VULCAN

Product Manager, The Office for Creative Research

Brief

Vulcan is a social impact company founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. On behalf of The Office for Creative Research, I led a cross-functional team in building a responsive website visualizing the data from Paul Allen’s Great Elephant Census, the largest pan-continental elephant survey since the 1970's. The “Elephant Atlas” website included maps, an interactive timeline, an animation of pilots counting elephants, a custom report generator, and an API allowing public access to elephant census data for research, policy, and action.

Objectives

  • To raise awareness about the alarming decline of African savannah elephants and their human causes

  • To tell the story of how elephant data was collected: how volunteers from 18 African countries counted elephants from planes

  • To collaborate with the GEC on a final round of data testing and cleaning

  • To encourage the general public, scientists, policy makers, and students to explore the elephant data and lead further policy change, research, and activism

  • To present evidence to the World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Hawaii before their vote on ivory trade

  • In a later session, all IUCN member nations voted to ban domestic ivory trade.

Deliverables

  • Client Management: served as Vulcan’s main point of contact

  • Requirements Gathering: collaborated with Vulcan stakeholders and scientists to define goals for the site’s interactive data visualizations, report generator, and API

  • Data Integrity: worked closely with engineers and Vulcan stakeholders to define, test, and ensure data quality standards

  • Product Management: managed end-to-end production for a cross-functional data analysis, design, and engineering team; wrote user stories and prioritized the backlog; ensured time, budget, and a successful launch in tandem with articles published by National Geographic and The New York Times

  • User Testing: gathered user feedback on site navigation and homepage design, synthesized results, and added user stories to the backlog

  • UAT: created test matrices to ensure optimal data display, report generation, and performance across desktop, tablet, and mobile