James Rhodes

Product Manager, Music Streaming · New York

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Senior Product Manager, Playback & Discovery

Waveform Audio · 2021 – present
New York, NY · 6 engineers, 2 designers, 1 data scientist
  • Own the now-playing and queue experience for 4.1M monthly active listeners across web, iOS, and Android.
  • Shipped a redesigned autoplay queue that cut skip rate by 14% and raised average session length from 22 to 31 minutes.
  • Ran a 9-cell A/B test on recommendation shelves that moved daily playlist saves up 27% without hurting artist diversity.
3:12 in role80%ongoing
🔀 Shuffle: cross-team Prev Next 🔁 Repeat: weekly ship
About this listener summary

I have spent 9 years building consumer audio products, most of it on the part people actually touch: the player, the queue, and how the next track gets picked. At Waveform I run a squad of 9 and I still read every session-length dashboard on Monday morning. I care about latency, because a 300ms delay on hitting play is the difference between a session and a bounce.

Up next previous roles
01
SC
Product Manager, Listener Growth
Soundcrate · 2018 – 2021 · San Francisco, CA
  • Led onboarding and free-to-paid conversion; lifted trial-to-subscriber rate from 4.2% to 6.8% over 18 months.
  • Launched offline downloads for Android, adopted by 1.3M users in the first quarter.
3 yr
02
TC
Associate Product Manager
Tunecircle · 2016 – 2018 · Austin, TX
  • Owned the search and browse pages; reduced no-result searches from 11% to 4% with a fuzzy-match rewrite.
  • Wrote specs for the first collaborative playlist feature, which reached 420K playlists in year one.
2 yr
03
MX
Product Analyst
Metrix Labs · 2015 – 2016 · Austin, TX
  • Built the retention funnel dashboards used by 3 product teams and flagged a churn spike tied to a 2s load regression.
1 yr
Playlists skills

Product craft

8 tracks
  • Roadmapping
  • Discovery interviews
  • Spec writing
  • Pricing & packaging
  • 0-to-1 launches

Data & testing

6 tracks
  • A/B experiment design
  • SQL
  • Amplitude / Looker
  • Retention analysis
  • North-star metrics

Team & delivery

5 tracks
  • Squad leadership
  • Design partnership
  • Agile / sprint planning
  • Stakeholder alignment
  • Roadmap comms
Liked albums education & extras
B.S. Information Systems
University of Texas at Austin
2011 – 2015
Pragmatic Institute · Product Management Certified
PMC-III
2019
Speaker: "Designing the Queue"
AudioDev Meetup, New York · 140 attendees
2023