Jeff Bangerter — Product leader who still ships

Jeff Bangerter

Product leader who still ships.

Six years in product across marketplaces, payments and consumer lending, on top of seven in finance and analytics. Today I set strategy for a two-sided marketplace with 100K+ users.

Nights and weekends I build and ship my own apps end to end — a cheap way to keep a product manager honest about what “just add a toggle” actually costs.

Built solo, out in the open

Things I wanted to exist

Built end to end and left unpromoted. No growth loops, no launch posts — they are here to show taste, judgment about what to cut, and that I can carry something from idea to production alone.

Group trip planning · live

Tript.io

Every trip I plan with friends turns into a spreadsheet — a schedule tab, a packing checklist, a who-owes-what tab nobody opens. I wanted Partiful, but for the whole trip: something you send to friends that they actually use.

So it is built from simple, malleable blocks instead of a rigid itinerary. Drop in a day, a lodging idea, a list, a decision still up in the air, and move them as the plan changes. No columns, no formulas, no one person maintaining the master copy.

Next.jsPostgresmalleable blocksreplaces the spreadsheet

Visit tript.io →

Small-group social · live

Banter.Camp

A social platform with no engagement-ranked feed, on purpose. Posts arrive in the order they happened, which turns out to be enough when the audience is people who actually know each other.

Installable PWA with web push, including on iOS, which is its own small act of endurance. In regular use by my family and friends — the only retention metric it has, and the only one it needs.

PWAweb push on iOSPostgresno algorithm, deliberately

Visit banter.camp →

Two projects · one obsession

Riding, instrumented

Two separate builds on either side of the same question: am I actually getting faster, and can I train for a specific course without driving to it? One reads the data after the ride. The other puts the ride in front of you.

The Bike Fit dashboard, showing training load trends built from Strava history

01 · Bike Fit · in use

Do I actually know my fitness?

Strava history turned into a straight answer to “am I actually getting fitter?” — and what to ride tomorrow because of it. Not a wall of charts I have to interpret myself every Sunday night.

Strava APItraining load modelin use

Field test

I trained off its plan for a race I did last year and took 9 minutes off my time — on less training. Small sample size, but I will take it.

The MTB simulator in Unreal Engine, showing trail terrain generated from a GPX file

02 · MTB simulator · building

Ride a real trail from the garage

Feed it a GPX file and it builds the route in Unreal, then drives a smart trainer off the elevation — the climb on screen is the resistance in your legs. Preview a course before race day without flying to it.

GPX → terrainUnreal Enginesmart-trainer controlwork in progress

Deliberately the hardest thing on this page: real-time device protocols, physics and engine work — where AI assistance helps least and you find out what you actually know.

Ship early, ship often, and know when to be careful

Strategy is half the job. The other half is evangelizing the practices that make it stick — most decisions are cheap and reversible, so get them in front of users and learn. The few that are not cheap deserve real caution, and telling those two apart is most of the craft.

“Gardener, not guardian” of product principles — tend them, do not stand watch over them.

Strategy & operating model

A north star with a next Tuesday attached

Outcome-led roadmaps at executive altitude, four teams migrated onto a product operating model, and scope negotiated so releases get smaller instead of later.

Evangelizing the practice

Good habits, spread on purpose

Discovery, evidence and rationale kept inside delivery artifacts rather than in side conversations nobody can find later — and taught, not mandated.

Two-sided marketplaces

Both sides, from nothing

Supply, demand and the humans in between: listings, discovery, agent placement, and the unglamorous internal tooling that keeps liquidity real.

Fintech, payments, lending

Money movement, specified properly

Amortizing consumer financing, a loyalty-currency ledger and API, payments and fraud tooling, PCI and chargeback exposure — built on what I learned working in finance.

AI-assisted development

Where it helps, and where it does not

Defined the product-to-engineering handoff for AI-assisted work and cleared a repeatable release path with legal, compliance, ops and data. Weeks to production, without pretending judgment is optional.

Discovery & analytics

Baseline first, program second

Customer interviews, experimentation, SQL and BI. Comfortable saying a program is not measurable yet, and comfortable being unpopular for a quarter about it.

Thirteen years, condensed

New Western

Director of Product
Nov 2023 – present · Remote

Real-estate investment marketplace. 100K+ users, 20K monthly active, across web, mobile, Salesforce and internal tooling.

Set the product strategy for the marketplace — where the two sides are going, what we are not doing, and how each quarter's work ladders to it.
Lead and coach four product managers who own BI and AI/ML scoring, agent sales and acquisition tooling, CRM, and technology operations.
Split an open-registration feature out of the waterfall rework it had been bundled with and shipped it alone, roughly eight months earlier: 36 first-time buyers, 44 purchases, $500K+ in gross profit.
Built the company's answer to what AI means for how we build — the product-to-engineering handoff, plus a repeatable path to safe production release cleared with legal, compliance, operations and data.
Helped bring the initial marketplace online: live listings sourced by acquisition agents, a surface for investors to find them, and placement for the sales agents who help them close.
Set strategy and scope for the investor-recommendation engine, cutting the first release to one achievable use case so agents work the top ten likely investors per property instead of an undifferentiated call list.
Killed a funnel-optimization program that would have consumed ten people for months before any baseline signal existed; established the baseline, then redirected that capacity to legal-risk, engagement and bid-data products.

arrivia

Executive Director, Product Strategy
Jan 2020 – Nov 2023 · Remote

Travel and loyalty platform serving millions of members through partner brands including USAA, Hilton Grand Vacations and T-Mobile.

promoted 3× in under 4 years

Designed the product model for a reusable, simple-interest amortizing financing platform for memberships and cruises — researched consumer lending from scratch, then decomposed it with engineering. It now generates multimillion-dollar annual interest income.
Automated thousands of cancellations and refunds a year, removing manual agent handling from half of all cancellations.
Led creation of a centralized loyalty-currency ledger and API plus payment and fraud-management tooling, tightening financial control while reducing chargeback and PCI exposure.
Led strategy across six product domains and four product owners: one platform delivered against many partner business models.
Started as the finance product manager, implementing the ERP that solved at scale the reconciliation work I had previously been doing by hand.

Seven years in finance, which is where the analytics habit comes from

CoreLogic

Senior Pricing Analyst · 2018–19

Built an Excel/VBA/SQL tool to model profitability on large bundled deals, and helped set the CoreLogic Store's first public consumer pricing.

Hyundai Capital America

Senior Financial Analyst · 2017–18

Automated commercial profitability reporting; developed cost, OPEX and revenue strategies modeled at $14M annual benefit.

Stifel

Registered Associate · 2012–17

Series 7 registered, supporting a financial-planning team managing $800M in assets.

San Diego State University

BBA, Finance · 2012

Tools and working fluency

Claude CodeCodexAntigravityClaude & Gemini APIsMCP serversVercelGitHubSQLPower BIExcel / VBAJiraConfluenceAzure DevOpsacceptance criteria & manual QA