LorenzoGravinaNotes

Resume

In short

For the past few years, I’ve been the product manager of Ango Hub, an AI data annotation platform used by or in projects for FAANG, Fortune 50, and Mag7.

I was the second hire at Ango AI, the startup behind Ango Hub, founded in late 2020. Ango AI was then acquired by iMerit in mid-2023, and we continue our work there on Ango Hub as a team.

Work experience

Senior Product Manager at iMerit (July 2023 - )

I manage Ango Hub, a platform used by iMerit to annotate and create AI training data for clients including the top foundational AI companies.

Ango Hub is a key piece of infrastructure at iMerit as it’s the tool through which the majority of projects are carried out, generating millions of dollars in revenue.

As part of my role as product manager, together with determining the direction of the product and managing its development team, I am also its foremost internal and external advocate, having demoed it hundreds of times both online and offline. (While most of my demos were given privately to clients, a few public ones exist, such as one on some of our GenAI features and one on agent evaluation.)

Founding Generalist at Ango AI (December 2020 - June 2023)

Ango AI was a startup setting out to create a user friendly yet powerful AI data annotation tool to the market. I was the second hire, and together with the founders, we charted out a path for Ango Hub, starting with a small 100k USD seed round and culminating a few years later in our exit, being acquired by iMerit.

As Ango AI was a small startup, I was wearing many hats, not just strictly that of product manager. Together with being Ango Hub’s product manager, I handled Ango AI’s marketing and, occasionally, sales if it was necessary.

Education

B.A. in International Relations (Bilkent University, Ankara, 2020)

Finished third in the department with a 3.94 GPA.

Computer Science High School (A. Avogadro, Turin, 2013)

About me / Working with me

  • I’m somewhere in between technical and non-technical. Maybe “semi-technical”? While I’ve rarely, in a job setting, submitted code directly, I’m more technical than the average PM, and I shipped stuff on my own in the past, even commercially (before AI). I’m basically a software nerd who stopped just short of becoming a full blown programmer because I realized I liked PMing more.
  • As a product manager, your number one skill should be knowing when to say no.
  • But yes, you can have high functionality while keeping the product from becoming overwhelming. Keeping that balance is exactly the PM’s job.
  • Every department in the company should know and have used the product. Especially sales and marketing. I have and will go to great lengths to make sure this is true.
    • For example, at iMerit, I have created an internal one-way chat channel where I post videos, news, releases, etc related to the product, which quickly rose to have over 2k members and has become the most subscribed-to internal channel. Now everybody knows what we’re shipping.
  • I don’t shy away from publicly praising people who do well.
  • With most of my work experience being in startups, I have an innate startup mentality. I dislike friction, and like environments where if I have a low-impact idea in the morning, it can reasonably be shipped to prod the same day.
  • No work is beneath me. If it benefits the product, I will do it while a more permanent solution is found.
    • For example while waiting for a QA engineer at Ango AI, I was doing all manual feature testing myself as the PM.
    • And since we didn’t have a docs person, I also wrote all of the docs. (https://docs.imerit.net)
    • And since there was no person bridging marketing and product, after talking to marketing, I hired a designer and built a separate product website myself. (currently WIP still, and in a bureucratic limbo, but you can find its v0.1 at https://ango.ai)
  • I see being a “product manager” to be holistic, and more than just “picking some features.” As the PM, you should also deeply care about how your product is designed, marketed, and sold.
  • Ever since the advent of Claude / Codex, I enjoy making functional working mockups of my ideas with it, I find it to be much more powerful than regular mockups (although those are good too).

Some interests and quirky fun facts

  • Before enrolling into university, I worked as a flight attendant for Ryanair for a year, living in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. (2014)
  • I have a small software side project (an ebook reader for learners of Japanese) which earns enough to sustain itself and make a profit.
  • I held the Italian record for fastest solve of a variant of the Rubik’s Cube.
  • I was one of the main proponents of the “slip-box (Zettelkasten)” method of taking notes online and my blog posts and videos at the time helped bootstrap the note-taking software Obsidian in its extremely early days.
  • I performed English voice acting for a 2019 video game.
  • I occasionally maintain an online presence on a personal blog (not this, but this: https://trms.me) and YouTube channel. There, I talk about productivity, software, and other things I like.
  • I am passionate about graphic design, industrial design, and typography.
  • I have been a semi-professional photographer (some photos here).
  • I’m an avid reader of non-fiction books, especially history.