As a founding member of Weedguide, I led product development & strategy from initial concept though design, testing, launch and growth. When we began, the general idea was to create a search engine for cannabis related content. From there, I did extensive research on existing offerings in both the general search and cannabis industries to begin creating a product that was unique and filled a void in what was currently available. From initial sketches and wireframe to final design, I designed the UI and User Experience of our product to be inclusive, professional and straightforward.

As a vertical search engine platform, the technical requirements for this product were quite complicated and in-depth. Working with our CTO and development team, we created a proprietary crawler technology to crawl websites, index and store related content. We built a sophisticated set of rules and priorities for determining the value of each piece of content as well as extracting key structured data for returning results based on semantic search.

The front-end web experience was built on a custom content management system (CMS) that integrated both curated content and search result driven content into a single page.

In the screenshot below you’ll see examples of several integrations with various types of content and sources for highlighted placement on the homepage. For example, we created a custom connector for YouTube to pull the most popular videos from a curated list of accounts. We also created a crawler specifically to fetch news articles from trusted news sources in near real time and return results automatically to the homepage.

As the product manager, I defined feature requirements, created projects and tasts within Jira and managed our sprint planning and backlog in conjunction with our CTO. I was responsible for user testing and acceptance before each deployment.

This site is no longer live, but I invite you to click on the image below for a closer view of the homepage.