Shannon Chambers

Consumer Product Leader

Shannon
Chambers

Consumer product leader obsessed with the humans on the other side of the screen.

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About

Product leader with experience owning strategy, roadmap, and execution for high-scale consumer products across community platforms, health tech, and hardware-enabled apps. My work is grounded in a deep understanding of user behavior and a belief that solutions must flow naturally from the user’s headspace to drive meaningful gains in activation, engagement, and retention. I pair behavioral insight with strong business judgment and analytical insights, navigating when to prioritize company goals and when to honor user intention. Former founder with a strong experimentation background and a track record of motivating cross-functional teams through clear communication, structured collaboration, and an approach that makes ambitious work feel energizing.

This site showcases my personal projects. Visit me on LinkedIn to dive into my full-time career history.

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Career timeline

  • –Founded and led end-to-end product strategy for a consumer app rethinking restaurant discovery through structured experiential data, moving beyond star ratings to multidimensional experience scoring (food quality, ambiance, service, value, authenticity, etc.).
  • –Designed and validated a novel review framework that translates subjective dining experiences into consistent, analyzable signals, enabling future personalization, recommendations, and ML-driven enjoyment predictions.
  • –Developed a long-term product vision that extends beyond a consumer app into a hospitality intelligence and consultancy platform, aligning short- and medium-term roadmap bets to a cohesive, durable strategy.
  • –Led deep competitive and category analysis across 20+ failed or stagnant products in the space, diagnosing reasons for churn and irrelevance and designing Foodie and its GTM strategy to explicitly avoid those traps.
  • –Made deliberate product scope decisions grounded in deep understanding of foodie behavior, intentionally rejecting hollow, quick-to-market MVPs and delaying launch to deliver an integrated, all-in-one experience that earns trust with a discerning, high-expectation user base.
  • –Led user research and early community building by recruiting and managing a Founding Foodies alpha cohort to validate hypotheses and deeply understand foodie behavior and motivations, enabling product decisions that fit seamlessly into their existing habits without requiring forced behavior change.
  • –Defined core product principles, contribution incentives, and progression mechanics to drive high-quality UGC and retention, using behavioral science while intentionally avoiding dark-pattern UX.
  • –Shaped go-to-market strategy around foodie identity and reputation, designing referral and community dynamics that affirm users' pride in being foodies rather than exploiting social pressure or low-trust growth loops.
  • –Played a central role in the launch of Glassdoor's Community platform; drove the product from launch to over 2M monthly engaged users in 2 years, achieving more than 2x+ growth through focused engagement and growth strategies.
  • –Led the design and launch of AI-generated headline summaries for the Community feed; owned end-to-end prompt engineering and LLM behavioral tuning to surface concise, engaging post previews, improving feed scannability and driving a more streamlined browsing experience for 2M+ monthly users.
  • –Drove user journey mapping and identified adoption gaps, then redesigned the registration flow to introduce new users to Community and funnel them into key Community experiences, ultimately sending 10% of all legacy Glassdoor sign-ups to Community and driving early engagement and adoption.
  • –Led a series of A/B tests on the signed-out community experience, culminating in a 75% lift in registrations on community pages and meaningful downstream gains (+32% post views, +46% reactions, +8% comments, +24% job alert sign-ups).
  • –Led product efforts for Glassdoor's Worklife Pros influencer program; drove feed algorithm updates for content distribution, influencer discovery and follow-flywheel UX, and in-product analytics for creators; efforts contributed to 100K+ follows within the first 4 months.
  • –Built a self-serve feed-curation tool for marketing and engagement teams (no eng staffing required), powering 600K influencer post views and over 5,000 follows in the first 30 days.
  • –Initiated Glassdoor Community's first bottom-up FY26 planning cycle; identified a long-standing gap, authored key thematic pillars, and secured leadership approval with no edits, giving the Community org a clear, high-impact roadmap for the year.
  • –Led the development of Glassdoor's power user strategy, creating a path for frequent contributors to become community stewards and drive bowl growth. As part of this initiative, shipped high-value moderation tools for bowl leaders achieving feature parity with Fishbowl and unlocking the FY26 leader-migration campaign.
  • –Overhauled new user onboarding by utilizing a checklist-style gamification mechanic designed to introduce new users to retention-driving features. Users who engaged with the checklist feature showed an increase in 4-week retention of 18.5%.
  • –Led a cross-functional project with our community team and launched a degree-based personalized experience for students. Piloted impact with the MBA student community, resulting in a 21.5% increase of 2-month retention. The improvements were developed in such a way that the community team could replicate this success with zero eng time for other student groups.
  • –Launched a suite of community-leader-oriented improvements that decreased member approval queues by 94%.
  • –Led the design and development of WHOOP's first health-centric feature, Health Monitor. Partnered with data science to bring the concept of a daily health dashboard to reality in under 3 months; in time for the Gen4 product launch. 5 months after launch, Health Monitor is now WHOOP's 2nd most engaged-with feature (as measured by daily usage).
  • –In response to a corporate strategic objective to drive more women to join WHOOP, led the user research, conception, design and development of WHOOP's first female-focused feature, Menstrual Cycle Coaching — a net-new coaching feature designed to help those who menstruate train with their cycle. Post-launch, the women's sign-up rate increased by 33%, reaching near-parity with men for the first time since the company's inception.
  • –Managed first-ever addition of in-app member segmentation based on membership goals. Users can now self-identify why they're using WHOOP, allowing for a feedback loop that benefits the users' experience while providing insight that enables data-informed decisions for feature prioritization.
  • –Conducted at least 3 member interviews per week to aid in the team's continuous discovery process while ensuring our understanding of WHOOP members evolved along with the base itself. Used these findings to create an opportunity map for the Coaching space that drives customer-driven feature prioritization and more accurate impact forecasting.
  • –Proactively created a strategic vision for the team detailing the future of Strain at WHOOP informed strictly by member interviews. The concept proposal was presented to WHOOP's leadership team and met with excitement regarding evolving the experience to serve a new member segment.
  • –Coached and advised early-stage founders across MIT's Executive Entrepreneurship Program and the Fuse accelerator.
  • –Partnered with startups on product strategy, defining target users, value proposition, and problem–solution validation.
  • –Acted as an external thought partner to founders navigating pricing and early go-to-market decisions.
  • –Brought in to support accelerator teams at moments of high uncertainty and constraint.
  • –Increased user activation by 18% in my first 12 months. Increased month 1 user engagement by 56% and month 2 user engagement by 28%.
  • –Key contributor to experimentation culture. Went from running 1-2 large experiments per year to an average of 7 per quarter, enabling our team to achieve the results above and learn more about our users in less time. Created a system of documentation and circulation of results for broader team learning.
  • –Drove the build of our first in-house ML model from start to finish, achieving a recall of 98.8%, and therefore enabling the development of a new OCR feature. Worked with a full-stack engineer (with no prior experience in AI) and created a system for building/evaluating future ML models.
  • –Drove dramatic improvements to overall user experience, user education/onboarding, and brand presence within the app, while increasing our app store rating from 4.7 to 4.8 stars on both iOS and Android.
  • –Defined and conducted over 75 customer interviews using ethnographic research methods and narrowed in on the problem to be solved for our customer. Communicated the problem statement and proposed solution to CEO and mock board of directors, garnering full support and funding from the delta v mock board.
  • –Defined and developed MVP for under $100 to test our central hypotheses, enabling us to acquire customers and iterate based on data we collected about consumer questions/frustrations.
  • –Roadmapped the Levio platform based on MVP learnings, delivered requirements to engineers, and created sprint schedule for development. Led a team of part-time engineers and UX researchers to execute on our product roadmap.
  • –Concentration in Entrepreneurship with a focus in Product Management.
  • –Dean's Achievement Scholarship recipient. ROMBA Fellowship recipient.

Product Philosophy

How I think
about building.

01

De-risk before you build

Every feature is a bet. Discovery isn't a phase — it's a continuous discipline. Talk to users directly to learn what job they hired your product to do. Any gap between that job and your product's actual delivery is a churn risk. False door testing closes that gap before a line of code is written. Treat every feature like a crowdfunding campaign.

02

Know your user — deeply, continuously, and directly

42% of failed startups cite no market need as cause of failure. The real diagnosis: user understanding failure. Quant tells you where something broke. It cannot tell you what the user believed in that moment, or what they were trying to do when they left. That requires a PM who talks to users directly — not one who reads a research summary — and maintains that proximity continuously.

03

Don't be selfish

Companies optimize for metrics. Over time, those metrics drift from what users came to accomplish. The gap surfaces as churn nobody can explain. When a team asks "what can we build to move this metric," they're asking an internally-facing question. The answer is rarely the same as "what does this user need right now." Train users to feel used rather than served, and eventually they leave.

04

Guide your user — don't expect them to find their own way

Users arrive with a job and limited tolerance for friction. Seven tooltips is not onboarding. Effective onboarding is editorially paced — one meaningful action at a time, sequenced around why the user is actually there. Account creation is the most underutilized instrument in consumer product: ask why they're here, then make the first thing they do reflect that answer.

05

If the team isn't thriving, the PM hasn't done their job

A PM's output is not a roadmap — it's the quality of the environment in which everyone else works. Two signals tell you it's working: the team is engaged, and the tests are hitting. Shipping features while burning the team is the wrong outcome. So is a thriving team whose roadmap never moves the needle. The standard is both.

Featured Essay

Product strategy · Behavioral research

Why knowing your users has never mattered more

In a world where anyone can build anything with AI, the scarce skill is knowing what to build. Research across more than 100 failed startups consistently points to the same root cause: not technical failure, not competition, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what users actually needed. This essay examines the evidence for user understanding as the primary determinant of product success, drawing on behavioral economics, cognitive neuroscience, and business performance data. The argument is not that user research is useful. It is that its absence explains a disproportionate share of every product that has ever failed.

Read the full essay→

Full essay available on Substack — link coming soon.

What I’m Building

Foodie

Primary Project

An invite-only restaurant review community for people whose standards are too high for Yelp.

Ship It Guide

Secondary Project

A step-by-step workflow that walks anyone with an app idea through every phase of planning, designing, validating, building, and launching their product — tracking progress along the way so you always know exactly where you are and what's next.

Questlog

Tertiary Project

A native mobile app for tracking video games across every stage of the gaming lifecycle — discovery, active play, completion, and curation.

What I’m Looking For

I’m open to full-time, fractional, or consulting engagements.

For full-time and fractional roles, I thrive in environments where product strategy, roadmap, and execution are connected — where there’s room to get close to users, run experiments, and build alongside a team that cares about the work.

For consulting, I help companies design product strategies with deep user understanding woven into the foundation — not bolted on after the roadmap is already written. If your team is making decisions based on dashboards and has never spoken directly to the people using your product, that’s where I come in.

shannonlynnchambers@gmail.com→

AI-Enabled Stack

How I build.

These are my preferred platforms. I have experience with all industry-standard tools including JIRA, Amplitude, and others.

Research & Planning

ClaudeGeminiNotionLinear

Design

Weavy AIFontshareFigma with Claude Code MCP

Building

Claude Code in CursorPostHog21st DevJitter

Distribution

Tely.aiplan to use

Infra & Deployment

GitHubVercelExpo EASplan to use

Misc

WisprFlow

My Day

Product manager turned founder turned builder turned insomniac.

Builders can now architect their work around their lives, not their lives around their work.

7:00 amWake up
7:15 amRead AI and product newsletters
8:30–9:30 amGym
11:00 am–5:00 pmFoodie
5:00–7:30 pmPersonal time
7:30–11:30 pmFoodie
11:30 pm–1:30 amShip It or Questlog

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