Vollie Inc.

Zero product. Zero customers. Zero codebase. I was the first and only PM. My job was to figure out what to build and make sure it shipped.

The problem

Employee coaching is expensive. A good facilitator costs real money per session and can only run one at a time. Most companies skip it entirely or run it so rarely it doesn’t stick. Vollie’s bet: a voice AI that can moderate a coaching session, keep it on track, and produce the summary a manager actually reads.

What I built

A voice AI that runs the session live, asks the questions, manages turn-taking, keeps the conversation on topic, and handles awkward silences without making them worse. After the session ends, it writes the report: sentiment analysis, engagement scores, commitments made, and follow-up items.

I scoped the first three features. Cut everything that didn’t fit a first release. Wrote the eval suite that measures whether the AI’s moderation actually improves conversation quality or just interrupts it.

How it went

Zero to first client in seven months. The hardest part wasn’t the AI, it was defining what “good moderation” means well enough to evaluate it. A facilitator who talks too much is bad. One who says nothing is worse. The eval suite had to capture that spectrum.

What I learned

Founding PM means you’re the person who says no. The team had ideas for real-time translation, async coaching, Slack integration, manager dashboards. All good ideas. None of them mattered until the core session worked. I cut the roadmap to three features and didn’t add a fourth until the first three shipped.