aligns your customers' needs with business goals? A great PM crafts a clear vision of a world that solves your users' biggest problems and defines a roadmap that drives your team to this destination while achieving business outcomes on the way. Let's talk about your business goals and how I would approach reaching them. Let's build valuable products together.

Product Portfolio

Ask AI, 0-1 Launch [Scribd]

AI assistant that answers questions about the document you're reading.

Ask AI launched as a 0-to-1 product to help our users find information when reading documents. Through quantitative stack-ranking surveys we validated that our users' biggest problem was the time it takes to read and assess documents. This led us to ask: "How might we help users find what they're looking for within a document?"

We brainstormed ideas that combined customer-centric approaches with technology-led solutions and proposed the hypothesis: "If we surface answers to user questions about a document (via natural language prompts) then we can reduce the time it takes to find information."

We started by concept testing the idea, validating its value with positive user feedback. Following this, we created a design prototype for usability testing while our engineers built a feasibility prototype for employee dogfooding. Employee feedback on quality led to guardrails and fine-tuning of the model. Ask AI is currently in Beta.

Press

Search Results Page Redesign [Scribd]

Search platform helping information seekers find documents.

New Design (List View):

Old Design (Grid View):

Through user feedback and analytics we validated that one of our users' biggest problems was they couldn't assess documents from the search results page, resulting in pogo sticking between search results for a single query. This led us to ask: "How might we help users assess search results?"

We brainstormed ideas that combined customer-centric approaches with technology-led solutions and proposed the hypothesis: "If we display more metadata on the search result then we can reduce the amount of clicks (effort) it takes for a user to achieve success."

We created a design prototype for usability testing, received positive user feedback, and validated users would skip over results they would have previously clicked in the control group designs. Following this, we launched an A/B test validating our hypothesis and resulting in a positive impact to our output metrics.

Career Guide Platform Migration [Indeed]

Career content hub providing jobseekers with advice on how to get hired.

Career Guide is an SEO growth engine that publishes articles answering career questions users ask on search engines (e.g: Google). Through feedback from our content team, we surfaced their biggest bottleneck to publishing more articles: WordPress required articles to be published manually, one at a time. This led us to ask: "How might we remove the bottleneck to publishing articles?"

We brainstormed ideas that combined user-centric approaches with technology-driven solutions and proposed the hypothesis: "If we migrate from WordPress to a CMS enabling bulk uploads then our content team can 10x the amount of articles published daily, increasing SEO traffic."

We gathered CMS requirements from our content team, and the engineering team developed a prototype. After validating the CMS enabled bulk uploads and met the needs of the content team, we migrated from WordPress to the new CMS. The new platform resulted in over 18k articles published within its first year and an increase in SEO traffic with each published article.

Language Flashcard Emailer [Personal Product]

Personalized flashcards in your email focusing on words you struggle with.

I'm learning Spanish to communicate with my Spanish-speaking family. As I immerse myself in reading, listening, and conversation, I encounter words that I've heard before but can't recall their meaning, but I don't have the time devote an hour each day to intentional studying. This led me to ask: "How might I increase my rate of encountering vocabulary without devoting time to studying?"

I brainstormed ideas and hypothesized: "If I send myself flashcards throughout the day of words I struggle with then I will memorize vocabulary without devoting time to studying."

I created a Python script that imports words and how often I've looked them up from a spreadsheet I maintain into a dataframe. The script randomly selects 1 of the words, generates an example sentence using OpenAI's API, and emails me the flashcard. Additionally, cron jobs on my local machine run the script throughout the day. The flashcards have helped me memorize vocabulary I struggled with.