2021-22 | New York, NY / Role: Product Manager, Research & Innovation
Bowery Farming:
the largest vertical farming company in the United States that uses IoT, Data Science, AI, Robotics and Cloud to bring economic viability to smart agriculture.
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As Research & Innovation Product manager, I:
Defined new technology solutions to achieve company innovation goals
Was key liaison between technology and science divisions
Facilitated design workshops for users and stakeholders
Defied & tracked success metrics for new projects
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During my time at Bowery, I developed my skills in and learned about:
Cross-functional stakeholder management
Importance of edge case training in ML
The value of modifiable, off-the-shelf hardware solutions
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Streamlined research operations and delivering efficiency gains.
Enhanced data-driven decision making through integrated monitoring systems.
Optimized crop recipes and maximizing yields through data-driven insights
Automated manual tasks to refocus scientists on higher-value work.
Developed hardware, software, and data solutions for accelerating product development.
Featured Projects
Experiment management platform
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R&D relied on manual updates of fragmented google sheets to create and manage experiments. It resulted in:
Lost time spent on rote tasks
Computer & human errors
Unactionable data
Overlooked insights
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Since our internal system could not handle the custom requirements from the scientists, I turned to AirTable to create the necessary features.
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The new system catered to the diverse needs of the science team, including:
Fully configurable experiments
Linked harvest data
Dynamic scheduling
Farmer task management
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The project soothed a long-standing pain point in the company, resulting in:
~40% increase in experiment completion
~10 hours saved per week per scientist on manual input
~$15k reduced monthly expenses
~200% increase in experiment velocity
Strawberry product launch
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As our first vine crop, strawberries presented unique logistical challenges for the company due to these attributes:
High-maintenance: pruning, pest control
Task variability: Daily, weekly, whenever
Highly sensitive: Lack of environmental compliance can halt production
Incompatible: Did not fit into our Farm OS
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Building upon the success of the Airtable Farm OS integration, we further developed the platform to accommodate strawberry needs and extend the features for supply chain and fulfillment.
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Based on the many requirements for this project, we created a custom Strawberry OS that included:
Planner for supply chain & scientists to make plans & projections
Scheduler for supervisors to manage schedules and compliance
Task system for farmers to track requirements & SOPs
Harvest hub for supply chain & marketing to generate SKUs and match cultivars
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Thanks to the flexibility of this low-code approach that allowed us to integrate into our custom OS, we succeeded in our pilot objectives in:
Accurately predicting & managing our supply in production with multiple cultivars
Determined greatest areas of opportunity for increasing shelf life & reducing costs
Validated premium product position for Bowery strawberries, consistently achieving sell-out status
Other accomplishments & focus areas
In addition to the pair of projects I led, I was involved in:
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Supported research on sustainable grow media alternatives
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Identified $6m annual cost savings across farms by simply switching light schedule to off-peak energy hours
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Introduced new image recognition capabilities for crop distress identification.
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Managing the creation of custom smart grow chambers for efficient use of space and labor
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Introduced a component-based UI kit for greater developer velocity and design consistency
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Rolled out no-code interface for custom crop recipe creation with ML recommendations for light, airflow, temperature and nutrient scheduling
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Represented the technology department in Bowery's sustainability steering committee and was responsible for creating sustainability reports from our farm data.