Vanessa Kafka

At Eventbrite, I led the shift toward a more personalized, discovery-driven consumer marketplace, redesigning the mobile app and launching social discovery features like Friends and It List to drive gains in retention and paid conversion. I scaled experimentation across ranking, discovery, and checkout flows, delivering paid-ticket growth during a period of company-wide revenue pressure. Alongside growth, I built a modern product operating model — rolling out Product Principles, career frameworks, and outcome-driven planning.

At Tinyhood, I partnered with founders to define product vision and growth strategy for an on-demand learning platform for parents and led the company’s shift to subscription, including engineering planning and rapid prototyping ahead of a Q4 launch. I introduced experimentation practices to validate pricing, onboarding, and engagement during the business-model transition.

Over nearly 8 years at KAYAK, I grew from one of the company’s first PMs into SVP, ultimately leading 40 PMs and designers across KAYAK, Momondo, CheapFlights, and other global brands. My teams built large-scale personalization, ranking, and experimentation systems powering discovery in 60+ countries, launched KAYAK’s first branded hotel spanning digital and on-premise experiences, and led COVID-era pivots into rentals, multimodal travel, and engagement products. I also unified teams across acquisitions, redesigned operating models around autonomous, journey-owned squads with embedded data science, and shifted north-star metrics toward booking-based economics through close partnership with Commercial.

At Wayfair, I led customer acquisition for early lifestyle brands, doubling first-14-day conversion through creative testing, incentives, and landing-page optimization.

At Hailo, I launched the company’s first U.S. ride-hailing operation, building the Boston team and recruiting thousands of licensed drivers through partnerships with regulators and local dispatch networks.