In 2004 Yahoo! began increasing its investment in India, specifically in its development office in Bangalore. This shift allowed the community team to begin funding projects that had been pushed aside for several years as the company recovered from the .com bust. The first two products to receive development headcount were Yahoo! Polls and Yahoo! Message Boards and I took on the role of Product Manager to bring these services back to life.

Yahoo! Polls
Yahoo! Polls is a set of internal facing tools that allow individual Yahoo! properties to add poll and quiz modules to their sites (e.g., What is your favorite food?, Do you think Britney Spears is trashy? etc..). Simple right? Well, it actually is rather simple, but when you take into consideration how large Yahoo! is, even the simplest of services can become a major effort. At the time I took over the platform it was being used as a regular part of Yahoo! Finance, but for the most part it was languishing and fraught with bugs. We decided early on that we could develop a completely new system from front to back easier than we could fix the platform that was already in place. After gathering requirements from across the company, I drafted the final Yahoo! Polls Product Requirments Document, led our development schedule and priorities, organized the migration from the old platform to our new platform and worked with our beta customer to successfully launch the service.

The end result was a system that has become the most widely integrated community platform at Yahoo!. The tools allow just about any property to add customized polls and quizzes to their site with little if any engineering support. More importantly, once the core platform was deployed, the cost of maintaining it has been extremely low. Additionaly, this project marked the first time that a product was completely designed and developed out of our India office. With the product team in the U.S. and the development team in India, our team was treading new ground in an increasingly globalized world.

Yahoo! Message Boards
Yahoo! Message Boards was a bit more of a beast than polls, and ended up taking the bulk of my attention during this two year period. When we started we had an eight year old platform running on multiple installations, and with the exception of Yahoo! Finance, most of our integrations were down right embarrassing. Our mission was to shore up the backend, introduce new features to our users and better integrate the message boards experience into each property, keeping in line with Yahoo!'s strategy of deeply integrating community features across the network.

As product manager for message boards my tasks included aggregating requirements from product managers across Yahoo!, monitoring trends in the message boards/community space across the web, writing the initial product requirements document and maintaining a product backlog, managing our development team's priorities and development schedule, evangelizing the service across the company and managing our migration to our new system as well as each successive integration. If you consider that our team consisted of one product manager and ten engineers, you could assume that I did everything that didn't involve writing code (although I actually I did write a bit of code as well).

At the time I left the message boards team we had deployed message boards for Yahoo! Movies, Avatars, Finance, Education, Hotjobs, Music, Travel, Anti-spy and various properties across Europe and Asia.

In 2000 I became International Communities Producer at Yahoo!. This was a great opportunity for me because not only did I love working with online communities, but I also had a deep passion for understanding different cultures. In this position I worked to deploy and maintain Yahoo!s community services across Yahoo!'s 23 markets during a time of extremely rapid market growth both domesticaly and internationally.

At the time our services included:

• Yahoo! Clubs
• Yahoo! Photos and Briefcase
• Yahoo! Member Directory and Profiles

Learning about the user needs within ea

My first job after college and my "foot in the door" was as a Customer Care Representative at Yahoo! Inc. I was hired as the 10th person in the department and the 587th employee at Yahoo!.

This position not only placed me in a rapidly growing company with room for advancement, but it allowed me to experience how organizations deal with extreme growth, especially within an rapidly changing market environment.

Looking back, it is fascinating to remember that I provided the first technical support for a number of Yahoo! services that still exist today. Now that the Yahoo! Customer Care department has hundreds of employees based across the U.S. and the world, I am proud to say that I was one of the first and helped to shape the organization.

Most importantly, serving Yahoo! users directly was an excellent way to get to know the business and the customers it served. By working closely with both our user base and our product and engineering teams, I quickly learned the skills necessary to advance into Yahoo!'s production team and to build tools and services that met customer needs. I also had a chance to sleep under my desk during the many nights that we were faced with thousands of user emails that had to be answered using Netscape Communicator and cutting and pasting pre-written FAQ's from a Word document.