kaulana.com

Sean Kaulana Gabriel // Friendly, neighborhood product team builder

Hi, I'm Sean

πŸ‘‹ Hi, Sean here! I'm all about building and leading product groups to succeed — by relentlessly focusing on our customers, their often unarticulated needs, and figuring out how best to engineer high-quality software that meets those needs.

No matter the circumstance, I believe there's always a way to do it with the warmth of the aloha spirit. If you need me in your corner, I'm happy to serve!

Product teams I've helped succeed

Through Red Badger, I've helped our clients design, build, launch and scale their products globally, as well as use lean innovation techniques to develop their product strategy. As a director, I also coach and develop our people, with a focus on empowering our product delivery teams to co-create great software with our clients, fast.

Shipped the original Xbox Music & Xbox Video apps for PCs, consoles, and phones. Despite fierce competition from market leaders Spotify and iTunes, I helped successfully launch new markets for our music storefront and roll out a clean, modern UI for our cloud-connected features. From a low at the onset of Windows 8, our apps' star ratings steadily increased during the 8.1 lifecycle.

Led feature delivery for the Windows 10 Store for music, movies, and TV. On a newly formed Windows team with no existing code to build upon, I helped define the experience architecture for these media types early in the 'Threshold' release and built out our roadmap to launch. Day by day, I fostered experience & design partnerships with other first-party teams while translating business requirements across the Windows org into product backlog stories for our team.

Teaching at the MEST Africa Incubator in Accra, Ghana, I designed and ran a Scrum bootcamp to implement agile ways of working with resident startups Suba, SynCommerce, Kudobuzz, Asoriba, and Flippy Campus. Under the banner of customer-centricity, I worked directly with co-founders and CEOs to guide and mature their product development practices, as well as embedded with teams to provide UX guidance and share design best practices.


πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡¬πŸ‡­πŸ‡¨πŸ‡­ β€’ More projects β€’ Letters to an Aspiring PM β€’ Weeknotes

Here's a bit more about what I believe: