Recent Projects from Mark Allen

Tonal

As director of product management, I created and led Tonal’s membership, growth and analytics product pillar. During turbulent covid and macroeconomic disruptions, we were able to keep our our monthly subscriber churn to levels well below industry benchmarks, scaled our billing and support infrastructures to handle 10x annual growth, and piloted forward-looking initiatives to help drive future growth.

Role: Product Management

Brevet Stopped Time

After a few slower than expected ultra-distance cycling events, I wanted to see where I was losing time, so I built this little tool to analyze GPX files and find where I was stopping and calculate some efficiency metrics. My rides got much more organized after this.

Role: Design, React, Leaflet

Paris Brest Paris Ride Calculator

Every four years, thousands of cyclists gather in Paris to ride 1200km to the city of Brest and back in under 90 hours. I’m riding in 2023, and built this site to help plan my pacing strategy and figure out how much sleep I can manage while staying under the time limit (hint: it’s not much!)

Role: Design, React

Leaf

Writing in Markdown is wonderful. But when you need to share Markdown content with someone, you first have to either convert it to another format or upload it to a code-centric service like Github Gist. Leaf takes any Markdown file, renders it beautifully, and gives you a shareable URL.

Role: Strategy, Design, React, Express API

Beans.to

Of all the issues facing humanity during universal shelter-in-place orders, having access to freshly roasted third wave coffee beans perhaps isn’t at the top of the list of priorities. It’s somewhere on that list though, and I wanted to help connect my neighbours with the great local roasters in Toronto still open for business.

Role: Strategy, Design, Gatsby, Contentful CMS

Teleport

We spend all day in Zoom meetings now, and sometimes it’s weird to invite your whole office into your living room slash home office slash day care center. Teleport is a crowdsourced collection of interesting virtual backrounds for Zoom.

Role: Strategy, Design, Gatsby, Contentful CMS

RelayPad

Organizing and sharing knowledge in the workplace is so painful that you probably groaned just reading this sentence, so I co-founded a company to fix it. RelayPad is a shared notebook that helps teams capture the knowledge that needs to outlive a chat message.

Although the company we built didn’t end up taking the world by storm, I learned a ton about customer research, marketing, ruthless product prioritization, software development, marketing, and managing remote teams.

Role: Strategy, Design, React

MapMyFitness

After MyFitnessPal was acquired by Under Armour, I led product management for Under Armour’s MapMyFitness suite of products. There I helped design and build an app for the Under Armour Gemini 2, the world’s first smart running shoe featuring a Bluetooth-connected activity tracking sensor.

Role: Product Management

MyFitnessPal

At MyFitnessPal, I created a food insights feature that delivered real-time, personalized feedback to users and helped invent a patented recipe parsing tool that used natural language processing and machine learning to interpret a list of ingredients and calculate nutrition facts for the recipe. I also worked with Apple on building the MyFitnessPal Apple Watch app as a featured part of the Apple Watch launch.

Role: Product Management, Design