fig. 01 / lou kromah
Product · Community · Go to Market
I build products and the communities that adopt them.
Ten years in tech. Multi hyphenate on purpose.
Ten years in tech. Multi hyphenate on purpose.
A golf app for people who’d rather play with someone than alone. Enter your availability, pull the lever, and get dealt a hand. Built the product, the brand system, and the launch plan. Going to market through local golf groups first, because that’s where the players already are.
I’ve spent 10 years building software. ML infrastructure at Twitter, product at Cigna and WITH Wellness, then Head of Product at Journey Foods. In between I taught augmented reality, founded a bootcamp that moved creatives into UX jobs, and spent a lot of nights filling rooms in Charlotte for hackathons, speaker series, and car meets.
People hear that list and call it scattered. It’s one job. Find out what a group of people actually needs, build it, then go get them to show up for it. Most products I’ve watched fail didn’t fail on the build. They failed because nobody built the room.
I write the specs myself. Architecture, data models, API surfaces, role systems, user stories, QA parity passes. I’d rather hand an engineer something sequenced and unambiguous than hand them a vision. Then I go find the people who need it.
I’m best where those two things touch. Product decisions that are really distribution decisions, and community work that’s really a growth channel.
My grandfather built a 200 acre farm in Bong County, Liberia, from nothing. Decades before anyone advised him to, he secured legal deeds to the land. When civil war came, the farm was looted. The deeds held. The land is still ours. For the past year I’ve been recording oral histories with my aunts and uncles so that story doesn’t fade.
He taught me the part most builders skip. Building the thing is not the same as making sure it holds. I try to build both.