Elena Hagege

Responding to incoming network-powered demand to assist early-stage startups in their AI-related Product work.

• + Product ops. Draft a large volume of tickets, clean Jira, reorganize specifications for the Dev and QA team in an exceptionally short time frame.
  • Impact: Dev team unblocked. What was in the founders' minds is now written, no more bottleneck on them. Edge scenarios and missing requirements have been spotted and addressed before the dev team needed the information.
  • Tools: ChatGPT for simple rephrase, and to challenge the completion of the first template-tickets. Once the first core tickets done, I "discussed" the desired features with Claude Code, which scaled the process and produced the tickets. I verified them with Claude Code, Claude, ChatGPT and manually.
  • Note: At the time of this mission, AI tools could not be trusted. There were a lot of hallucinations, so I applied a constant verification. The mission was executed faster with AI than if I had to do it all manually, but end-to-end the time difference was not huge. However, the process in place enables the company to scale easily, in an effective way, with little Product resources (probably one experienced PM only).
• + Audit of the Product Department. Assess the logic and solidity of a company's product process, remove blockers, and prepare the team to introduce AI.
  • Mission: Collaborate with the Product team, the Dev and Designer teams, as well as all their stakeholders, to understand precisely how they work, at every step, in detail. Assess the efficiency. Spot what process should be changed rather than improved with AI tools. Spot if some needs — and therefore actions — are purely obsolete, and should be terminated instead of "optimized to reduce costs".
  • Actions: Investigated all the processes and tools. Conducted a series of interviews, 1-to-1 and group. Analysed the cost and results of the organisation. Suggested evolutions in the organisation: processes, tools and team.
• + Transition to AI. Rationalize team structure, test and choose AI tools for the entire org, and unify the AI process across all PMs.
  • Mission: Adopt an end-to-end approach to rationalize the tools the team needs to work properly and reach the desired output.
  • Impact: Reduced costs and improved the velocity of the Product Department. Improved the team's happiness at work by reducing the volume of low-added-value work they have to do, and increasing the time they have for "smart" work. Made the team's life simpler by unifying the process across all PMs (not each PM working his own way, on his personal Claude account, on his own computer).
• + Develop projects with AI. My main activity.
  • Mission 1: Design and build websites and SAAS using AI to replace most of the Development team. Portfolio available on demand.
  • Mission 2: Design and build tailor-made AI agents to execute key parts of the product work, and custom AI tools solving specific problems for companies and private people.

Large American corporation, market leader. Reported to Product Director.

• + Head of Product, CMS. Drove roadmap and execution. In charge of communication with US stakeholders.
  • Mission: The CMS powers the website's homepage, category pages, and hundreds of content-pages. I led the CMS department: transformed the objectives given by the C-level into a detailed roadmap. Decided on the department organization, process and led the team towards execution within time and budget.
  • • Defined the roadmap.
    • Organized and decided on priorities in the backlog.
    • Shaped and sometimes drafted the product requirements.
    • Created and oversaw the execution of state-of-the-art documentation and demo pages, for stakeholders' benefit.
    • The demo site, built from scratch: one page per feature — around 110 in the end — each showing the feature in every important user state (logged in or out, photos already uploaded, a project started but unfinished, a frame requiring three photos with only one added), and side by side what was live, what was being built, and what existed only as a sandbox concept. I created the first twenty pages for my own team; QA, Creative, UX and e-commerce started using them, until management asked the QA team to complete the whole catalogue within a week and engineering paused tickets to help. Hundreds of views a day.
    • Integrated the DAM with the CMS.
    • Scaled the test pages — one per feature, per PM, per QA, per e-commerce user and per other stakeholder — with naming conventions for page titles and CMS folders, and work with DevOps so those pages were never published to production and never overwritten during mass updates.
    • Built a self-serve tutorial system, in text and video, so non-technical users could assemble their own page from their blocks and get their domain visible on a single page.
    • Set up an on-demand dataset for QA and Product, so nobody had to re-create test data from scratch.
    • Set up process for effective and happy collaboration with the design team, and "our main client" the ecommerce team.
    • Led the implementation and the usage of the new Design System in the CMS code, and CMS-team's usage.
    • Became the face of CMS towards all stakeholders — customer care, ecommerce, merchandising, etc.
    • Held CMS steering committees.
    • Part of the Shopping, Merchandising & Personalization team.
    • Benchmarked industry standards, innovated, and shaped the product vision while building consensus among CMS stakeholders.
    • Contributed to the increase in engagement, conversion and retention with Machine Learning based product recommendations and personalized customer experience.
    • Developed « My Projects », a complex and innovative personalized module — smart modules across the customer funnel targeting key conversion metrics by user segment. One version for prospects and not-logged-in visitors, converting account creation and the upload of a first personal photo, with a dedicated path for users identified — through behavioral signals — as high intent to buy; another for logged-in users, focused on product discovery and resuming past projects. Among engaged users: +20% account creation for prospects, +7% first purchase for new users, +60% project resumption, and +12% conversion for returning customers — higher rates for conversion than for acquisition.
    • Increased the CMS-to-shopping-page entry rate by 30%.
    • We create pages and features for all e-commerce teams to use.
    • UGC: product reviews (Power Reviews).
    • Worked in Agile. Led a Product Manager, a team of 6 to 25 developers (depending on sprints and needs) and 6 QA. Worked with the Head of Data, two shared analysts, 6 shared designers, and creatives.
  • After three years leading the CMS, I was selected for the cross-functional team driving the company's flagship website replatforming program.
  • • Led the CMS RFP, a 6-month project where we teamed up with procurement to select the new CMS tool.
    • Managed the migration from legacy to headless CMS.
    • Not Agile this time: managed an offshore team in India of 20+ developers, 2 product managers and several PMOs.
    • Experienced in managing multicultural teams, in-house and offshore.
    • Owned internal communication within the replatforming team.
  • Impact: Established transparent, structured and efficient communication between the CMS team and all its stakeholders. Empowered the e-commerce team to self-serve, reducing their dependency on Product for content updates.
  • Tools: Jira, Confluence, Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, Figma, Optimizely, Bloomreach
• + Product Specialist, E-commerce Retention. (6 months)
  • Mission: Understand and improve repeat purchase rate across Shutterfly's core e-commerce funnel.
  • Actions: Ran a hands-on 6-month deep dive into user data, end-to-end and across all platforms (website and mobile apps). Built analytics dashboards to map the full user flow and study retention mechanics at scale. Identified friction points, fixed bugs, and specified features to remove them.
  • Impact: Contributed, over three quarters, to year-over-year improvements in conversion rate, repeat purchase rate, average order value, and customer lifetime value (LTV).
  • Tools: MixPanel for the mobile applications (an iOS and an Android app), and Adobe Analytics for the website. Plus FullStory, Tableau, Confluence and Jira.
• + Release Manager, iOS Mobile App.
  • Mission: PM in charge of the manual verification of the app end-to-end before each release.
  • Impact: Caught a few minor bugs missed by the QA team.
  • Skill: Patient, methodic, reliable.

New startup. Reported to CEO.

• + Head of Product, First PM. Built the product department: organization, processes and roadmap.
  • Mission: Build the product function from scratch at a new SAAS startup.
  • • Defined the product vision with the CEO and built the product.
    • Hired and onboarded 1 PM.
    • Designed all agile rituals.
    • Created the first product roadmap, aligned to investor milestones.
    • Launched and structured the work between product, engineering and business units.
    • B2B SAAS suite: PIM, mobile-web first.
    • Part-time CPO role. Managed 2 people.
  • Impact: Product organization operational in 1 week, could be run by a junior PM; company succeeded in presenting an MVP to investors in under two weeks, and the final product v1 after a month — which was the set goal.

Fast growing, 350-person startup. Reported to CEO.

• + Head of Product, Consumer Platforms. Led 5 squads, developed 5 B2C SAAS products. Delivered the key features needed by our clients. Conceived and delivered efficient "Base Products" for the Project team to personalize further for each client.
  • Mission: Lead all consumer-facing products for Wynd, an omnichannel SAAS solution serving two profiles of clients: Retailers and Restaurants.
  • • Led 5 squads; hired and managed up to 30 people: PMs, developers and QA, in-house and contractors.
    • Owned key client needs from discovery to release, cutting time-to-production for validated requests by 5x.
    • Managed the collaboration (shared resources, objectives, prioritization and results) with other departments: core tech teams (backend, admin sys, devops, etc.), Pre-Sales, Sales, Account Managers, Project Delivery, and the cross-squad Designer team.
    • Reported to CPO and to CEO depending on the product. Impacted vision and drove roadmap. Respected budget and timetable. Interviewed, hired and fired team members. Handled the relationship with contractors (agencies). Impacted the working culture in my tribe.
    • Filled in for missing resources in the Project Delivery department, to handle a sensitive client directly.
    • Set up strategic roadmap, planning, processes and documentation, and led execution.
    • Delivered pending modules and developed net new ones, including the e-commerce solution on kiosk for retail POS.
    • The products: the final customer-facing e-commerce website, and an e-commerce kiosk platform. Sales-assistant interfaces for salespeople in retail shops: mobile app and tablet app, for iOS and Android (4 distinct products). Temporarily led the POS products — the cash-register software for restaurants and for retail shops.
    • The platforms: web, tablet Android, tablet iOS, mobile Android, mobile iOS, and a star innovative product for kiosk (large kiosks in restaurants and retail points of sale).
    • Took part in a massive Product organization evolution. Benefited from deep Agile training with top-agency Agile coaches, present full-time to ease the transition to new processes.
    • Hosted an image library on a server of my own, because the company simply did not have one.
    • Built a sandbox dataset for QA and PMs, who were re-creating all their test data from scratch every single time.
    • Introduced a business-impact tagging system: the squads worked with the sales Account Managers to tag the clients behind every feature — client weight, how long they had been waiting, the impact on them — which turned priority conflicts into a trade-off anyone could decide.
    • Managed the team's planning, velocity and workload.
    • Prototyping and design handoff with Invision.
    • Led the execution in highly processed Agile organisations.
    • Implemented a data-driven, customer-focused approach.
    • Launched new products and improved existing ones.
  • Note: Weak spot of this experience: a low BI and data-analysis culture and resources, and insufficient DevOps resources and CTO-level support. Learned from the gaps in the org left by the company's extremely fast-paced growth before my arrival.

A personal cloud storage service — like Dropbox, but with encrypted protocols and your files stored on a physical, secured disk attached to your box (hardware). A "star" tech startup, backed by a famous European VC, fast growing. Reported to CEO.

• + Senior Product Manager. Reported to CEO. Led the newly-created Product and Design team. Defined and delivered the roadmap. Hands-on on core features. Improved the user-feedback collection and internal usage.
  • Mission: Came in to manage the two new hires — a product manager/developer and a product design/developer, set up the Product team, processes, roadmap, prioritisation, and be hands-on on a complex foundation feature.
  • • Hands-on product work on the file management system: file status and overlays.
    • Drove the features and UI of the SAAS, across both desktop and mobile apps.
    • Desktop apps on Windows and Mac.
    • Set feasible objectives and consistently delivered on them.
    • Improved file management.
    • Partnered with Customer Care to significantly reduce the volume of daily complaints and support requests.
    • Introduced a user-feedback channel through the online support site.
    • Improved data tagging.
    • Prioritized the backlog; produced mockups and ran qualitative and quantitative user research. (Sketch)
    • Defined the short-term product roadmap — deliberately no long-term plan at this stage — and set up the process key metrics.
    • Simplified complex features towards delivery and user adoption.
  • Impact: Delivered every committed objective on time; reduced the daily support workload; and strengthened the product's foundations through better file management, a new user-feedback loop, and cleaner data tagging.
• + Program Management. First and only PMO. Unblocked the delivery with a better management of the tech dependencies.
  • Actions: Conducted a series of one-to-one meetings with each of the 11 developers to understand what they were working on. There was no product team at this time, the projects were not documented. We spotted the dependencies and blockers. I created a massive Gantt chart to provide transparency and answers to everyone. We reorganized the order of priorities of the projects, not based on the customer, the importance of the features from a product standpoint, or the business needs, but based on the needs of the technology. In less than a month, we addressed and solved the blockers and started delivering again.
  • Impact: Unblocked the delivery with a better management of the tech dependencies.
  • • Significantly improved the team's velocity.
    • Managed the tech team of 11 developers.
    • Reorganized the roadmap.
  • Tool: Gantt chart. (TeamGantt)

Doctipharma is a startup launched within the market-leader media corporation Lagardère. It is a sister company to Doctissimo (same office, shared resources).

Reported to CPO then to CEO. Used a shared team of 6 developers and QA. Managed 2 product managers.

• + Head of Catalog and Merchandising.
  • Mission: Turn the catalog into a growth driver: clean, expand and qualify it to enable the merchandising tools, then define and execute the merchandising strategy — improving the average number of products per cart, the average cart amount, engagement and above all retention KPIs. I joined as a PM working on filters; when I understood the real issue was upstream — inefficient product-information qualification and flaws in the PIM set-up — the CEO asked me to focus solely on fixing it. I was then promoted from Product Manager to Head of catalog and merchandising: a department and a job title created for me, with carte blanche on the roadmap. I built the department from the ground up, hired two product managers and set up the processes and repetitive tasks.
  • Clean & qualify: The starting point was a catalog of 11K products. We cleaned it, removing 30% of duplicates and obsolete products, and qualified the catalog database (Excel) down to about 7K genuinely sellable, qualified products. I reshaped the product-information page in the PIM and made several evolutions to its set-up (a personalised version of Akeneo) — a qualification designed from the start to enable the merchandising features: filters, search, cross-sell.
  • Scale: We then grew the sellable catalog from 7K to 13K products (+86%) — at scale, not by hand: with my newly hired team we strengthened the partnerships with the laboratories, developed our network of pharmacies, and evolved our processes to spot new products and enlarge the product base systematically.
  • Merchandising: On top of this qualified catalog we built the merchandising system. An internal tool, based on each product's score, managed the position of every product and every marketplace offer on content and category pages. We created a « top products » section at the top of catalog (thumbnail) pages — digital « têtes de gondole » — creating a story line for products, a path designed from the user's experience in order to drastically increase their sales. It worked: +40% of sales on the products entering the 3-month « Top Products » track, led by clicks on these new spots; overall, about +30% of revenue was led by the Top products (hard to evaluate precisely).
  • Self-service tooling: With the CPO and the CTO, in a couple of hours, we built a way for my team to create, edit and qualify the filters and the merchandising levers of the 13K-product catalog by themselves. The only engineering involvement left was the release, every other day. Several hours of development work freed every week — and the merchandising strategy stopped waiting on tickets. We also gave each function its own browser dashboard, specified by me and built by our developer, so everyone could follow the catalog and merchandising numbers without having to ask.
  • Guidance & clarity: The thread running through all of it was clarity: answering the customer who wonders « what should I choose », the way a pharmacy does (« demandez conseil à votre pharmacien »). I paired with a pharmacist to create precise purchase-guidance content — help texts, content pages and improved information on info, category and catalog pages — and introduced new cross-category sticky filters such as skin type, helping each user see the right products for their skin and their needs.
  • Impact: +1.5 point in conversion over nine months; more products per cart; and a +40% lift in the share of one-time visitors becoming returning visitors, over the 1+ year I spent in this position.
  • Tools: PIM Akeneo, Excel, Jira, Confluence, Kibana. Agile Scrum. Mockups and low-fidelity wireframes.
• + Product Manager. Search, cross-sell, funnel, e-commerce features. (6 months)
  • Mission: Improve e-commerce KPIs (search, conversion, cross-sell) for a marketplace with a complex catalog.
  • • Modified UX & UI with A/B testing to improve conversion. (Sketch, Kameleoon, AB Tasty)
    • Ran a deep study of user baskets and purchases. Tuned the parameters of our cross-sell tool (Nuukik) to improve recommendation relevance and basket size — +35% items per purchase through cross-sell and merchandising.
    • Worked with the tech team on the smart cart algorithm.
    • Gathered stakeholder needs, defined and wrote the product requirements. (Trello)
    • BI and data analysis with AT Internet and Google Analytics.
    • Upsell in addition to cross-sell.
    • UGC: customer reviews (Avis Vérifiés).
    • Added filters and improved search and the site tree to optimize SEO and UX. (Sol-R, Elastic, Doofinder)
    • Improved SEO-friendly content. (Yooda Insight, Bolt)
  • Mission 2: Own the B2B platform for the professional sellers of our marketplace, the pharmacies.
  • • Collaborated with our Account Managers to gather the users' needs.
    • Handled by myself the prototyping, data analysis and all related product work, to maintain, fix and improve the platform.
    • Worked both on an existing Mirakl platform and on a second one, created shortly before my arrival — built to replace the Mirakl one.

20-person company, market leader. Reported to CEO. Only PM for two distinct products.

• + Reverso Human Translation and Revision. B2B and B2C e-commerce — a service.
  • Mission: Finished, launched and continuously improved the B2B e-commerce platform selling professional human translation services to mostly business clients.
  • • Designed wireframes and mockups.
    • Wrote the product requirements.
    • Navigated a complex partnership with the external agency providing both the tech squad and the translators.
    • Coordinated delivery, reviews, and acted myself as QA.
    • Complex e-service e-commerce, on web. No direct reports.
    • Managed alone two distinct products and two teams.
• + Reverso Documents (aka Reverso Localize). A B2C SAAS platform.
  • Mission: Own the product for a B2C SAAS platform translating documents and full websites.
  • • The roadmap was largely provided by the CEO. Ran daily product reviews with him.
    • Specified features and did the mockups.
    • Managed the single dedicated in-house developer.
    • Ran A/B tests and qualitative analysis sessions with targeted users; topped this with classic user data, even though the product was young and the user base limited.

• + CEO & founder. Created a physical innovative product. International distribution with points of sale in five countries. Backed by seed VC fund KIMA VENTURES.
  • Developed an innovative physical product, a "backup-shoe": comfortable, rollable after-party flats that fit in a woman's little purse or pocket.
  • • Owned the vision and developed the long- and short-term strategy.
    • Raised seed money from KIMA VENTURES — the prestigious, highly active French seed investor owned by Xavier Niel and managed by Jérémie Berrebi (mostly in tech).
    • Managed the board, investor relations, the bank and the budget.
    • My partner and I led a team of three. Together we:
    • Designed the product.
    • Produced it in China.
    • Built and managed the e-commerce activity.
    • Developed a network of 75 points of sale, mostly in France, with anchors in 4 other countries: the United States (New York and Washington), Austria, Hungary and Germany.
    • Managed marketing, sales, press, finance, HR and administration.
    • Built brand recognition in an emerging market, as a pioneer developing this new usage and market.
    • Effective SEO strategy — ranked first on Google on all our targeted keywords, without ever spending on communication or marketing.
    • Built and grew the business to ~20% online conversion and 40–45% repeat purchase.
  • Tools: Shopify, Google Analytics, Excel, Mailchimp
  • Feedback and learnings: www.shoette.com

Reported to CEO.

• + Junior Consultant. Deep market analysis, business strategy, and internal information and knowledge management.
  • Mission: Provide strategic insights to clients through market analysis and competitive intelligence. Also acted as program manager for a pool of 65 freelance consultants, deployed on projects based on client and project requirements.
  • Actions: Conducted deep market research and competitive benchmarks; developed business strategy recommendations; structured and maintained internal information and knowledge bases.
  • Signature skill: Data visualization.
  • Impact: Delivered competitive intelligence reports used in senior management strategic decisions.
  • Tools: Excel, PowerPoint, market research databases, press and archive databases, datamining tools
  • Note: First professional experience — developed core analytical, strategic and synthesis skills in a demanding consulting environment.