Product Explorations
Some product ideas that have kept me busy outside of work for the past years
ODIN (physical product)
Blunt knives are the kitchen's and food processing unit's #1 safety hazard. ODIN's here to help. The result, after countless hours of interviews, observations, ideation, evaluation, prototyping, validation and business modeling is a comfortable, modular knife easily exchangeable blades and a resharpening service.
SonicVoyage (digital product)
Goal of this project was to explore a different way to explore new music, even if wildly beyond your usual music taste; based on a personalized, progressive learning path and some social features.
HATE (kinetic sculpture)
Designed and built a kinetic installation that served as a medium to discuss the role of hatred and inflammatory content on online platforms, and its negative impact on the tolerance between people and their individual mental health.
PACTO (physical product)
40 billion single-use plastic forks, spoons, and knives are used and thrown away each year. But it's not easy to carry our own cutlery around. Pacto is the result of a few months of user research, ideation and prototyping to solve that problem.
Websites & Articles
Stuff I've (co-)written over the last few years about topics like tech, mental health, etc.
"A Path To Change Your Music Taste?"
Where does musical taste come from? And is music exploration beyond one's favorite genres possible (and desirable)? In this website/article, I explore a personal story of taste expansion, and how it could be replicated algorithmically.
"The (Inevitable?) Race Towards a Cliff"
Short article about some companies' obsession with fundamental AI research (and why we shouldn't rush it if we don't have the proper guardrails in place). The image was generated using with Claude AI, which, well, is not very good at generating images yet (as of April 2025).
"The AI Job Wars: Episode I"
An article I co-wrote with a good friend in 2017 about the potential of AI to entirely replace parts of the workforce in very short periods of time, and that got published in the online magazine BecomingHuman.ai.
"Neuralink y el Futuro Mágico del Cerebro" (Translation from WaitButWhy.com)
Based on discussions with the blog owners, I translated the popular article (short book, really: it was 230 pages long) on Brain-Machine Interfaces to Spanish. Publication on the website still pending.
Image source: WaitButWhy.com
"Diaries of a volunteer in Lesvos"
Daily thoughts of a person who's never seen action, trying to help in the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe's recent history.
"Mental Health Awareness Post"
A rescue from the depths of my Facebook timeline, expanded. Some thoughts about dealing with depression, destigmatizing mental health issues and advocating to look for solutions, from an old experience that kind of sucked from when I was a very early adult.
Image source: MesserWoland, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Things I watch/listen to
Feel-Good Indie Things
Probably my most popular playlist (which doesn't say much)
LOTS of Documentaries
130ish days of handpicked history and science documentaries
About me
From launching Amazon's festival tickets in Europe to being the sole PM for Sonos Voice Control, I've driven innovation with a focus on great user experiences and data-driven decision making for 10+ years across companies of different sizes.
With a master's in Integrated Product Design, I combine design thinking and technical expertise to create transformative products. I'm passionate about human-machine interactions, focusing on recommendation algorithms and novel interfaces.
Work Experience
Staff Product Manager, Smart Expert Recommendations
Intuit
2025 — Present, San Diego (USA)
Owning the expansion of new products and features that help experts at Intuit make recommendations to end customers.
Senior Product Consultant
Tambor AI
2024, Remote (USA)
Led user research and competitive analyses to contribute to the early stage startup's initial product roadmap and pricing strategy.
Senior Product Manager, Sonos Voice Control
Led the launch of Sonos' proprietary voice interface from a product design perspective.
Sonos
2021 — 2022, Paris (France)
Senior Voice Experience Designer, Prototyping Labs
Sonos
2019 — 2021, Paris (France)
Created 10+ prototypes for systems that detected human intent to interact to smart speakers without the wake word based on context, linguistics and spatial awareness, guiding long-term technical plans for machine learning and embedded software teams, and resulting in two issued patents.
Senior Client Solutions Manager, AI Voice Interfaces
Snips AI (acquired by Sonos in 2019)
2018 — 2019, Paris (France)
Designed and delivered 20+ voice interfaces for smart home and music use cases for Fortune 500 and startup clients.
Led a task force delivering an on-device music voice interface demo, attracting Sonos' attention for startup acquisition.
Program Manager, Alexa Experience and Devices
Amazon UK
2016 — 2018, London (UK)
Led the UK Alexa Beta program, gathering insights from 2,000+ users and ensuring the desired UX and performance by the planned launch date.
Selected as UX role model, serving as Working Backwards Coach (0.5% of Amazon UK corporate employee base).
Site Merchandiser/Associate Vendor Manager, Movies, TV, Music (Physical and Digital)
Amazon Spain
2014 — 2016, Madrid (Spain)
Owned customer experience, marketing and major vendor negotiations for two of the main Media categories.
Site Merchandiser/Associate Vendor Manager, Movies, TV, Music (Physical and Digital)
Amazon Spain
2012 — 2014, Madrid (Spain)
Owned customer experience and marketing for the Movies & TV category.
Education
Master in Integrated Product Design
University of Pennsylvania
2022 — 2024, Philadelphia (USA)
Multidisciplinary program between Penn Engineering, The Wharton School, and the Weitzman School of Design, with a mixed cohort of engineers, business people, designers and other profiles, aimed at learning how to find the sweet spot between desirability (Design), viability (Business) and feasibility (Engineering) to solve the world's most important problems, via Human-centered design.
GPA: 3.81/4.00 (Summa Cum Laude). Fully sponsored by La Caixa Foundation.
European Degree in Business Management (Dual B.A.)
Universitat de Valencia + Hochschule Bremen
2007 — 2012, Valencia (Spain) + Bremen (Germany)
Double degree with a total of two years abroad and two semesters of internships.
GPA: 8.28/10.00. Honors in Statistics, Business English and Macroeconomics.
Education
Other Interests
Music
Avid consumer of music, especially what we used to call Indie in the 2000's, and whose number of current genres I can't even start to count. But they would include Chillwave, Indietronica, Indie Rock, Britpop. If you're curious and feel adventurous, check out this website by Glenn McDonald, EveryNoise.com, to check for a seemingly infinite cloud of genres, how they relate to each other and what artists are included in each of them, apart from other fabulous features.
Also interested in algorithmic content recommendations and ways to discover new music, a topic that I've been kind of obsessed since 2011.
Ethical Development of Artificial Intelligence
It's undeniable that Machine Learning algorithms can contribute to humanity very positively. But there are risks in continuing to develop these technologies without some guardrails. I loved this article in Anthropic's website where they outline their strategy to make sure that they develop a safe AI that benefits most of us (or at least that doesn't doom us all). They go over the possible scenarios, from most "innocent" to the most grim, and how they are working to prepare and hopefully prevent the worst from happening, maximizing benefit for humanity and reducing a series of different risks—including an unlikely, but highly worrying existential risk.
Other interesting people to follow in the field, in my opinion, are Nick Bostrom (whose almost 10-year old book blew my mind back then and in my opinion still has very valid points ("Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", 2017). And I'm a big fan of physicist Max Tegmark (check out one of his article's here, or a book he wrote that I loved, "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence", 2018) and his work and views on AI safety. The Future of Life Institute is also doing terrific work in the field (among other existentially important fields).
Travel, sunsets, deserts, photography, lists
Get in Touch
If you're curious about anything you've seen on this site or feel like chatting about any of these topics, feel free reach out!
I'm always on the lookout for fellow nerds to exchange ideas with.
(Or fill this form)
danif@danif.me