During my summer at Opal Wearables, I worked on growth, product development, and partnerships. My primary objective was to grow the product launch waitlist while conducting user research to guide the product roadmap.

I conducted market and customer research, wrote product requirements, defined success metrics, created wireframes of customer journeys, organized collaborations, and conducted outreach to potential partners (including event spaces, NYFW brands, publications, influencers, survey respondents, potential future employees/interns). I owned and devised our SEO strategy across platforms, and created written blog posts and videos for content marketing purposes.

Opal's mission is to increase accessibility to discreet personal safety wearables. We are building a wearable panic button in the form of a ring. The ring connects to a smartphone through bluetooth and can send requests for help (with the user's precise real-time GPS location) to 911, emergency contacts, or both, depending on the situation and what the user needs. The request is triggered discreetly (via a long press or double click) and can be done with one hand.

On the product side, I worked to ensure that the product we are developing adequately addresses user needs, is feasible, and is strategic from a business perspective. We now have separate roadmaps and requirements detailed for each component of the integrated prototype; software, hardware and jewelry. We have a more complete wireframe for the user onboarding process. We also have a more robust competitive landscape and market analysis.

On the partnerships side, I worked to secure collaborations that would allow Opal to gain more visibility with our target customers. Currently,

the product is still under development and we don't have enough of a budget to implement these partnerships. However, the partnerships will be in place once the product is ready.

My product management courses such as Intro to Product Management and Product Management Lab at Columbia Business School introduced me to the foundations of product management. Through those courses I came to understand how to develop products that solve user pain points, were technologically feasible, and were strategically well-considered.

Courses such as Launch Your Startup helped me understand the importance of customer discovery, and how to approach it rigorously. This was a very crucial component, given how early we were in the product development process. We were really looking to customers to get a sense of how to shape the prototype roadmap.

Then, classes such as Business Analytics I and II and Intro to Databases strengthened my data analysis abilities. This ability to parse both quantitative and qualitative data is imperative as good product managers are rigorous in evaluating the data and integrating that into the roadmap through data-driven product decisions.

Lastly, my Strategy classes helped inform product strategy, which was vital as we were laying down the initial strategy for the prototype, and my Marketing classes helped me shape the GTM and partnership strategies.

Opal is a very young venture that is still pre-fundraise and the product prototype is still under development. As such, we were limited in terms of what we were actually able to execute due to budget/development constraints. It would have been interesting to see more of these projects realized, but due to the early stage of the company and the limited period of the fellowship, we weren't able to see all these projects that we set in motion come to fruition.

For instance, while we reached out to and established relationships with several potential influencer partners, we were not able to launch a campaign due to the lack of a working prototype and budget. Similarly, in-person popup events and markets were difficult without a working prototype that we could demo to customers.

It was such an incredible opportunity to be able to work on a venture with such a meaningful mission. I've always been passionate about consumer product, so it was also a great experience to be able to work on a hardware/software product that was entirely new to me. I was also specifically seeking partnership experience, as it was a role that I have limited professional experience in but something that I was interested in learning more about. In my role with Opal, I had the opportunity to experience the responsibilities of a partnerships role.

Throughout the summer, it was valuable to have frequent and regular touch bases to ensure that my deliverables were tracking against the expectations and needs of the venture and it felt rewarding to be able to look back on the goals and milestones we set at the beginning of the venture and see how much we were able to accomplish.