Runwayz

I will begin by saying that I cannot share anything behind the scenes for this one, yet. Runwayz is, at the time of writing, where I am spending the majority of my time. However, as this product is both relevant and profoundly meaningful to me, I want to share the highlights from my work thus far. At Runwayz, I serve as the current head of product, working hands on with the development of key features and helping solidify our technical product roadmap.

In this case study, I will highlight some of the key features I have brought to life during time at Runwayz. At the time of writing, Runwayz is funded and moving at the speed of light. I am excited with the potential that this company brings.

The key prolem I ws addressing at Runwayz dealt with the ability to seamlessly onboard students, efficiently gather relevant career profile info and then use that data to match them with employers and job opportunities. It was super important to me that the students are forced to do as little as possible. Considering our target demographic and their willingness to adopt yet another software, we needed this to feel as white-glove as possible.

That was the first key challenge: how do we create a simple yet thorough career assesment that both engages the kids and provides enough info for to match them accurately? I decided that a fun and short career quiz was the best answer. We ask short, multiple choice questions that empower the kids to answer earnestly, and provide plenty of helpful matching information to help provide them with relevant jobs.

The second major piece I have addressed at Runwayz was the ability to education admin to productively track student engagement and activity across the platform. Not only did this need to be a comprehensive dashbaord, but it needed to provide more value than simply collecting all the apps info in one place. I first had to udnerstand what type of information admins needed to see in order to best support the students; stuff like have they used the chatbot or how many jobs have they applied to.

This was a unique opportunity to build a clean and personalized dashboard that collected insights rather than information. Based on all the information the app was collecting, this new dashboard could aggregate that data into digestible, and more importantly actionable, insights. Not only could the admins view smart aggregation of data, but they could react to it in a meaningful way.

Finally, we learned that these admins also wanted to be able to see what types of employers may be good matches for different types of students, and how certain student behavior on the app could inform that. So, I created the concept of recent activity, which contributed to relevant employers. This way, the education admin could evalute and react to their student body at a glance.

All of this culminates in our AI chatbot experience, where all of these features must be synthesized and offer a seamless exerience to students, employers and everyone in between. While I cant show the behind the scenes, this has been some of the more complex and rewarding work I have done in my career thus far.