Brian Mikol Personal Portfolio
Skill Set
I am a product manager, the polyglot of the modern information economy and passionate advocate for the user. Blending my freshly-minted programming and user experience skill set with my earlier marketing & sales background, I’m just as comfortable in the trenches with my development team as I am gathering user feedback and working with business stakeholders.
An Advocate (INFJ) personality type, my mantra is “Help Me Help You”. I am committed to delivering solutions to user and business needs, iterating as close to optimal as possible. I am insatiably curious. I am always on the lookout to make what needs to happen happen, even if it means rolling up my sleeves and doing it myself — which includes jumping into development. And I work with small- and mid-sized startups that want to grow sustainably.
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Product Management
- Agile / Scrum artifacts & ceremonies
- e-commerce platforms
- online marketplaces
- planning & prioritization
- product marketing
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Development
- Amazon Alexa Skills
- CSS
- HTML
- JavaScript (jQuery, Node.js)
- Ruby on Rails
- Sass / SCSS
- web design (including responsive)
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User Experience
- human-computer interaction (HCI)
- interaction design
- protoyping
- usability testing
- user personas
- user research
- wireframing
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Marketing & Sales
- business analysis
- community management
- content management
- direct marketing
- event marketing
- online communities
- online publishing
- partner relations
- program management
- project management
- sales account management
- sales training
- search engine optimization (SEO)
- vendor relations
Portfolio
Included below is a selection of various projects I’ve worked on.
- All
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Code
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Product Management
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User Experience
Version: 1.0.0
These are two little projects I put together as a product of trying to learn both Node.js as well as the ins and outs of putting together an Amazon Alexa Skill. For the CalQuakeBot skill, the backend parses the USGS “All Earthquakes”/“All Day” ATOM feed, filters out the seismic activity from California and the basic data reported, then produces a simplified RSS feed that the Alexa Skill subscribes to. Big Quake Bot instead consumes the USGS “Significant Earthquakes”/“Past Month” ATOM feed and massages it into a suitable RSS feed for consumption by Alexa.
The Node.js backend is currently pretty hacked together (I lovingly refer to it as being on the level of duct tape & bailing wire, with some creative stapling thrown in for good measure) so I want to give it a good once over before publishing to Github. Despite all that, it’s been humming along pretty nicely on Heroku and both Skills are available for you to add to your “Flash Briefing” if you’d like.
Links
- Big Quake Bot (Amazon)
- CalQuakeBot (Amazon)
Version: 0.6.9
This Ruby on Rails webapp is my course project from CareerFoundry’s full-stack web development bootcamp. An e-commerce site for a fictional “Bicycles Berlin” online bike shop, it features integration with the Stripe API for payment processing.
Work in progress.
Links
- Github repo
- Demo on Heroku (may take a few moments to spin up)
Version: 0.5.11
This Ruby on Rails blog is an optional course project from CareerFoundry’s full-stack web development bootcamp. I decided to go this route as I was getting pretty tired of the manual process I had put into place with my old static blog and wanted to replace it with a dynamic option.
Work in progress.
Links
- Github repo
- Demo on Heroku (may take a few moments to spin up)
One of the last features I worked on as a Product Manager at Ingenio, this redesign was a critical part of pivoting Ingenio.com from a generalized price-per-minute professional advice marketplace to a specialized personal coaching one, complete with analogous half-hourly and hourly session pricing.
Without any dedicated UX resources, all user experience work was done by us in product management before working with Ingenio&rsqou;s visual designer for final mockups.
Links
The following artifacts are the result of my experience at Product School in the Spring of 2016, where the final project requires either pitching a new product or a new feature for an existing product. Given my interests in fitness and technology, I decided to pitch the addition of third-party functionality to Fitbit’s then-recently-launched Blaze “Smart Fitness Watch”, starting with compatible web apps. This feature proposal touches upon Fitbit’s three platforms (smartwatch wearable device, native mobile app(s), and web) and two different user types (consumer/user and third-party developer).
Links
- Product Requirements Document (PRD)
An example PRD for introducing this feature, based upon public information. Creating all the typical PM artifacts is the focus of the course, culminating with the proposal presentation.
- Feature Proposal Presentation (2.2 MB PDF)
The summation of the course. Includes modified script used for the class presentation (Please forgive the compression artifacts; the original PDF is a hefty 8.3 MB).
- InVision interactive mockup of Fitbit iOS app changes
Using the existing app’s UX/UI design methodology.
Since 2015, I’ve been helping small startups in various spaces with their product development needs, from MVP to existing products.
Contact Me
Please feel free to reach out about product management or programming opportunities, contract or full-time. If you are interested in other collaborative possibilities please add it to the subject line. I look forward to connecting and discussing how we can take this business relationship further.