Product Manager Lead

The Base Solutions (TBS)

Seoul, South Korea

Jun 2023 – Present

Head of Product

• Built the TBS product organization from zero as founding product lead, structuring and directly managing a team of 2 PMs, 1 UX designer, 1 CS lead, 1 support, 5 internal developers, 2 pattern specialists, and 10 external engineers, setting individual KPIs, defining problems, structured roadmaps, and delivery goals to drive simultaneous product execution across STEK ONE and STEK EDGE.
• Evolved STEKSHIELD from MVP into STEK ONE, a scalable end-to-end business management platform covering warranties, claims, product catalog, and inventory across the B2B automotive aftermarket, launching to 100+ country distributors and 3,500+ registered service providers and driving the product from initial build through launch and structured post-launch feedback cycles.
• Designed the role-based customer hierarchy and product visibility rules for STEK ONE, covering HQ, factories, country distributors, sub-distributors, service providers, and end-consumers, with custom permission boundaries per tier, country, business type, and user role, as STEKSHIELD's early-adoption user model could not accommodate the full hierarchy complexity at scale, enabling consistent data governance across 90+ countries without disrupting existing users on migration.
• Defined the data contract between STEK ONE and SAP, specifying product normalization, customer record structure, and inventory input requirements, as the MVP relied on manual data entry rather than SAP integration and caused consistent user errors across regions, reducing customer data validation issues by 89%, cutting data-related support requests by 90%, and improving platform adoption.
• Built two service-provider-facing tools within STEK ONE: Sales Builder, automating quote generation and follow-up delivery so installer shops respond to customer requests with standardized pricing and professional communication, and an AI Marketing Tool converting warranty and job photos into ready-to-post social media content, targeting a 10% YoY increase in film and material sales across the distributor network.
• Led end-to-end design, implementation, and launch of STEK EDGE, a specialized geometry editing platform for vehicle cutting configurations, replacing a white-labeled OEM product and launching across 95+ countries, aligning pricing, licensing, onboarding, and adoption readiness at launch, building a commercial model targeting a 25% YoY lift in film and material sales.
• Designed the vehicle container data model from scratch, mapping 100,000+ cutting configurations across 10,000+ vehicles by brand, model, sub-model, and year, with canonical metadata, geometric scaling, and kit-to-part relationships, enabling structured library governance and reducing duplication across the vehicle catalog.
• Defined how pattern updates propagate across STEK EDGE, establishing that HQ improvements to cutting configurations automatically apply to HQ-managed kits while installer-edited versions stay protected from those changes, governing how the platform tracks usage, controls sharing, and maintains pattern quality across all user tiers.
• Coordinated compatibility across 10+ plotter manufacturers, aligning integration requirements and testing across hardware vendors to ensure service providers connect existing equipment to STEK EDGE without replacing hardware, reducing rollout friction and improving time-to-plot by 15%.

STEK Automotive

Seoul, South Korea

Jan 2022 – Jun 2023

Software Product Manager

• Founding Member of STEK's first software department, designing and shipping STEKSHIELD to replace disconnected email and WhatsApp warranty and claims workflows with workspace registration, role-based permissions across 4 user types, approval workflows, and status tracking, making claim processing consistent and auditable across 90+ countries.
• Scaled STEKSHIELD to 100+ distributors and 3,500+ registered service providers, building support flows, triage processes, and structured release communication to maintain operational quality across global adoption.
• Reduced Quality Management first-response time from 48 working hours to under one business day and lifted claim resolution rate to 98%, a 65% improvement, by redesigning intake requirements, routing logic, and status visibility within STEKSHIELD.
• Evaluated, contracted, and deployed CUTZ as a third-party pre-cut platform to accelerate market entry, defining the subscription model, checkout flows, access management, and daily configuration request cycles to generate real service provider usage data ahead of a proprietary build.
• Grew CUTZ to 3,000+ active subscribers and approximately $2M in revenue across global markets, driving continuous improvement cycles through direct service provider feedback, including post-launch auto-nesting.
• Positioned CUTZ as both a revenue-generating product and a structured research environment, systematically collecting service provider behavior data, UX friction points, and configuration quality issues across a global user base, converting those findings into the validated requirements that shaped STEK EDGE's architecture and justified the proprietary platform investment to leadership.

STEK Automotive

Seoul, South Korea

Feb 2020 – Dec 2021

Global Marketing and Growth Manager

• Joined STEK with no digital presence, no lead infrastructure, and no marketing foundation — built the full growth stack from a blank domain, generating 16,000+ inbound leads and contributing to ARR growth from $5M to $38M across 85+ countries within two years.
• Designed and built STEK's first digital funnel end-to-end, covering site architecture, gated content portal, CTA flows, and lead-capture workflows, generating 16,000+ inbound leads and converting 70% to customers, 40% of whom became repeat buyers at approximately $2K per month.
• Delivered 3 offline international exhibitions (SEMA) at approximately 210% ROI per edition, managing a $300K per-event budget and saving $125K across three editions by negotiating a multi-year vendor contract against rising material costs.
• Executed go-to-market for 10 product launches with email campaigns averaging 68% open rate and 38% CTR, driving a consistent 15% order lift within two weeks of each launch.
• Built a content strategy anchored in how service providers research and buy rather than consumer marketing language, growing website traffic 35%, blog traffic 76%, and newsletter signups 128%.
• Organized distributor summits in Berlin and Korea — two-day sessions where top distributors shared what was working, what was failing, and what the market needed, as no structured channel existed to feed field intelligence into R&D and product planning. Outputs fed directly into launch priorities and R&D decisions within 72 hours.
• Prototyped an internal CRM using WordPress, PHP, Zapier, and Airtable to centralize lead routing and warranty claims running across disconnected WhatsApp and email threads, demonstrating enough operational impact that leadership formed STEK's Software division, leading to the founding product owner role.

Seoul Startups

Seoul, South Korea

Jan 2018 – Dec 2022

Startup Ecosystem & Program Manager (Volunteer)

• Served as a founding operator of Korea's largest international founder community, building the programs, automation systems, and institutional partnerships that scaled the organization to 5,460+ verified members over five years — entirely volunteer-run with no paid staff or marketing budget.
• Scaled community membership to 5,460+ verified members by designing repeatable onboarding, engagement, and retention systems, as the community had no formal operations structure when the role started, making Seoul Startups the largest international founder hub in Korea by 2022.
• Introduced a no-code automation stack covering Zapier, Typeform, Airtable, and Mailchimp, replacing manual event registration, newsletter sync, and job post workflows, as all recurring processes ran on manual coordination across a volunteer team, reducing admin overhead and making consistent execution possible without paid staff.
• Organized 60+ events over five years, including 3 Techstars hackathons at 100+ attendees each and an annual flagship event at 200+ attendees, maintaining a 60–75% RSVP-to-attendance rate consistently above benchmark for community-run programs.
• Grew a monthly newsletter to 5,000+ readers at a sustained 65% open rate, produced without a paid distribution budget or dedicated content team.
• Co-built a job board MVP with automated submission and publishing flows, enabling community members to post and discover startup job listings without manual moderation.
• Delivered institutional partnerships with Techstars, Google for Startups, WeWork, and multiple embassies, managing logistics, reporting, and stakeholder coordination across multi-day sponsored programs with budgets up to $10,000+.

Co-Founder (Product + Go-to-Market)

• Co-founded an IoT and mobile app startup to reduce household food waste, owning product definition, user research, go-to-market strategy, and MVP coordination across hardware and software, supported by the Asan Sanghoe pre-seed accelerator.
• Generated a 2,500-person waitlist through a pre-launch demand campaign, validating market appetite and de-risking hardware investment before committing engineering budget.
• Defined MVP scope and coordinated delivery across makerspace engineers, 3D printing labs, UX designers, and React Native developers, producing a working prototype integrating weight and ultrasonic sensors, inventory tracking, and AI-assisted recipe recommendations.
• Conducted qualitative research across Korea and Europe, identifying a credible B2B pivot toward food producers after household interviews showed uneven adoption across user segments, pivoting the business model on behavioral evidence rather than assumption.
• Won Best Pitch at the Asan Sanghoe accelerator across biweekly investor and mentor sessions, incorporating structured feedback on product scope, business model, and user behavior into each pitch cycle.

Growth Marketing and SEO Strategist

• Joined Noah, a Korean app matching foreign English teachers with local schools, to lead growth marketing and SEO strategy during an early scaling phase, as the product had organic traction but no structured acquisition system.
• Increased monthly active users by 176% from approximately 1,500 to 4,100 over the first year through SEO strategy, App Store Optimization, and onboarding improvements tied to user activation metrics, as organic growth was the primary acquisition channel with no paid marketing budget.
• Grew organic traffic by approximately 25% through technical SEO improvements — site structure, speed, and mobile optimization — and a structured backlink outreach strategy targeting education and productivity verticals.
• Built a content system aligned to user search intent and long-tail keywords covering visa processes, housing, and banking for foreigners relocating to Korea, improving acquisition quality and reducing bounce rates by matching content to the actual user journey.
• Executed App Store Optimization improvements across iOS and Android, including keyword optimization, A/B testing of app descriptions, and screenshot updates, increasing app store visibility and install conversion rates.

Business Intelligence and Market Strategy Analyst

• Led customer insight gathering and competitive intelligence across 12 packaging business units and 5 countries, conducting 300+ face-to-face interviews with decision-makers at Unilever, Colgate, and Nestlé, bypassing sales team filters, delivering unfiltered feedback directly to C-suite, and identifying delivery delays, quality gaps, and fragmented communication as the primary retention risks on $15M in at-risk revenue.
• Built the Lost Revenue due to Service Failure metric to quantify preventable revenue loss tied to operational failures, giving the C-suite a data-backed business case for process investment and driving a 30% increase in reorders and 10% reduction in quality complaints.
• Proposed and influenced the creation of a Multi-Account Manager role after discovering that 12 separate business units contacted the same clients independently, consolidating account ownership and resolving the communication failures that threatened major account retention.
• Automated monthly executive dashboards using Excel macros and R, reducing report preparation from 15 days to near real-time, as manual reporting cycles delayed C-level decision-making by weeks.

Marketing Data and Strategy Analyst

• Built automated Excel dashboards with macros and validation logic, consolidating campaign data across social media (Facebook, Instagram), email (Mailchimp), and web analytics for major consumer brands including Starbucks, Huggies, Digicel, Kimberly-Clark, and Comex, reducing report preparation from hours to near real-time in the early social media era.
• Reduced campaign trafficking time by approximately 30% through improved workflow coordination between creative, media, and client teams, standardizing briefing templates and approval checkpoints to reduce rework cycles.
• Managed media planning and buy execution across print, radio, outdoor, and early digital channels, coordinating with vendors to secure placements within client budgets and timelines.
• Produced pre-campaign planning documents and post-campaign performance reviews that informed content strategy, timing, and budget allocation decisions, enabling the Marketing Director to make data-driven adjustments rather than relying on prior-cycle assumptions.

Data Analyst — Human Development Index

• Delivered validated, analysis-ready datasets from 5,000+ survey responses, enabling accurate regression modeling and index calculation for El Salvador's official 2013 Human Development Index — a foundation for national policy decisions on inequality, education, and development.
• Ensured data accuracy across 30+ development indicators (life expectancy, schooling, GNI per capita, gender inequality, labor participation) by validating survey responses and reconciling legacy datasets, preventing errors that would have compromised regression models and index calculations.
• Built semi-automated data processing workflows using SAS, Excel macros, and R, reducing manual processing time while maintaining systematic error-checking routines — enabling economists to focus on analysis rather than data cleaning.
• Supported methodology validation by producing statistical breakdowns and trend visualizations that helped the Lead Economist evaluate regional disparities and validate HDI calculation assumptions before publication.
• Contributed to the official 2013 Human Development Index report for El Salvador, cited in academic and policy contexts as a foundation for development planning; received formal credit and UNDP certification.

HR Methodology & Projects Intern

• Structured organizational data across 206 job roles using the HAYGroup framework for Aeroman, one of Latin America's leading aviation MRO providers serving Delta, JetBlue, and Southwest, enabling role clarity, accountability, and standardized processes critical for safety and compliance in a high-stakes maintenance environment.
• Conducted 1:1 interviews with C-level executives, VPs, Directors, and Managers across 7 departments to gather accurate role definitions, reconciling conflicting information and standardizing inconsistent terminology into a unified organizational framework.
• Built complete organizational charts and role documentation that clarified reporting lines, decision rights, and accountability, enabling the HR Director to meet accreditation requirements and support strategic workforce planning.
• Delivered structured datasets using Excel with macros to process and validate job data across 206 positions, reducing manual processing time and enabling future reuse for hiring, compensation planning, and organizational development.
• Contributed to a broader HR transformation that reduced new-hire attrition by 15% over three years through improved role clarity and better job-person fit enabled by accurate role definitions.