Richard Zhao

Sr. Product Manager | Chicago Booth MBA

Palo Alto, California, United States

About

Product leader with 10+ years of PM & 7+ Yrs DEV experience.

Experience

  • Technical Product Manager at TikTok
    Sep 2022 - Present · 3 yrs 11 mos

    • Filed a patent for an LLM-driven diagnostic algorithm and drove 0→1 productization of a multi-agent AI incident diagnosis platform that synthesizes multimodal inputs and applies LLM-based reasoning to generate suggested root causes, delivering a unified orchestration framework, 10+ core AI components, reducing incident investigation time by 50%. • Led design and onboarding of a global compliance platform for 600+ services/PSM across 20+ business lines and multiple regions, achieving local regulatory compliance while maintaining controlled production traffic at scale. • Redesigned the UX of an internal compliance platform, reducing workflow steps by 20% and introducing AI-assisted draft generation and validation; cut average task completion time by 35% through streamlined UI and submission flows. • Optimized production on-call workflow by launching a RAG-based AI assistant built on structured incident history, increasing automated AI response coverage by ~15% and reducing on-call engineering effort by 33%.

  • Senior Product Manager at Oracle
    Dec 2020 - Sep 2022 · 1 yr 10 mos

    • Owned product strategy, pricing, roadmap, and GTM execution for cost-optimized cloud, driving $6M+ annual revenue. • Enabled customers to reduce infrastructure spend by 50–87% through pricing and architecture innovation. • Coordinated across compute, storage, networking, and capacity teams to ensure scalable rollout. • Conducted customer validation, segmentation, and usage analysis to refine positioning and growth strategy.

  • Co-Founder & Product Director at SuperiorCustomLinens.com
    May 2015 - Sep 2022 · 7 yrs 5 mos

    • Built and scaled a DTC startup from $0 to $1M+ ARR through SEO-driven acquisition, referral loops, and funnel optimization. • Improved CVR by 20% through landing page A/B testing, messaging optimization, and checkout friction reduction. • Achieved 50% repeat purchase rate and improved LTV/CAC through lifecycle automation and referral growth. • Led end-to-end product lifecycle including design, sourcing, pricing, brand positioning, and GTM strategy. • Reduced platform dependency by shifting from Amazon to owned channels, improving gross margin and CAC efficiency.

  • Product Manager at Access Softek
    Jul 2019 - Dec 2020 · 1 yr 6 mos

  • Senior Software Engineer & Product Owner at United Airlines
    2013 - 2016 · 3 yrs