What we talked about
Danielle Costa-Nakano shares how, as Chief Product Officer at Grassroots Analytics, she’s leading a shift from data-as-a-service to software-as-a-service to help nonprofit and political organizations escape spreadsheet sprawl and tool fragmentation. Danielle explains why many teams still spend half their day importing/exporting CSVs across 7–10 systems and how a central data platform:with strong APIs, embedded analytics, and AI-assisted workflows:can surface “the right ask, to the right person, at the right time,” replacing manual busywork with actionable insight.
Show notes
Today we’re joined by Danielle Costa Nakano, Chief Product Officer at Grassroots Analytics. Danielle is a high-energy leader with a strong track record in building data products and scaling SaaS solutions for nonprofits and enterprise organizations. With over a decade at NGP VAN and leadership roles at Bonterra and National Geographic Society, she has shaped how technology supports fundraising, compliance, and social good. We’ll explore her journey, lessons in leadership, and her vision for modernizing data and product strategy.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the PreVetted Podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Danielle Costa-Nakano. She’s the Chief Product Officer as Graduates Analytics. Danielle is a high energy leader with a strong track record in building data products and scaling SaaS solutions for nonprofits and enterprise organizations. She has over a decade at
NTP van and leadership roles at Bonterra and National Geographic Society And she has shaped how technology supports fundraising Compliance and social good. So we are going to explore her journey Lessons in leadership and her vision for modernizing data and product strategy. Danielle, welcome to the show
Danielle Nakano (00:51) Thank you, great to be here.
Federico Ramallo (00:53) Awesome, awesome. can you tell us a little bit about your role at Grassroots Analytics?
Danielle Nakano (01:02) Sure, I joined Grassroots Analytics in January of this year. My role is the Chief Product Officer and I’m really helping this company move from being a data as a service company to a software as a service company.
So right now we sell data, we rent data, we provide folks with data oriented solutions, and we’re moving into a space where we’d like to provide them with software solutions as well as data solutions. We’re really thinking a lot about helping our industries modernize their infrastructure and move forward, do a bit of a leap into the AI generation.
Federico Ramallo (01:38) Interesting, interesting. And what does going to software as a service entail?
Danielle Nakano (01:45) at this point with the data as a service company, there’s a lot of invisible data being shared with folks and it’s hard for them to visualize, to see things and they have to take the data back into their ecosystems that are.
kind of old, built in the early 2000s. So a lot of our customers are living with a third or half of their day being spent using imports, exports, lot of Excel, Google Sheets, a lot of being stuck with a lot of different data sources, but the inability to bring them together in a really meaningful and powerful way for their workflows.
on the day to day and week to week. So a lot of what we want to do is help them do a lot of the tasks they have today, but in a more modern infrastructure that will free them from their time being spent doing basic data work or importing, exporting, or opening a bunch of sheets and freeing them up to do a lot more of the high quality work that they really want to focus on.
Federico Ramallo (02:44) Right, right. So it’s qualitative data rather than just importing and exporting data.
Danielle Nakano (02:53) It’s quantitative as well
as qualitative data that they’re dealing with. But there’s a lot of transactional based stuff that is first order and helping them get, get organized and provide a more central data platform instead of seven, eight, nine, 10 tools and 20 sheets.
Federico Ramallo (03:11) Right, right. I’ve been going through CSVs many, times. it’s a workhorse, but it’s so limiting in so many ways. Yes.
Danielle Nakano (03:25) and time consuming. It’s great for exploration
at the beginning, but terrible to have a process built around.
Federico Ramallo (03:31) Right, right. But I think the spreadsheet is a great way to start when you don’t have a defined process. But as soon as you have a defined process, you need a much more mature solution.
Danielle Nakano (03:44) Absolutely, absolutely. So we’re really looking forward to helping our customers sort of leap ahead with more modern infrastructure that will help save them time.
Federico Ramallo (03:54) Right, right. And getting into data transformation and validation is a big part of that, right?
Danielle Nakano (04:00) Sure, there’s some aspect of that that we’re hoping to do for folks. A lot of what we think about with our central data platform is providing folks with the ability to use API connections to help move data in and out so that they’re not dealing with spreadsheets and exports and all of that manual work. In addition to that, what we want to provide in this platform is analytics that help.
Folks, instead of shooting darts in the dark, help them find the right person with the right message at the right time for the right ask.
Federico Ramallo (04:31) Right, one thing that because nowadays AI, the term AI is hype, But I think people forget that AI come from, know, the root is machine learning, which is basically, you know, managing tons and tons of data and being able to make sense of it, right?
Danielle Nakano (04:48) Absolutely.
Our current product that’s a SaaS product is called Quiller. It is a AI first content creator. So for folks in the political and nonprofit markets, it will give them the ability to help generate really great content in their voice. You know, it’s really important for each organization to have their brand, their voice, and speak the language the way that they speak, the people that represent them, and helping create those first drugs.
or taking something that maybe staff made as a draft for content creation but needs a little bit of professional highlight to bring it up and zhuzh it up if you will. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing with content creation. So this data, central data platform that I’m speaking about will take that as well as all of their qualitative data, excuse me, and quantitative data, help them organize it and take action on it.
Federico Ramallo (05:41) right, I think that’s a great use of AI because what I was I’ve been learning is that we can use AI as the creative but with our guideline we became the navigator where we wanted to go so providing our own voice into the content that’s key
Danielle Nakano (05:58) Yes.
Yes, definitely. We’re big believers in, you know, human in the loop or really taking AI and using it as a way to automate, to augment, and to assist with humans, but not to replace.
Federico Ramallo (06:20) right, yeah, augment and enhance, I like that term, yeah what excites you the most about being a chief product officer?
Danielle Nakano (06:29) Well, grassroots analytics is just in a really special place. We’re really excited about the problems we’re looking to help our customers solve and bringing a lot of maturity in terms of infrastructure to markets that have a lot of private equity and VC tech that was built originally in the early 2000s and is sort of languished and hasn’t had proper investment. So we’re just excited to help our customers. over the last six months, we’ve
and putting together an amazing technology team, including AI developers, as well as traditional data experts and front-end full-stack developers. And so moving forward into next year, we just have a ton of launches to get through and to help onboard customers to this new technology that’s AI-based, AI-developed, and AI-first.
Federico Ramallo (07:22) is there any other use cases for grassroots analytics and Quiller
you haven’t mentioned that would make sense to share with the audience?
Danielle Nakano (07:31) Sure, Quiller is like I said a content creation tool. It will basically write letters, will write text messages, emails, even if you need just a tagline or something to help you come up with big bold things to stick on a big banner behind you, Quiller will absolutely give you the right inputs telling you about your voice, what your topics are, what your red lines are you don’t want to get into, has an opportunity to
Conversationally work with you back and forth to help you come up with the right content for whatever your needs are in the moment
Federico Ramallo (08:05) and what’s what’s the use case for grassroots analytics?
Danielle Nakano (08:09) Well, Grassroots, as I mentioned, is a data provider. So we rent and sell a lot of data across the political and nonprofit markets. so Quiller is another tool that helps the content creation. So it’s a really strong complement to the data. And then as we go ahead and launch that newest product next year, we’ll have a complete platform that sort of gives you access to see the data that you’ve rented or purchased in a new way where it’s
highlighted and giving you a 360 of your data plus some insights from ours.
Federico Ramallo (08:44) interesting, interesting so you work at other organizations like National Geographic and Bonterra what did those experiences teach you?
Danielle Nakano (08:50) Yes.
Those were amazing experiences. First of all, at Bonterra, I was with them for over 20 years. I was in a third higher at NGP Software before it became NGP Van and before NGP Van spun off every action. So there was a long history of companies merging and then creating whole new companies out of mergers. In the last few years that I was at Bonterra, I had the opportunity to
introduce data governance to the new organization that was really a merger of six smaller companies. So that was quite a feat in such a huge brand new organization. And I also got a chance to help productize predictive analytics in NGP software, part of the fundraising software for political customers. So that really prepared me for coming to GA here and doing the work that we’re doing now with predictive analytics and
and
putting them in products and helping them be more accessible to customers. On the National Geographic side, that was just a really amazing, unique opportunity to work for an outstanding impact organization. The National Geographic Society is actually opening a museum here in Washington, D.C. next year around the summertime. It’ll be a digitally immersive museum. And so my role when I was there for two years was to help prepare their data
for opening their digitally immersive museum. I got to work really closely around the grant making data, the fundraising data, all of the marketing and communications data. I helped purchase new platforms and bring online something called a customer data platform in a way to help them create experiences that would help connect people who are on the campus and going to the museum as well as off campus and just
engaging with National Geographic products, whether the website or something else.
Federico Ramallo (10:43) wow, that’s amazing I’m wondering what a digital immersed museum would look like. What that experience would be, right?
Danielle Nakano (10:51) You’ve got to go to NGS.org and check it out.
Federico Ramallo (10:55) Yes,
So how your approach on building products that serves nonprofits and social good differs from other types of organizations?
Danielle Nakano (11:03) It is interesting when you’re a for-profit company and all of your customers are non-profit. I think that you have to have a set of values that aligns well with your customers. so, you know.
being responsible with money and how you’re taking their money to help build amazing things for them is really, important. That’s a real quality and value that you really have to bring to the table. But those types of organizations, they are producing change in the world. And what they’re asking for is financial donations or contributions of their political organization in exchange for your support for them to
to
do the mission that they’ve set out to do. So they have a tall ask when they’re going out and doing that. so giving them the most efficient technology at the best possible price is the most important part of that value proposition is respecting their time and their money and helping bring them along with the best possible tools.
Federico Ramallo (12:06) Interesting, as a side note I was talking with a founder, he’s doing a for-profit social good enterprise or startup, right? his position was that if he was a non-profit that raising funds would be a limiting factor for him to pursue his mission, right?
he decided to instead go to a for-profit model so that way he would just be able to focus more on the mission and use the revenue to reinvest, yes
Danielle Nakano (12:41) like reinvest back to the customer. Yep.
That makes sense to me that that really does. But you know, your nonprofit customers, if you want to have those kinds of customers, they don’t want to see you be too excessive with your party’s incorrect. Congratulations. It has to be right sized.
Federico Ramallo (12:57) I’ve been involved in some nonprofits, both as a volunteer, sometimes donations, but haven’t been inside one to know how that works,
Danielle Nakano (13:07) Well, they really do vary tremendously. Most of the nonprofits in the world are just a small group of folks that often are volunteer based. And that’s the vast majority of the nonprofits that really exist out there. There are organizations like National Geographic Society or Greenpeace or Feeding America that are gigantic impact organizations that, you know, curry the kind of funding that competes with many corporate
organizations and LLCs in the world. So there’s a huge variety of what the operational impact and the budgets can be, but you know fundamentally a nonprofit organization is looking to sustain themselves and to take in enough funding to you know create impact in their community whether that’s the world or their local community. So it’s it’s a important proposition and over the last few years especially since the
It’s been harder and harder for nonprofits to continue to grow year after year. They’ve been struggling since the pandemic in particular.
Federico Ramallo (14:10) Right, I think you’re kind of answering this question. What do you think are the biggest challenges nonprofits are facing today? In general, and in particular with data, right?
Danielle Nakano (14:22) Yes, well today…
They’re suffering, I think, along with corporate America, where, especially over the last few months, it’s been hard for businesses to plan. And so when they stop planning, they stop hiring, and then the job market can get a little slippery. And the more folks that are either unemployed or concerned about their finances, they’re not donating as much. So this has been a particularly tough year.
short list of what’s happening now. You had another part of your question,
Federico Ramallo (14:52) I was wondering about the challenges you see in nonprofits in general and then you know because we’re talking about data I also asked about what challenges are nonprofits facing today related to data
Danielle Nakano (15:00) time.
I think with data, there’s a lot of opportunities. as I was mentioning earlier, they have a lot of data, they have a lot of tools, but they don’t have a lot of modern infrastructure. So if everything that you buy is a tool, that’s not talking to the other tools that you’ve purchased. So if one of them is your CRM, one of them is your texting tool, one of them is your emailing tool, maybe another one helps you with call time. Maybe if you’re mid-sized or larger, you might need additional reporting.
needs, you now have five, six, seven, eight tools that are doing something, but most of the people who are doing the jobs need to be in two, three, four, five of those tools. So when they’re not talking and they’re not able to communicate well together and move the data, then humans end up becoming human-ware instead of using software.
Federico Ramallo (15:55) Right, and then the humans become the bottlenecks, right? Yes, interesting.
Danielle Nakano (15:59) Yeah, that too. Exactly.
So it’s just a place where plenty of data really needing better infrastructure or more modernized tools that are able to be more flexible and work with other tools, especially when you don’t exactly know what it is, but having an API, that’s a start.
Federico Ramallo (16:20) Right, right. I don’t know on non-profits, but I’ve seen corporations also missing, know, missing on the API side, right? They don’t see that as something important or it’s an afterthought, right?
Danielle Nakano (16:39) It’s an afterthought, it’s not part of the budget planning.
it’s not part of the contracting necessarily, so then they try to add it later and they don’t know how to figure out how to charge for it or get additional funds so that you know if there’s a huge amount of egress going on you’re making sure you’re covering what you need to cover to pay your bills. Yeah, it’s a problem that I think especially before the end of this decade it’s time to solve them. We’ve got a lot of great technology now and really it’s just
it’s the focus to help our customers move beyond where they’ve been for the last five, 10, 15 years and really help them go twice as fast by eliminating a lot of moving and slowing down and being blind to a 360 picture of who their potential donors and prospects are.
Federico Ramallo (17:34) right, right, and what I’ve seen what happened with APIs I remember the case of Stripe this was 10-15 years ago where they were like API first, almost data first merchant gateway, right? and they took over the market because it was so easy to integrate it in so many applications
and it will solve the PCI compliance for you know startups so I can see how that worked and when I see I work on many different organizations where they build APIs, internal APIs but they don’t build APIs to allow people to integrate their software as much or as I said it’s an afterthought right so
eventually that becomes an afterthought and eventually the way that I’ve seen implementation lacks this idea of how can we leverage the API of this product to integrate with other products they miss that so the integration becomes challenging or difficult which eventually kind of miss the point, right?
Danielle Nakano (18:46) Yes, or they sometimes will build something that’s really hard to work with because it’s built around like a front end or what needs to be consumed by a front end and it doesn’t make as much sense when it’s pure API. I’d say one other thing to add to that is
I’ve had the opportunity to work for data products for many years now and a data product is really taking the software development lifecycle and applying it to data, which means that you have to manage the whole lifecycle. that means providing data contracts upfront. What are you accountable to? What are you holding yourself?
to deliver and how are you going to take that product and bring it into it when it’s done or when something new is coming along. So that’s been a huge part of helping change how the struggle has been, but it’s not universal. I was just actually at the CDO conference in Chicago. It was a CDO leadership conference. One of the main topics in the room was data governance.
Data governance, we’ve been doing this forever. You can’t really do data products without data governance. You can’t build AI tooling on top of data without data governance. these are foundational steps that if we skip any of them, it really makes things long-term really hard to maintain.
Federico Ramallo (20:09) Right, right, because if you open your data too much without compliance then you’re exposing yourself for liability, well the company, and data loss which could be a big issue, right?
Danielle Nakano (20:21) Absolutely, those are legal and breachy. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (20:24) Yes, yes.
Yeah, I’ve seen projects where we would run the internal audits to make sure that it was compliant. And one thing that I noticed, a pattern that I noticed through different projects is that the compliance is instilled within the code in a way that it’s difficult to abstract. So…
if the compliance change you have to dig into the code to actually see what’s going on so it was not a rule-based system but it was more of a conditional system within the code which makes it difficult to… yeah, that’s a good word
Danielle Nakano (21:05) Brittle.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (21:12) So you mentioned something a little bit before about nonprofits being able to follow up with donors and being able to build a relationship, right? Which is an interesting use case for AI agents, Where they can detect patterns in people and then based on that, you know, provide actionable insights, right?
Danielle Nakano (21:32) Yes, that’s some of the favorite terms we use in the world of nonprofit software and data is really trying to cut down on.
everyone getting tons of emails and text messages from organizations or candidates that they don’t know, never reached out to, but really trying to encourage organizations to build a conversation with folks and be able to reach out to folks that are interested in hearing about specific topics in the method in which they like to have communications done with them. That is a huge piece of modernizing the infrastructure and making the people that are
delivering those experiences to potential donors and prospects, give them the tooling that they need to be able to achieve those goals without spending two days with a bunch of spreadsheets, but really having insights put on their dashboards in the morning so that they’re able to make some quick decisions and action on where the best opportunities are every day.
Federico Ramallo (22:32) Right, right, mean what I’ve seen happen there usually is because that becomes a CRM, right? But then this CRM becomes this huge monolithic thing that is the all-in solution but it actually is not fulfilling ⁓
Danielle Nakano (22:47) Yeah, we’ve been thinking about
that a lot. And I think that, you know, what grassroots is focused on is the thing that happens after the CRM. In fact, a lot of organizations end up with multiple CRMs because certain departments or teams, they use one thing, another group of people use another thing. And what GA is focused on is bring all your tools, no matter how many CRMs or donation forms or email tools or whatever you
got, bring them all to the table and let’s use APIs to go ahead and connect everything together so that you can see all your data, the core of it in one place, be able to take strong good actions because you have enough of the information that you need to help you make strong predictions on where the wins are.
Federico Ramallo (23:35) wow that’s that’s all but powerful because what you’re describing is basically what you’re describing is you’re solving the CRM problem right by integrating multiple CRMs
Danielle Nakano (23:45) So what I think of in a post
CRM, the thing after post CRMs, I’m really focused on this being next generation where you’re not trying to be everything to everybody in one place, but allow for connectivity enough in enough places that the most important elements that you’ve decided are important can be brought together in a way that then you can make predictions, take actions and do that with other the tools that are meant for it. So as much as
Federico Ramallo (23:50) Right.
Danielle Nakano (24:15) it sounds like it’s an all-in-one solution it actually lets you connect to all your specialized tools so you can use the best email the best text messages have two or three CRMs whatever combination you’re you’re interested in
Federico Ramallo (24:30) Right, right, yeah, most what you’re describing is orchestration, right? Orchestration and integration, yeah.
Danielle Nakano (24:35) Absolutely. Orchestration
is definitely a way of using that terminology in orchestration for 100%.
Federico Ramallo (24:44) That’s amazing, that’s a very interesting approach.
Danielle Nakano (24:46) Yeah, I’m really excited about how it can transform the nonprofit and political markets in particular. They have a lot of that schism, fracture, tool sets. And so it’s been a mess for them for the past decade. They’re ready for something new.
Federico Ramallo (25:01) but
Right, right. So you’ve led teams throughout acquisitions and transitions, right? What lessons did you learn from that?
Danielle Nakano (25:10) Yes.
you know, wow. Number one is the people are everything.
If everybody walked out the door tomorrow, you’d be nowhere 100 percent. So never forget as a leader that you can buy the tools, you can buy the resources, but when you don’t have the people, you’ve lost all the magic. So every day, I’m always thankful when I walk in the door in the morning to the moment that I leave for all the people that are there and their focus and their hard work.
And I believe that a huge part of each organization’s obligation to every employee is to forge a relationship around what are you looking out of, what do you need out of this experience? What are you looking for out of this experience? So each year that I take each one of my employees, I try to spend time saying, what experiences do we need to make sure you get to have this year so that you’re growing and that…
your commitment to the organization and our commitment to you, we’re able to fulfill that. I find that it really helps folks want to work that extra mile, do that extra thing when they know that you’re making sure that they get what they need for their growth as well. So I’m people first 100%. Other than that, I have really come to appreciate how important as technology changes,
that the roles and the specialties of groups of people, especially when you’re working in technology, it’s a matrix. Most of the time, if you’re on a team and you’re developing a product, you have folks that maybe are architects, whether that’s their title or not. You have team leads that are out there leading small groups, sometimes multiple groups of folks in developing and engineering. You have product managers. You have user experience folks.
you’ve got your DevOps, you hopefully have QA, whether they’re automating or doing it manually, you’ve got some QA folks in the mix. So when you bring all these folks together, whether it’s three, four, five, six, 10, 13 teams, or maybe just one, that is a huge cross-section of skills that it takes to make something out of nothing. And I’m always just in awe of bringing together those different skill sets and helping folks
come together with a set of ground rules that was evolving. Like over the last nine months at GA, we’ve been putting together a software development lifecycle that’s evolved a lot since the first day that I got here. But now we’re running smooth with over 20 people actively working on a brand new product. That wasn’t happening before I got here. It was a different world. So it’s amazing what you can do with people. And I think that the most important
part of any initiative is skills and abilities and bringing together folks and showing them a lot of respect.
Federico Ramallo (28:10) wow, that’s amazing I told you before we start the episode, I’m a software engineer so I’ve been mostly thinking the collaboration from that point but then I started wearing multiple hats as founder, as product owner, as technical leader and so on and so forth and throughout the years I’ve been appreciating more and more
each of the roles involved in the process of building software and it’s interesting you mentioned QAs because that was one of the roles that I didn’t have the appreciation that I have now, before and when I started learning the impact that they have in the organization and the same with user experience or designers
how much they can impact on the final product if their voice is listened very interesting take, people first ⁓
Danielle Nakano (29:14) Yeah,
definitely. I’m glad to hear that you’ve come to appreciate the QA folks. They really can be your internal power users and really help you think around corners. Even if you can’t crush every possible bug they can think of, they can definitely help you prepare for sealing some of the holes and being ready to take on some of more complicated use cases that are coming your way.
Federico Ramallo (29:38) We used to joke or tease each other that they were against the developers because they were looking for what you actually did wrong. We were kind teasing but there was some truth into that. This was this conflicting roles. But then I was able to work towards
change on that point of view with me and my team, both on the development side and the QA team where we work together on building test plans before we will build a feature that way instead of becoming a I wouldn’t say enemy but an opponent it became an ally because now we would agree what are the use cases
that are more valuable for the user, right? Which is the user is our, we’re serving the user, right? But when you’re in a bigger organization, you kind of lose track of that, right? So we came to that first conclusion and then based on that, we would build a test plan prioritized based on effort to automate and impact to the user. And that way we were able to agree
Where do we draw the line? How much ⁓ time do we invest on automating versus not? And there was, of course, a lot of debate because the QA team would prefer everything, but then we had trade-offs of resources and bandwidth. So it was a very interesting experience for me.
Danielle Nakano (30:47) Yes.
That’s.
Yeah.
I’m glad you brought that up. We’ve actually just started introducing some QA scripts around here. We’ve been in development for about four months. We have enough of our foundation on this newer product. So that’s just been going on here for the last few months. And we try to think of it instead of it being developers against QA, we try to think of it as all of us are battle ready for production. Battle ready for production for the customer.
Federico Ramallo (31:29) Right.
Right, and we start doing this thing of, can we get a bug free feature? Which is, there’s always going to be little bugs here and there, but as close as possible, right? So if we had a bug, then the whole team failed on that.
level of quality and then we go back and figure out, what did we miss? Because if we’re putting the test cases first, then we shouldn’t have bugs, right? Or, I mean, there were functional bugs, were, you know, bugs on the UI, right? Or the UX. But basically, if we can allow the user to do what they need to do, what’s in it for the user, then, you know,
we would not consider that failure, but something we need to polish ⁓ and something that became very important for us is that we could trust the continuous integration server because if it’s green but we don’t trust it then the value for that diminish
Danielle Nakano (32:23) Yeah.
I think the systems are the most important thing. In order to build software today, you’ve got to have continuous integration and you’ve got to absolutely trust that when it’s green, it’s green 100%. That’s the only way to go fast enough.
Federico Ramallo (32:51) yes
yes yes and so we had had issues pressures where we had a an unreliable green flag so what we did is we disabled all the tests we start from scratch right and we’ll start adding again right because you need a solid foundation to move faster right yeah very interesting and
What are your thoughts on the importance of the UX team? What do think the UX team brings to the process?
Danielle Nakano (33:22) I think UX is, I don’t want to say the most important, but if you don’t do UX, you’re going to…
really struggle with product market fit. You’re going to really struggle with the ability of making sure that you’ve solved the problem in a way that the users are experiencing it. There’s so much product management that is focusing on the right problem to solve, finding an affordable problem we can solve, finding a solution that is affordable. Without UX to either validate the solution or to actually design the solution, at least
one, but probably both of those are really going to be the best way to ensure that you have a chance of product market fit and really having a solution that’s going to delight your customers.
Federico Ramallo (34:10) Right.
Danielle Nakano (34:10) GA
has spent a lot of time this year making sure that we’ve made massive investments in user experience. We’ve made sure that we have a great team. We have a director, a senior, even have a junior on the team that’s moving up into a mid-level soon. And it’s really been one of the best investments that every single…
staffer that works at this company has been able to say, before we have that team and where we are now, heads and shoulders different in the outcome. And as we have gotten closer to launching our newest product, the feedback on pre-release has been absolutely phenomenal when it comes to taking something that was hard to see in the past and making it easy to understand and comprehend in milliseconds.
Federico Ramallo (35:01) I agree, yes, we were talking about APIs being an afterthought and I had that same approach we designed, user experience as an afterthought but then I was able to learn more appreciation towards that role and help change the development process towards UX first
Right.
Danielle Nakano (35:24) Absolutely,
absolutely. At GA, we end up actually doing UX design and research while we have technical feasibility research at the same time. So we’re really trying to make sure that the stories of the problems we’re solving, we are technically with the tech team making sure that we’re designing for solution that everybody is really going to be able to work on. So we try to do that simultaneously.
the designs become high level and get really detailed as we work with our technical friends to make sure that they’re still feasible and viable for implementing.
Federico Ramallo (35:58) Right, I think that the product requirement documents are… although they have some role, but I feel that they are inefficient to share requirements.
Danielle Nakano (36:11) We don’t do a formal PRD here. We’ve found that engineers, if you write documents that are too big and too extraneous, they won’t get read. So there’s like a sweet spot in sizing and making the information available in a way that the team is able to consume during certain pieces of the software development life cycle. So we really start with a business case and a very high level super story. call it a super story. Once we have buy in there, that that’s the right
Federico Ramallo (36:14) interesting.
Danielle Nakano (36:40) set of problems we want to solve. We then go to the next level where we do very high level user stories around, you know, who are we solving exact problems for? And then really engage the design team and the tech team around what solutions could this be? And constantly use the trio of the product manager, the UX designer, as well as the tech lead to make sure that we’re headed down in this right direction together with our arms linked.
Federico Ramallo (37:08) Interesting, I was going to share that we did some development on storytelling because we started doing product requirements documents and it this big long document that nobody would ever read so even if you put a lot of details there, people would not read it and then what’s the point? And then there was a lot of friction because it was boring, I would say
to read. when we shifted towards, it was a transition of course, when we shifted towards storytelling, then the product owner and the UX would work together on building the presentation of the new feature and they would polish a lot of details of
of the behavior, expected behavior, right? And because the UX had a lot of access to the internals of how things were built, then he would act a little bit of the advocating for what was possible within the components that we had available, right? And then what happened is that instead of becoming a boring meeting,
everybody was happy to go to those meetings, right? Because now it was a story, right? Now we have a window of how the user feels and why he needs this feature, right? So it was a very interesting experience to go through that because we’re able to not only make it fun, but also make it efficient and finally being able to build it faster, right?
Danielle Nakano (38:33) Yeah, that sounds like a great process, similar to what we’re doing in GA.
Federico Ramallo (38:36) Interesting, interesting.
I had a guest that was talking about using AI to vibe code to ask the product managers to build prototypes instead of mock-ups or documents, right? And they were moving towards doing that as a new requirement in the role of product owners in the age of AI What are your thoughts?
about that.
Danielle Nakano (39:01) We have done some prototyping here. We’ve used Vercelles V0. The product managers will often do that at the very beginning of a brand new concept. It lets them vibe code out something that is not the solution we’re going to build, but it really helps everybody on the UX product and the tech team get on the same page about.
what it could be, you know, a very basic rudimentary version of what something could be. So we’ve also used a lot of Figma’s AI prototyping tool as well. So if we’re further down the road and we’re really battling a really complicated concept, our UX folks have also been using some of the prototyping tools there that will actually get them a working prototype using some AI as well.
And then in addition to that, our development team is using Cloud Code to help assist as well.
Federico Ramallo (39:55) Right, right. I think that Vibe coding has a great fit for this use case, especially if what you’re trying to do is it lowers the bar for a non-technical product manager to build something without the dependency of an engineer, right? ⁓
Danielle Nakano (40:12) Right.
But it’s usually not good enough to sell, but it’s great to like get an idea and everybody on the same page about the basics of an idea. And that’s what we have found. doesn’t, whatever it builds, the code isn’t the best from those tools. So, you know, we don’t necessarily find it to be highly reusable, but it’s really been great for us to get ideas across different teams.
get people on the same page, figure out, you know, what do we like about this? What do we want to keep intellectually versus, you know, what’s not working? And it helps us spin around iterations of ideas a lot faster than waiting for somebody to do a full Figma.
is interactive perhaps that you can vibe code a lot faster than a proper design with its interactions built in. So it can be really good get on the same page tool, but we haven’t found in any of the tools that I just mentioned that they’re prime time ready. don’t produce, they may produce a little piece of something that you can copy in a section of code and reuse it, but that’s about it.
Federico Ramallo (41:18) yes, I completely agree, I was going to share that insight yeah, the vibe coding is great to give a non-technical person to build a prototype maybe you can show it to users to see how that interaction works but that’s about it, right? after that the AI agents that are building this code doesn’t understand how to build abstractions
which is something that we humans can do better. So it’s great for that, for getting on the same page and then pretty much dispose it after that. ⁓ And then the developers can build something that is scalable, they can build abstractions and find patterns that otherwise wouldn’t.
Danielle Nakano (41:54) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (42:09) ⁓ Yes.
Danielle Nakano (42:09) And reusable components. I find that a lot of the prototyping
tools, don’t reuse components. It’s messy. It makes messy code. ⁓ Yeah. But the…
Federico Ramallo (42:18) Right.
Danielle Nakano (42:22) The usefulness of them is definitely quick, quick getting on the same page and it’s game changing for teams, especially with information architecture. I think that’s one of the areas that it can really help with real users and usability testing, help you understand if you have a good IA.
Federico Ramallo (42:40) Right, right. In particular with data you have such complex use cases that are difficult for any generic agent to understand and embrace.
Danielle Nakano (42:53) Yep, all of it needs some form of trading.
Federico Ramallo (42:56) Right, right. And I have the same issue with agents that are building mockups, that they’re good enough for prototypes, one of the things that I also appreciate about the UX designers is that they understand how to organize and locate the buttons and the functions, and they build a hierarchy of functions and buttons and locations based on
how the user would use this application, right? Yeah, and that’s something that, again, the AI cannot do.
Danielle Nakano (43:28) yet at least.
Federico Ramallo (43:30) yes, it’s evolving very fast, so maybe in the future, but not right now probably by the time we publish this episode it’s going to be able to, no, I’m just joking so what advice would you give to a younger self somebody that is getting into product ownership and data?
Danielle Nakano (43:51) Well, anybody interested in data, I would encourage them to explore that and stick with it. I became interested in data early on. have a degree in math. When I started working in computers and software,
Staying focused on data, figuring out how to build interfaces that are data driven with software development, AI, data science. mean, the world is endless. Data is a commoditized asset. So my advice to any young person is if you have any interest in data, go, go deep, keep exploring, don’t stop. There’s just so many places and ways to focus on it. Some folks, you know, are great with contracts.
and things like that. There’s risk, there’s securing data. Some people want to build things, they’re creators, they’re creative, there’s interfaces, there’s building APIs. There’s just so many different skills around data that there’s something for everybody.
Federico Ramallo (44:47) Amazing, amazing Before we wrap it up, Danielle, any final insights or comments?
Danielle Nakano (44:53) I just am really appreciative of the opportunity to speak to you today. I haven’t had a chance to do this in a while and I’ve just really enjoyed the conversation.
Federico Ramallo (45:04) Awesome, awesome, I am truly grateful for having you here today I think we learned a lot about data and product ownership and I had an amazing time talking with you Thank you Take care
Danielle Nakano (45:15) Yeah, thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.