Scarlett Hao.
San Francisco

I turn “it works” into “we can’t work without it.”

first deployment→dependable product→growing at scale

Scarlett Hao

Hi, I’m Scarlett.

I’m a product leader who likes to go where the hard problems and the good people are.

Scaling is messy. That’s the job.

Finding patterns through the noise.

Every industry I’ve worked in looked different on the surface. Underneath, the same patterns kept showing up.

In consumer and digital, customers vote with every click. I learned to read the signal in all that data: what makes people convert, and what makes them come back.

In defense and civic tech, the noise is everything that gets in an operator’s way. I learned to build for people when failure isn’t an option.

In physical AI, the noise is the real world itself. That’s where I put both patterns to work: technology that has to perform every shift.

Organizing chaos: a history

Where I’ve been, and how I left it better.

A Kodiak driverless truck hauling two trailers along a sandy road in the Permian Basin
Kodiak AI

Building businesses on driverless trucks

We proved the value of bringing autonomy into a business that already runs: driverless trucks working alongside human-driven fleets, and a clear picture of how a customer actually adopts this technology, from the first load to the operating changes, trust, and economics that follow.

35+driverless trucks in commercial service
24/7hauling, with no one in the cab
1stcommercial driver-out L4 deployment in the US
A small drone silhouetted against a sunset sky
Defense Digital Service · U.S. Dept. of Defense

Keeping operators on mission

Through the Defense Digital Service, I helped operators complete their missions on a cyber-hardened commercial drone platform, building features alongside the people flying them so security made the job easier, not harder.

4,500+units secured
5 mintime to first flight for a new user
Direct-to-consumer brands

Building the direct-to-consumer channel

I owned various parts of the funnel (acquisition, conversion, and retention) across established and growing brands, and led teams to deliver against revenue goals while growing brand and trust within natively owned ecosystems.

Where I can help

  • Designing how customers actually adopt new technology: onboarding, operating rhythm, trust
  • Bringing order to launches that sit across product, operations, and the customer
  • Building people-first product teams, or steadying ones in the middle of a scale-up
  • Companies that want to harness the power of AI to build at speed

Where I’m not the best fit

  • Pure research or early R&D, before there’s a customer in sight
  • Product teams that don’t have a seat at the decision table
Curious by default

How do things work? Why do people use them the way they do?

Why do customers drop off before checkout? What stops a servicemember from getting a drone ready to fly? What makes a business hesitate to run driverless trucks? The most interesting answer is rarely the technology. It’s the people using it, and what they need to trust it. Outside of work, that curiosity takes me around San Francisco on my Vespa, out among the flora and fauna, often halfway through a bag of chips.

Contact

If you're building something people will depend on, I'd like to hear about it.

Currently open to product leadership roles, advisory work, and conversations about scaling physical AI.