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

first deployment→dependable product→growing at scale

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.

Seven years 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.

Two years in defense tech. The noise is everything that gets in an operator’s way. I built for people when failure wasn’t an option, and delivered outcomes that bridged the technical and non-technical worlds. I strongly believe everyone should do a stint in public service!

The past few years: self-driving trucks. 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 a business on autonomy

Kodiak’s trucks could already drive themselves. The harder question was whether a business could run on them: around the clock, hauling sand through the Permian Basin, one of the harshest places to drive. I helped take driverless trucks commercial, from three trucks, each watched by a person, to a fully unmonitored, driverless fleet that runs 24/7, and that the customer keeps growing.

3 → 35+driverless trucks in commercial service

1stcommercial driver-out L4 deployment in the US

How we scaled

A small drone silhouetted against a sunset sky

Defense Digital Service · U.S. Dept. of Defense

Crossing the Valley of Death

Most promising defense software dies between a successful pilot and a permanent program. I led the government’s main platform for securing commercial drones across that gap, to a long-term home with the U.S. Navy, built side by side with the operators who fly.

3,500active operators

45federal agencies

20international partners

What it took to cross

Direct-to-consumer brands

Creating value propositions to buy direct

When a brand sells everywhere, its own site has to earn the sale. Across six consumer brands, I built the differentiators that lived only in the brand’s own channels: consultations, memberships, onboard booking, a better checkout. Customers chose to buy direct and kept coming back, and direct grew its share of each brand’s revenue.

200kstore customers brought online in 3 months

2×checkout conversion

What made them choose direct

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.

hello@scarletthao.me

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