I'm a digital health product lead with broad experience in consumer web and mobile product development.

I’m passionate about listening to customers; I use quantitative metrics and qualitative customer insights to guide products from conception to launch. 

Highlights:

Noteworth: digital health platform - Helping patients and clinicians to fully realize the benefit of digital health products, to better engage patients, improve care coordination, reduce costs and target outcomes. 2+ years in partnership with a physician domain expert to thoroughly understand the perspectives and concerns of users. 

Mentor - USC, Children’s Hospital LA: Mentored USC graduate students as part of CHLA diabetes design sprint.

Cedars-Sinai / Techstars accelerator: Led product development on-location at world-renowned healthcare institution partnered with leading technology accelerator. - 75+ customer interviews, 50+ mentor interviews

Hexagram: Mobile & Web platform used by 20th Century Fox, X-Men, Intel / Vice. Alfa Arkiv - Apple: “Best New Games.” 

Yahoo! Vertical Search: Analytics & reporting toolset, machine learning: naïve bayes classifier.

Yahoo! Marketplaces: Data feed optimization system. Praised by top-tier merchants: Amazon, Target, Nike, Zappos, Nordstrom, etc.

“Having worked very closely with Dennis for two years, I can confidently say that he's an incredibly hard worker who is committed to building and delivering the best products possible in addition to being a valuable and resourceful team member. His approach to building clinically-applicable products is open-minded, comprehensive and thoughtful. In my role as subject matter expert, Dennis routinely came to me seeking to learn more, to understand more and to validate his thinking—all in service of delivering the best possible product. Additionally, he demonstrated a level of focus and accountability that matched the outstanding quality of his work. I very much enjoyed my time working with Dennis on both a personal and professional level and it's my sense that he has that same effect on all partners he encounters.”

- Peter Bucciarelli, M.D. Director, Clinical Strategy and Operations, Noteworth

“Dennis is a rising star. Smart, focused, inquisitive, and passionate about his work. He has a wide range of skills sets (UX Design, Quantitative Analytics, Consumer experience) and excels at execution.”

Omkar Kulkarni, MPH, Chief Innovation Officer at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA)

“Dennis was a mentor to my classmates and I during a Design Sprint at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. He is a “velvet hammer” delivering thought-provoking questions in a measured/kind manner that left a huge impact on our design process. It was refreshing to have his input in the various stages of ideation throughout the weekend and I look forward to working with him again!”

-Lewey Knox, MS Candidate, Integrated Design, Business, and Technology @ The USC Iovine and Young Academy

" Much of the pleasure of working with Dennis is that Dennis is such an immense pleasure to work with. Both as a manager and in a client-facing capacity, Dennis exudes efficiency and professionalism while remaining accessible, caring, and focused on the quality of the project and the well-being of the team.

The net result for clients and employees alike—one that was frequently communicated from multiple parties across both sides of the client line—is that Dennis is a gentle shepherd who allows projects and teams to reach their potential without sacrificing quality of life and without undue frustrations.He greases the cogs of excellence in a likable and stalwart manner while maintaining an intelligent, almost enigmatic persona that clearly values the myriad concerns and personalities around him. To this he additionally brings his own wide-ranging interests, including an aestheticism that stems from his background in the visual arts.He is supremely honest, hard-working, and loyal to his beliefs and that which is best for the project and the related individuals.

The rest of the pleasure of working with Dennis comes from the fact that he is Dennis, a singular individual with a broad cultural awareness that enriches and invigorates the people around him. Tech culture needs more broad, T-shaped people like him and working with him is always a supreme pleasure. I look forward to doing so again in the future. "

— Rob Auten - CEO, Hexagram, Writer - Gears of War: Judgment & Battlefield: Hardline

" I had the pleasure of working for Dennis at Hexagram and I have known Dennis in a professional capacity for more than a year now. Along with CEO Rob Auten and CTO Stan Wiechers, Dennis kept our ship afloat and always sailing smoothly forward. 

At Hexagram, Dennis managed a diverse and brilliant group of game and app developers, while interfacing as our primary point-of-contact with back-end clients (including Twentieth Century Fox, among others). He was also essential in raising funding from investors and clients that kept us buoyant and agile. 

Foremost, I found Dennis to be an exceptional team builder and team leader. He engineers experiences that bring teams together to work on exciting projects at their best. This is just one of the many things I found that Dennis excels at best. Additionally, Dennis was a font of information for us at Hexagram regarding the latest developments in e-commerce, app development, product and project management, and trends in design and art. 

Dennis is a hard-working, warm and thoughtful co-worker, and a joy to collaborate with. I would happily work for Dennis again, as much as I would happily hire him, and I give him my very highest recommendation. "

— Avery J. Wiscomb - Communications Consultant, English Instructor & Ph.D. Student in Lit. & Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University

" I had the pleasure of working with Dennis Hoekstra in the product management team at Yahoo! Shopping. He is, without a doubt, one of the professionals that I have most admired working with in my career. He can look at a problem from a high vantage point and make keen strategic decisions as well as dive into specific details. When Dennis is working on a project he’s usually the first one in the office and the last one to leave and his passion for what he’s doing is infectious.

He’s the most creative product manager I’ve had the chance to work with and his sense of design and style add another dimension to an already strong, and very technology-oriented product management style. I’m not sure if I’ve ever worked with another product person that was so knowledgeable about the technology behind the scenes. Folks like Dennis are rare. They excel in more than one discipline, and Dennis is definitely one of the most rounded product people I’ve come across. 

To this day, Dennis and I talk on a regular basis. He’s someone that I turn to for advice and feedback. He’s honest, approachable and always on the cutting edge of what’s going on in the industry, which makes him a great person to bounce ideas off of. If I were to start my own company tomorrow Dennis would be one of the first people I would call. "

— Benjamin Bartels - Sr Product Manager, eBay

" Dennis has been a pleasure to work with and an invaluable resource throughout the years that we’ve known each other. As a product advisor at Aedeas, Dennis helped the team to focus the product offering, adding value throughout the development process. Dennis brings years of big data and analytics experience to his role and has been able to distill and crystalize our product offering. Dennis is a driven, focused, calm and empathetic team member and thought leader.

Additionally, Dennis has made valuable contributions to new enterprises in a range of categories, from outdoor advertising at Aap! Global, healthcare social support networks at WeAreUs, along with mobile app development at NexStudios. 

We’ve remained friends throughout the years and we continue to rely on each other for insights, advice or simply as a sounding-board for new ideas. I’ll continue to rely on Dennis’ thoughtful and insightful feedback going forward. "

— Robert Patterson - Principal, Aedeas Group

Mobile App | ALFA-ARKIV: a digital novel

ALFA-ARKIV is a digital novel masquerading as a game. Combining themes of surveillance culture, genetic modification, and Soviet history, it is as culturally relevant as it is technologically innovative. ALFA-ARKIV was featured as a "Best New Game" by Apple and lauded by media outlets such as CNET and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as one of the top mobile experiences of that year.

User sign-up flow | Using metrics to optimize user onboarding

Investigating a a high drop-off rate before the paywall on an iOS app - tracking user flow through an AI chatbot-gated paywall, using the Hexagram user-state tracking system.

Moonshots | A review of innovation strategies

Moonshot innovations require big thinking and should meet the following criteria: (1) addresses a large market, (2) a major breakthrough and (3) a10x improvement. A pithy and concise way to frame this thinking is Larry Page's Toothbrush Test: "Is this something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?

X-Men X-Tension | Immersive & alternate reality

20th Century Fox asked us to help them create an entirely new kind of Facebook page film promotion.The result: a Google Chrome Extension which transforms the X-Men Facebook page into an immersive experience.

Data-driven decisions

Feed scoring system for comparison-shopping engine structured data feeds. The Feed Scoring System gave merchants and the teams that supported them, more insight into the quality of a Yahoo! Shopping data feed. This data feed quality information could be used for a variety of activities including: feed reviews, optimization suggestions, and competitive benchmarking.

Customer success & onboarding

An example of a launch plan for a support and customer success team. My role in this exercise, is to advocate for the consumer throughout the development process, develop a support launch plan, measure and track consumer success, along with testing and optimizing new support features.