Strategic Direction and 0→1 Execution
Turn ambiguous ideas into coherent direction in early-stage and transitional environments.

Melissa Cooper
PRODUCT LEADER
I've spent my career working at inflection points: new products, platform shifts, and business model pivots across marketplaces, fintech, and consumer platforms.
Turn ambiguous ideas into coherent direction in early-stage and transitional environments.
Close the gap between user behaviour and product decisions without losing speed or depth.
Build both sides of marketplaces with deep focus on seller behavior, pricing, and growth dynamics.
Building and shipping products using AI-native development workflows, combining customer discovery, rapid prototyping, and implementation.
A live observation tool for usability testing, built to capture and pattern researcher notes in real time.
An app for offloading racing thoughts at night so you can get back to sleep.
Running live ecommerce businesses across Etsy, Shopify, and Amazon gives me ground-level insight into seller behavior and marketplace dynamics.
First UX hire, grew to Director of UX. Led the team that built reserved seating from the ground up, including a self-service seat map designer scaling to 100,000 seats, enabling Eventbrite to expand into venues, music, and galas. Patents pending in ticket template creation and reserved seating ranking systems.
Head of UX and Design during pivot from consumer payments to B2B payments infrastructure. Established the merchant centre, developer portal, and product positioning for a platform processing $3.5B annually.
First Product Manager and Head of Product at Australia’s largest online art marketplace, helping drive ~3x transaction growth in 18 months. Expanded into new verticals, rebuilt consumer experience, seller tools, and analytics, and increased conversion by ~1 percentage point within the first two weeks.
Founding product team member for Happy Force. Led product discovery, validation, and execution for a new property maintenance offering that reached $1M ARR in its first year.
Running live ecommerce businesses across Etsy, Shopify, and Amazon gives me ground-level insight into seller behavior, marketplace mechanics, and conversion that most PMs only see in data.