Robert Grande Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Dakar, Senegal, Sn

San Francisco, California, Us

Next Billion Advisors brings together a number of founders and business operators experienced in emerging markets and all facets of technology ventures. Together, Next Billion Advisors are connecting founders in emerging markets to strategy, product, sales, and operations experts in Silicon Valley and around the world.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Pngme offers alternative scores and data products to lenders and fintechs in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana by scraping data from a user’s phone and structuring the data into financial insights and machine learning scores. Within Pngme, I currently lead the team of data scientists and engineers owning data ETL, external APIs, new data products, and credit scores. Example responsibilities and projects* Developed 1 year product strategy by creating “Data Products Hierarchy” to classify products into levels of complexity and predictive power* Reduced time to evaluate predictive power of new products from ~2-3 months (and requiring clients to share sensitive data) to ~1 hour using in house resources* Launched company’s first client facing API to production

San Francisco, California, Us

* Designed new credit policy for airtime lending product with 2.3x improvements in user LTV * Defined ~25 page long term product strategy for Financial Data as a Service and led team of data scientists in exploration of data products and indicators*Created and executed on roadmap to reduce time to iterate on new machine learning credit models

San Francisco, California, Us

Product Manager for the Lending, Credit, and Fraud team at Branch. Branch provides microloans to users in emerging markets (Nigeria, Tanzania, Mexico, India, and Kenya) and uses machine learning to assess credit risk and fraud using data from users' phones. I led the team of data scientists and engineers owning our credit score model and manual review processes and worked closely with in-market loan review teams and SF based credit analysts. I ideated, prioritized, scoped, and led the execution of initiatives leading to the following key results:- Improved our first time borrower default rates by 25-55% (relative) and our projected customer LTV by 50% through credit model improvements, largely driven by new feature development.- Reduced the time to train and iterate on a new credit model from 7-10 days down to ~3 hours by migrating our homegrown infrastructure to AWS and streamlining certain manual processes.- Improved LTV of customers in Kenya by 25% by requiring more stringent KYC (Know your customer) checks in an A/B test. - Increased disbursements in Nigeria by 70% while maintaining positive unit economics for top borrowers in Nigeria by requiring additional financial documents in an A/B test.

San Francisco, California, Us

New York, New York , Us

Hoboken, New Jersey, Us

Lead Product Manager on Content Platform team with 10 engineers and data scientists-Defined quarterly OKRs and initiatives, led execution of initiatives, and coordinated cross-team efforts with data science, content publishing team, UX, legal, and marketing.Example Project 1: A/B test for new Hints feature- Identified root problems in poor instructional engagement and poor sentiment using user interviews and data analysis - Proposed new feature “Hints” to provide short, contextualized instruction as opposed to long instructional passages and videos- Performed A/B test and observed 50% increase in student engagement, 5% decrease in negative sentiment, and 78% students responding positively in survey

Hoboken, New Jersey, Us

Currently involved in a variety of projects, from designing a new UX and doing project management for a custom software solution to researching new features using data science models for language learning. I also have experience on a product quality monitoring initiative, negotiating between various stakeholders.- Project 1: Student analytics dashboards - Created user stories and designed new UX for teacher dashboards using Balsamiq mockups - Negotiated features and deadlines directly with enterprise customer - Defined deliverables and project milestones for technical work and user acceptance criteria with customer- Project 2: Product behavior quality assurance testing and monitoring - Consulting with partner facing teams, data scientists, and engineers, determined set of online tests to guarantee baseline level of product quality and metrics to monitor for quality regressions - Coordinated with multiple stakeholders with differing views to compromise on final set of tests and metrics - Oversaw project to final delivery of tests, adjusting scope as necessary to reflect changes in resourcing and requirements

Hoboken, New Jersey, Us

In charge of analyzing production data for an adaptive education recommendation engine, identifying key areas for improvement, designing product features to address these deficiencies, and analyzing the efficacy of these features. Additionally, designed and built new models and algorithms, using probabilistic graphical models and machine learning, for a brand new ESL product from the ground up.

Master Of Science (Ms), Aerospace, Aeronautical And Astronautical Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Mechanical Engineering