Makaliʻi Metrics

Makaliʻi Metrics is an emerging soil testing and analytics lab built in Hawaiʻi, for Hawaiʻi. It pairs modern soil analysis with Hawaiʻi-specific interpretation to help farmers, ranchers, researchers, and ʻāina stewards make faster, more informed decisions about their land. My engagement is a hybrid Product Manager and UX role, embedded directly in the product operation, not advising from the outside.

This is what Applied Product Lead work looks like in practice: I'm in the build environment alongside the team, owning the product discovery layer, shaping the roadmap, and making scope decisions that the engineering team can execute against. The product is actively shipping against those decisions.

These numbers represent the current state of an active engagement. They are not outcomes. They are the operational reality of a product in progress, being built against decisions that are documented below.

Hawaiʻi's farming and land stewardship communities are rich in traditional ecological knowledge, but they have been underserved by data infrastructure built elsewhere, for elsewhere. Mainland soil labs return generic recommendations that miss the specificity of Hawaiian volcanic soils, microclimates, and regenerative practice. Practitioners wait weeks for data that doesn't fully serve them, then make land decisions with incomplete intelligence.

The product problem wasn't just speed or accuracy. It was relevance. A soil analytics platform that doesn't understand the land it's analyzing isn't a better tool. It is the same extraction logic with a faster turnaround.

This is an embedded engagement. I'm not a consultant reviewing outputs. I'm in the product operation. My responsibilities span the full discovery-to-delivery arc:

• Led product discovery and definition, establishing the product spine and the boundaries that prevent scope creep from fragmenting the platform's core value
• Conducted a full heuristic evaluation of the existing product experience, surfacing friction points across all 10 of Nielsen's usability principles
• Designed and facilitated the Kōkua User Testing Session (02/19/26) with real practitioners, not proxy users, to ensure findings reflect how stewards actually interact with soil data
• Translated user testing findings into a severity-weighted backlog, structured so the engineering team works the highest-impact fixes first
• Built and actively maintains a 3-phase, 90-day roadmap with explicit gate criteria at each phase transition
• Maintained an ʻāina-first design perspective throughout, evaluating every product decision against cultural alignment: language choices, data presentation, and interpretation logic

The decisions that shaped this product aren't in the feature list. They're in the scope boundaries and the framing choices that came before the build:

• ʻāina-first as a product strategy decision, not a branding layer. Language, terminology, and data presentation were all evaluated against whether they serve Hawaiian land stewardship practice or impose an outside framework onto it
• Severity-weighted backlog structure, ensuring the engineering team's sprint cycles are ordered by user impact, not development convenience
• Phased roadmap with gate criteria, so the team has explicit conditions for moving from discovery into execution, not an open-ended build with no defined checkpoints
• User testing with actual practitioners. The Kōkua session was not a usability test with recruited participants. It was a structured session with a working farmer and an intern from the community the product serves

The product is in active development and shipping against a structured backlog. User testing surfaced concrete direction for the dashboard experience. The ʻāina-first framing has shaped the product vocabulary and the interpretation layer. The platform is being built to serve Hawaiian land stewards on their own terms, not adapted from a generic agricultural data model.

The roadmap provides the team clear gates before moving from discovery into execution, and the backlog ensures engineering cycles are ordered by user impact. Nine items shipped. Twenty-four tracked. Work ongoing.