Ale CabreraAle Cabrera
SHIPPED · ZAPIER · 2021 · 2 WEEKS
Events Salad Bar
A no-code, drag-and-drop tool for creating event schemas, turning a confusing, engineer-dependent process into something any team member could do in minutes.
- 2 wkhackathon to shipped v1
- ↓CI/CD failures from malformed schemas
- 1 clickto submit a PR, with mandatory fields auto-applied and human-readable errors
2 weeks, hackathon to shipped
- Day 1Kickoff: hackathon prototype to test feasibility
- Day 4Validate: user research confirms demand + usability
- Week 2Ship v1: productized drag-and-drop schema builder
- BacklogNext: GitHub/GitLab PR integration requested
How an event schema is built
- Available fields
drag from here - Event schema
drop to build - Required fields auto-filled
errors are human-readable - Submit PR
Two risks, and what happened
| Risk | How it was handled | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Feasibility. A major events migration introduced declared-schema rules for the first time, but there was no tooling to follow them. | Tested the feasibility bet cheaply as a hackathon prototype before committing real build time. | 2 weeks from hackathon to shipped v1. |
| Usability. Every schema change routed through an engineer: a bottleneck, and a real risk that teams would route around the rules under deadline pressure. | Ran it past actual users before productizing: non-engineers could use it and engineers trusted the output. | One engineer called it "everything I dreamed of for creating events" during the demo. |
My role. Spotted the bottleneck, scoped the hackathon prototype, and made the call to productize based on user validation rather than assumption. Owned the taxonomy rules the tool enforces.
With engineering. Worked with the engineer who built the CI/CD checks to make sure the UI's auto-applied defaults matched the pipeline's actual validation rules, avoiding a rebuild.
Product leader with a data scientist past · Zapier, Clearbit, HubSpot
Product doc: ale-cabrera.com/portfolio/events-salad-bar