Recapping my time @Chronicle

Chronicle is a seed-stage B2B startup on a mission to reinvent presentations, creating interactive, beautiful outputs without the design burden. Instead of teams spending hours formatting decks in PowerPoint or Google Slides, Chronicle makes it fast, collaborative, and stunning out-of-the-box.

I joined Chronicle in June 2022 as the founding Product Manager along a small and mighty team of ~15 people. It was an exciting zero-to-one environment that was fast-moving and high-impact. At Chronicle, I helped set product foundations, shipped the first private beta, and ran product discovery on new initiatives.

Here are a few highlights from my time:

1. New Features: Trends block

One of the most impactful features I led was the Trends block. Presenters consistently struggled to make data both accurate and compelling — existing tools like Sheets, Pitch, and June were either too manual, too static, or too design-heavy.

We set out to create a block that let users pull in metrics (e.g. revenue, retention, ad spend) and instantly transform them into polished visual narratives with animation and context. My role was to drive user research, define the problem space, and align product, design, and engineering on scope.

The result: within a month of launch, 35% of active teams were using Trends in their decks, and we saw a 20% uplift in presentation completion rates. More importantly, the block became a key differentiator. While Sheets required hours of manual formatting, Chronicle made it possible to create a board-ready chart in under 30 seconds.

2. Execution: Ways of Working

At an early-stage company, velocity matters — but so does quality. I designed and rolled out Chronicle’s end-to-end build process, an 8-stage framework with formal stage gates (exploration, PRD, design, build, refinement, launch). This aligned product, design, and engineering from the earliest stages of exploration and gave us a shared bar for what “ready to ship” really meant.

I also introduced a lightweight sprint planning model. Pods were staffed intentionally across priorities — balancing urgent bugs and tech debt with high-upside product bets like the Trends block. This gave the team the ability to execute fast while still carving out space for big, differentiated features.

3. Strategic Planning

In addition to shipping features, I helped shape Chronicle’s product strategy and planning process. I worked with the leadership team to define our mission (“anyone can tell impactful stories, effortlessly”) and a six-month vision centered on reducing design burden and making storytelling seamless.

To bring this to life, I set user experience goals (flow state, minimal design overhead, captivating outputs by default) and product principles (start from the ideal UX, scope down to core essence, ship work you’re proud of). These acted as guardrails for every feature we shipped.

We then organized execution around three strategic efforts, balancing near-term delivery with long-term differentiation. This planning cycle gave Chronicle clarity, focus, and a roadmap that tied directly back to our mission.

Reflections

Working at Chronicle was a masterclass in building from the ground up. I learned how to balance structure and speed, how to translate user pain into differentiated product bets, and how to bring features to market in ways that actually drove adoption.

The work was fast, scrappy, and sometimes messy — but it was also transformative. We proved that storytelling software doesn’t have to live in static slides. It can be interactive, data-driven, and designed for the next generation of teams.

And that, to me, is the real legacy of Chronicle: not just making presentations easier, but reimagining how ideas are shared in business.