Sasha Katsnelson
Product leader · Madrid, Spain
Summary
Product-focused executive with 10+ years of strategy and implementation experience — from presenting results and supporting an acquisition to prototyping a brand-new product and setting its go-to-market. My work has improved outcomes for media, advertising, payments and education B2B users, with an emphasis on data pipelines, auditability and machine learning.
Experience
Affirm
Buy-now-pay-later; ZT1 is the internal incubator · Madrid (remote)
Director of Product Management, ZT1
2024 – 2025- Prototyped a cross-surface design and feature-validation platform that uses existing CI flows and AI to keep design, product, sales, support and engineering aligned across the product lifecycle.
- Launched a mobile app in the UK on time and under budget, and wrote the playbook for Affirm’s direct-to-consumer internationalization.
- Designed a new in-store checkout flow that lets users navigate their options in the app, cutting time at the register by 50%.
- Managed a team of three engineers across Spain and Poland.
Climate Central
Climate-change communication non-profit · Princeton, NJ (remote)
Product Manager, Director of Realtime Climate
2020 – 2024- Grew outreach volume more than 5× and improved the quality and diversity of messages for Realtime Climate, an automated system that gives journalists timely, relevant data to bring climate change into their reporting.
- Led a product at the forefront of climate science, aligning climate researchers, communicators and product development.
- Prioritized audiences and features, and measured success against non-profit impact metrics.
Applecart
Machine-learning-driven marketing via a national social graph · New York (remote)
Product Manager, Modeling
2018 – 2019- Led 4–6 data scientists and analysts delivering internal and client-facing machine-learning and entity-resolution pipelines.
- Set the strategic vision for data science and drove adoption of social-graph and match-quality metrics, plus iterative delivery.
- Prioritized features and client-specific models with a transparent, company-wide rubric.
Noodle
Education search for parents and students · New York
VP of Marketing and Analytics
2016 – 2017- Led strategy and development of a marketing-optimization tool allocating spend across SEM, display, business development and offline channels — cutting wasted spend by 95%.
- Ran revenue, user-behavior and product tests to validate hypotheses, improve ad-product ROI and streamline sales.
Head of Analytics
2015 – 2016- Built a Python / S3 / Redshift ETL unifying partner and first-party data, laying the groundwork for automated optimization.
- Codified the reporting process, cutting effort by 80% while improving accuracy and consistency.
- Built user-flow tracking from arrival to activation, filtering bots, scrapers and internal traffic.
Product Manager
2014 – 2015- Reworked provider onboarding, raising activation from 9% to 34%.
Maxifier
Ad optimization for publishers · New York
Director of Product Management
2013 – 2014- Introduced a transparent, objective prioritization framework for product decisions.
- Coordinated teams in New York and Samara, Russia to ship a new HTML5 product and schedule upgrades across 21 clients.
- Defined the global product vision across US, European and APAC clients, and built the go-to-market story for the ADMAX optimization engine.
Readfa.st & Tovide
Founder of two early-stage startups · New York
Founder and Product Manager
2010 – 2012- Readfa.st — co-founded a literacy product focused on reading efficiency.
- Tovide — built tagging and search for a photo-organization prototype (Rails, Solr).
Yahoo / Associated Content
Associated Content was acquired by Yahoo in 2010 · New York
Sales Analyst
2009 – 2011- Provided the analytics that guided strategy and supported the acquisition by Yahoo.
- Built pricing and inventory models that eliminated under-delivery across 60 categories.
- Set 2011 sales targets and revenue plan for the Yahoo Contributor Network.
Selected consulting
- 10X 2020 – 2025
- Integrated and modernized legacy systems to improve sales analytics and reporting.
- Climate Central 2019 – 2020
- Specified and project-managed a climate-news delivery engine, plus content-distribution and impact analytics.
- Passive.ai 2019 – 2020
- Cleaned and integrated data, growing the training set by 80%; refactored code to speed up experimentation.
- Noodle 2017
- Ran three two-week validation experiments for an ed-tech company, leading remote sprints and analytics.
- Applecart 2017
- Delivered lobbying-campaign targets from analysis of social and professional networks.
- Agent Inbox 2017
- Identified the traits that predict frequent, loyal users for a real-estate messaging startup.
- Newspaper Association of America 2012
- Wrote the 2013 plan for member education, communications and advocacy.
- Belcampo Meat Company 2012
- Built herd-projection models to guide a sustainable meat producer from startup to steady state.
Education
Columbia University
2006B.S. Operations Research, minors in Economics and Computer Science
Independent research in auction theory (ε-equilibrium bidding) and queuing theory (shipping security).
Community
- Common Threads 2014 – 2020
- Technical advisor on analytics, technology and infrastructure.
- Columbia Venture Community 2011 – 2014
- VP of the pitch competition — 20 submissions, 400 votes, $1,000 in prizes from local VCs.
Skills & interests
- Languages
- English, Russian, Spanish
- Programming
- Python, JavaScript, SQL, HTML/CSS
- Interests
- Stories, games, rock climbing