About Helen
Helen Brown | Product Manager
Prioritization Is My Superpower
Ms. Helen Brown has a unique background that combines product management, user experience, and environmental design (architecture and urban planning).
In her 10+ years as a SaaS and platform product manager, she has led the product strategy, prioritization, and owned success metrics across a diverse range of domains including customer support, billing platform, health apps including patient and office portals, geospatial data visualization, and globalization.
Ms. Brown excels at garnering alignment across cross-functional teams and has developed a unique product development process that balances transparent and empathetic culture, while ruthlessly prioritizing problems. She is known for her ability to achieve key outcomes with limited resources by minimizing risk, iteratively testing, and measuring success continuously.
Above all, she is a staunch advocate for high-quality experiences and thrives in customer-obsessed environments.
Skills & Experience
Portfolio
Please visit https://www.behance.net/helenbrown for visual samples of my work.
Skills
Product vision, strategy, prioritization, roadmap
User research and usability testing
Market and competitive analysis
Prototyping and wireframes
Product requirement documentation
Experience in agile environment
Cross-functional collaboration with design, user research, pricing, engineering, legal, finance, tax, audit, IT, RevOps, RevRec, GTM teams
Compliance experience in HIPAA, GDPR, WACAG, FedRAMP
Software:
Collaboration: Confluence, Jira, Github, Google Workspace
Billing & GTM: Salesforce, Zuora
Data: Pendo, Snowflake, Looker, Google Analytics
User research: Userinterview, Usertesting
UX design: Figma, Sketch, InVision, Miro, Lucid
2D and 3D spatial design: ArcGIS Pro, AutoCAD, SketchUp
Experience
Senior Product Manager | Zendesk | Jan 2022 - Present
Launching a new employee service product:
As the new Employee Service PM, currently owning user research, vision and strategy, roadmap, implementation, and success metrics for a task management feature that will improve accountability, transparency, and SOC auditing for HR/IT customers in the ITSM ($9B TAM) and HRSM market ($30B TAM).
Pioneered AI monetization:
As the Billing Platform PM, delivered a usage-based revenue model in anticipation of a market shift away from agent seats to AI usage;
Garnered ($5M ARR) in the first quarter after monetizing GenAI capabilities (such as automated responses, sentiment analysis, and customer insights) by collaborating with cross-functional teams across the billing platform, IT, pricing and packaging, RevOps, sales, and marketing.
Expanded Zendesk’s global footprint and revenue:
As the Internationalization PM, grew the serviceable and addressable market by $500M and added 260+ languages for customer’s end users;
Achieved 6x faster deployment and saved $140K annually by enabling machine translation for 100+ product development teams;
Senior Product Manager | Esri, Inc. | July 2019 to January 2022
As the lead product manager, established and maintained the product strategy and roadmap for the desktop, web, mobile, and enterprise, and APIs of the ArcGIS Business Analyst product suite;
Served a wide range of customers (200K+) across commercial real estate, government, and health industries by garnering trust and alignment from department leads and teams for consistent user experience across devices;
Exceeded revenue forecast by 33% per year by launching a new bundling pricing model that targeted mid-tier customers;
Identified market trends through continuous discovery with customers and GTM interview (sales, customer support, tech support, distributors, and global partners);
In collaboration with the data and legal team, embedded industry-leading geospatial data for the global market (150+ countries), reviewed terms and conditions, and finalized contract fees for optimal ROI; and coordinated back-end service needs to deliver the data in intuitive workflows;
Director of Product | Canary Health | March 2017 to July 2019
Determined MVP and managed product strategy and roadmap that met quarterly OKR and B2B2C needs;
Built the product vision, strategy, and roadmap and aligned cross-functional team members, vendors, and healthcare clients around patient outcome goals.
Achieved 85+ SUS of new feature improvement for a web-based, CDC-certified diabetes prevention program (DPP) from outreach through program completion and support;
Increased monthly consumer registration by 160% after applying personalization to acquisition campaigns;
Increased conversion rate from consumer registration to first-month return visit from 43% to 53% by rethinking re-engagement opportunities;
Launched a new SaaS diabetes management mobile app with a major healthcare partner and its vendors while maintaining a consistent, high-quality consumer experience from registration through fulfillment of health rewards (via third-party APIs), portals for both patients and health coaches, and by providing health lessons through an LMS integration.
Product Manager | Internet Brands | December 2014 to March 2017
Launched seven new SaaS products (B2B) over an 18-month period from ideation, launch and subsequent releases for multiple health brands (11,000+ clients);
Communicated product goals and use cases to dev teams with diagrams and low- to high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes;
Conducted remote and on-site training to sales, customer support, and marketing teams in preparation for product launch and customer onboarding.
Helen Brown Design & Planning, Inc. | Principal | June 2013 to December 2014
Founded a user research consultancy to help customers increase new user engagement and address navigational problems. Customers include the American Library Association's Connect Website (http://connect.ala.org) and Planetizen’s Online Courses Website (https://courses.planetizen.com).
Architectural designer, Urban planner, Urban designer | September 2001 to June 2013
Urban Planning and Design, Architecture: Designed award-winning parks and streetscape improvements based on community stakeholder input. Managed civil and landscape sub-contractors and designed urban design improvements. Planned and designed multi-family affordable housing.
Education
B.A., in Architecture, UC Berkeley
M.A. in Urban Planning, UCLA
