"UrbanSpoon is a developer lead organization where people are held accountable. Sometimes it's difficult when one person starts talking about an idea and they don't know how to articulate it. And really, they're the only person that gets the idea. In that environment I really fall back on accountability. That person or that developer, they're the owner of that product, and they're allowed to try out that idea and see what the response is like on our website or on our mobile apps. And then if they succeed, they can continue building on that idea. But we wanted them to get an iteration of that idea up quickly, and then depending on that response, iterate on it or kill the idea. We tend to kill products quickly." -- Mani Dhillion
Is it a good idea if nobody gets it?
As General Manager of Urbanspoon, Mani Dhillon is responsible for continuing the hyper growth of the company and further developing innovative products like the new Urbanspoon Rezbook® application, a reservation and table management system designed for the Apple iPad. Before joining Urbanspoon, Dhillon served as Director, Product Management and Business Development at Electronic Arts where he was responsible for developing and managing cross-platform strategies for iPhone, social networking and online games. During his tenure with EA, he was responsible for bringing Pogo Casual Gaming service to Facebook and iPhone.
Prior to joining Urbanspoon and Electronic Arts, Dhillon was the Director, Global Product Management within the Consumer Business Group at Cisco Systems, where his team managed the Linksys portfolio of 100 products which generated over $900 million in revenue. He also served in strategic planning and product development capacities at Price Waterhouse’s Entertainment Technology Group and with Verizon Wireless. Dhillon has a MBA from Northwestern University and a BA from University of Southern California. You can follow Dhillon’s dining experiences at http://www.urbanspoon.com/u/profile/777962/Mani-Dhillon.html.
