Michael Nicholas

Junior Product Manager | SocialLadder

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Hello there! You can call me Mike. I am a technical professional with prior experience in product and software engineering environments who now focuses on product management and development, user-interface and user-experience design, and all things user-focused decision-making.
I graduated with my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (with minors in Informatics and Business), Summa Cum Laude in May of 2020 from the University at Albany, and completed the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate in August of 2021.
My passion has always been expanding towards a wide range of technical fields and projects to see how I can improve my skillset, whether in the workplace or otherwise. I am a self-taught Figma Designer, have worked in numerous programming languages (from front-end design to backend implementation and database architecture), and I am a lover of all things spreadsheets.
Resume Portfolio

SocialLadder

As of March 2022, my current role is as a Junior Product Manager at SocialLadder, where I am the team’s roadmap manager and feature designer.

SocialLadder is an all-in-one platform that enables brands to track and manage creators, influencers, brand ambassadors, street teams, affiliates, college reps, and advocates from one single platform. SocialLadder operates on a web-based portal for admins, and offers mobile / web-based experiences for ambassadors, which I oversee product development and rollout of new and existing features for each.

One of my favorite feature launches was one of my first, Creator Search - one of our many features focused on brand ambassador outreach. Creator Search leverages a Creator database of over 100M creators across TikTok and Instagram to provide advanced filtering and sorting options to tailor your search for potential brand ambassadors. Through the feature, users can search for creators and scan through different demographics, social media accounts, reach, engagements, and contact information, amongst other creator information, for potential brand ambassador applicants-to-be. Then, they can export this information to contact these creators to apply to join an ambassador hosted by SocialLadder. If you're intrigued, check out the overview guide of Creator Search that I made on the left to learn more!

Check out SocialLadder here!

Download SocialLadder on the Play Store or on the App Store!

IdeasFWD

At the start of 2021, I was fortunate enough to team up with Joshua Murphy, Founder and CEO of IdeasFWD. IdeasFWD is a young and small start-up self-described as "more than a communications firm; but a movement to challenge the status quo and give power back to the people."

Joshua hired me as a Lead Technical Intern at the beginning of January 2021, quickly extending my role to a Lead Product and Technical Intern. We collaborated together alongside a small, international team in designing a mobile-focused social platform that allows you to co-create with an inclusive community called WeCreatives.

IdeasFWD, and subsequently WeCreatives' mission is to drive creative equity and creative agency forward globally. Having worked on the team, I am excited to see where the project goes next.

Check out IdeasFWD here!

Cyclistic Biking

As a part of the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate, I was tasked with completing a self-paced capstone project. This capstone was in the form of a case study involving a fictional bike-share company called Cyclistic. The purpose of the study was to delineate between casual and member ridership data and trends to determine actionable insights that could provide the top three potential conversion marketing strategies.

This project was the culmination of the skills I learned in this certificate, including choosing between developed software skills in Tableau, BigQuery, the Google Workspace (Sheets, Slides, Docs), Excel Spreadsheets, and R/RStudio, as well as best practices and important methodlogies, such as the six phases of data analysis. You can find out more information about the project by either watching the attached video or by exploring the presentation linked below.

Check out the presentation and source files here!

Check out the RMarkdown file for an analysis breakdown here!

TradeX

TradeX was a combined effort by me and my software engineering class group to compete against other groups in the class for a "fake bid on a contract" that was calling for aspiring software engineers to create a portfolio management application. The application collects user's stock information and plots them using tabular and graphing data, the latter of which utilizes highcharts.

My role in the project was to develop our PHP backend, manage our MySQL database for user/asset/portfolio information, as well as that of a business liasion in presenting our work to our "customer" (our professor would switch back and forth between guiding mentor and scrutinizing customer), during our three separate formal product demonstrations, as well as the more nuanced, behind the scenes interactions. Check out the trailer video I created to the right to learn more.

Check out the project repository here!

UI/UX @ Beemo

During my college education, I had the opportunity to partake in a Software Engineering Internship for credit focusing on "Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction" in Muenster, Germany.

The goal of my internship was working on updating the user interface for a construction and mechanical engineering toy debugger called Fischertechnik. While my time on the team was cut short due to COVID-19, I was able to gain experience from a real team of software engineers and take my initial steps to learn about the product lifecycle.

Check out Beemo here!

Champion Mastery Tool

This is a personal project (which is currently on hold) started in my spare time back in Winter of 2019 and again in December of 2020.

The project is a proof-of-concept application web-hosted on Heroku and developed by me that allows for players of the popular MOBA game League of Legends to compare their character data and mastery with other players, to see who is the best at what characters. It uses Riot Games' developer API to collect player data and champion statistics, stores them into a MySQL relational database, and displays them in a PHP frontend application.

Check out the project repository here!