StumbleUpon

A social network that helps you find the hidden gems of the internet based your Likes and Dislikes

Before there was the Facebook News Feed or Snapchat Stories, there was StumbleUpon. With just a click of the Stumble button, StumbleUpon would take you down the rabbit holes of the internet, showing you interesting and unique websites based on what other people similar to you have liked. StumbleUpon’s revenue stream was mainly based on ad view time, with “ads” strategically placed every 7th or 8th stumble. Unlike your normal pop-ups, these “ads” were oftentimes dedicated promotional websites with high quality content, so good, that you wouldn’t know you were on a promoted site.

As a product manager at StumbleUpon, I had the opportunity to work on both the web and mobile products. I learned how to successfully implement Lean development, set up AB tests, and navigate continuous deployments. From implementing a new Windows 8 application, to overhauling the mobile apps to make it more touch friendly, to AB testing the stumbling experience, I quickly learned the benefits and challenges of working at a smaller company with fewer resources.

Mobile App Redesign

Although our original StumbleUpon Android and iOS apps were highly loved and used, the reality was the apps themselves had a 40%+ crash rate and was highly unstable due to the way the apps were loading upcoming stumbles (aka websites) in the background. In addition to this, the main landing page focused on stumbling by Interests instead of general stumbling, and this counterintuitively reduce the amount of time users were stumbling because the quality of our content was lower. To combat this the engineering and AI teams proposed a rewrite of the apps and challenged the product and design teams to redesign the app such that it felt just as fast as the old app and demote Interest based stumbling as much as possible. It needed to feel faster but in actuality, the new app would be slower because websites would no longer preload.

To address these problems, we overhauled the homepage to focus more on general stumbling and introduced the concept of the “Stumble Preview”. With metadata about upcoming stumbles readily available, we enabled giving users previews of the site. This way if if the stumble was not interesting to them they could continue to swipe and avoid waiting for a website they didn’t care about to load.

Since we were rewriting the app anyways, we also made it a point to make the apps more touch friendly. Up until the redesign the apps were an exact clone of the website and were not touch or thumb friendly on small phones so a centered Stumble button was introduced.

Role: Lead Product Manager
Team: 2 PMs, 2 Contract Engineers, 1.5 Designers
Platforms: Android & iOS
Timeline: 4 weeks design, 12 weeks development, H1 2013

Introducing StumbleUpon on Windows 8 v1 (Microsoft partnership)

Originally starting out as a Hack Week project by 3 of our developers, this app manifested into a StumbleUpon & Microsoft partnership at the Windows Build Conference. In a scramble to get the app ready to ship and demo, I volunteered to PM and design the app to help showcase the capabilities of the Windows platform.