Senior Product Leader · Data & Analytics

Nicole Gravagna, PhD

0→1 Builder  ·  Denver, CO

“My best work happens when there’s no playbook.”

Career highlights

10+
Years in product leadership
6
Products built 0→1
2
Businesses founded (1 exited)
PhD
Neuroscience, U of Colorado

I find the problem nobody has named yet.

I’m a product leader with a PhD in neuroscience, a decade of 0→1 experience, and a habit of building the tool that doesn’t exist yet. I’ve led product at venture-backed SaaS companies, founded a behavioral analytics firm serving Fortune 500 clients, and written books on venture capital and behavioral science.

What ties it together: I think in systems, reason from evidence, and thrive in the ambiguous early stages where there’s no established process to follow. Whether I’m owning a data quality pipeline, designing a neuroscience-backed hiring platform, or rallying engineering, data science, and customer success around a shared problem — I’m the person who makes the whole system move.

01

Diagnostic Strategy

I don’t just manage the roadmap. I diagnose what’s actually broken. At Flagship RTL, I invented the data quality framework when no one else had a plan — before the engineering team had capacity to build one.

02

Cross-Functional Glue

Engineering, data science, customer success, and leadership don’t always speak the same language. I do. I’ve spent a decade translating ambiguity into action and holding the thread across teams.

03

Builder Without a Playbook

Four companies. Six 0→1 products. One founded from scratch. I thrive where the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet and the answer isn’t in a template.

Six Products Built 0→1

Every one of these started with a gap no existing tool could fill.

ML Forecasting · Data Quality

Flagship RTL — Data Quality Pipeline

2023 – 2026

The ML forecasting models were live and the forecasts were wrong. No tool existed to find out why. I diagnosed the root cause and built a SQL-based diagnostic system in Snowflake that screened every SKU before it reached the ML pipeline — catching data integrity failures that would have poisoned production forecasts. I also built the brand data infrastructure and AI-assisted onboarding system that cut time-to-value by 65%.

75%
Early datasets with failures caught
65%
Reduction in onboarding time
20+
Enterprise customers served reliably
8
Data pipelines managed end-to-end
Field Intelligence · Gamification

Spring Global — Field Task Platform

2023

CPG companies had no way to measure field employee speed or motivation — or to know which employees were ready for higher-stakes assignments. I designed the product from idea to execution in six months: a gamified task platform where field reps earn points and XP for task completion, creating portable seniority beyond tenure and giving managers real-time visibility into who to call when a critical project comes up.

$1M+
Recurring annual revenue opportunity identified
6mo
Idea to execution
XP
Portable seniority beyond length of employment
CPG
Large enterprise target market
HR SaaS · 0→1

interviewIA — Structured Hiring Platform

2021 – 2022

Every interviewer asks different questions, making the data incomparable and leaving HR teams unable to predict hiring outcomes. As the first product hire, I applied behavioral neuroscience to treat the interview like a validated survey instrument — giving teams standardized, bias-reduced skill signals. Built the product-led growth model from scratch and delivered the full 18-month roadmap from pre-revenue to enterprise scale.

250%
Enterprise revenue growth
9
Enterprise customers (Fortune 100/500)
28
Self-service customer logos
18mo
Full roadmap delivered 0→1
Behavioral Analytics · Founder

NeuroEQ — Team Intelligence

2016 – 2020

Managers make team decisions — who to add, who to develop into leadership, how to improve collaboration — based largely on intuition. This product turned behavioral data into a team-level intelligence layer: surfacing who works best together, who has leadership potential, and how to integrate new members into an existing group dynamic. It made invisible team chemistry visible and actionable for people managers.

F500
Enterprise client tier
12
MRR enterprise customers across both products
$75K
Avg annual customer value
4yr
Built from zero as founder
Behavioral Analytics · Founder

NeuroEQ — Executive Strategy

2016 – 2020

Organizations make high-stakes structural decisions — standing up a new business unit, overhauling a retention strategy, replacing a retiring CEO — with surprisingly little data about the human dynamics involved. This product translated the same behavioral dataset into strategic intelligence for executives: who can anchor a new team, where the cultural risk sits, and how the organization will absorb change before it happens.

CEO
Succession planning use case
BU
New business unit team design
3
Named F500 clients: Lockheed, Quora, Gordon FS
DaaS
Data-as-a-service delivery model
Civic Tech · Rapid Deployment

Safe2 — COVID Contact Tracing

2020

At the start of the pandemic, no contact tracing infrastructure existed for communities or private organizations. Safe2 was a once-in-a-career volunteer effort: a team of domain experts who came together to build and deploy a working proximity-detecting app under extreme urgency. I managed operations, led 13 international executive-level volunteers, and ran three live pilot programs — proving the product in real-world conditions before the broader tooling landscape had caught up.

iOS+
Proximity-detecting app on both platforms
13
International exec-level volunteers led
3
Live pilots: company + 2 municipalities
0→1
Full product cycle under pandemic urgency

Publications

Books, peer-reviewed research, and applied behavioral science.

📘
Venture Capital for Dummies
John Wiley & Sons · 2013 · Step-by-step guide to securing venture capital, positioning companies, and navigating early-stage fundraising.
📗
MindSET Your Manners
Createspace · 2016 · A behavioral method for moving beyond limiting beliefs.
🔬
Localization of Kv2.2 in Xenopus laevis Embryos
Journal of Comparative Neurology · 2008 · Voltage-gated potassium channel expression during neural development.
🧬
Molecular Characterisation of 17β-HSD Genes in H. glycines
Nematology · 2006 · Gene expression in soybean cyst nematode gonad development.

Let’s work on something hard.

I’m open to senior product leadership roles, advisory conversations, and interesting problems at the intersection of data, AI, and product strategy. Denver-based, open to remote.