Hi! I'm Mara. Eight years across product, founding, UX, and creating for fun.
Leading product across a multi-brand platform, founding a dating app, and UX design at Epic. The throughline: real users on the other side of the screen.
Product Manager / Team Lead
Led product strategy and execution across two teams in Spark's multi-brand dating ecosystem. Owned premium Matchmaking strategy including Juliet (an AI Matchmaker), alongside Trust & Safety across all six brands.
Founder & Product Lead
Solo-founded a core values-based dating app from concept to live product with paying users. Owned product vision, roadmap, UX, freemium monetization, and founder-led fundraising end-to-end.
User Experience Designer
Designed and optimized workflows across enterprise healthcare products. Partnered with PMs and engineers, led clinician usability research, and facilitated cross-team design sprints — the UX foundation everything since has been built on.
Three from LinkedIn. One from my daughter — I mean dog.
Kari Sunderland
Mara's manager and Head of Product Operations at Spark Networks
“Mara stepped into product without a traditional PM background and quickly proved herself through strong execution and adaptability. She led and supported multiple third-party platform integrations and built excellent relationships with engineering partners.
Suresh Dhandapani
Former CPO at Spark Networks
“I had the pleasure of managing Mara and can confidently say she's an exceptional product manager. She brings deep customer obsession to everything she works on, especially in complex areas like Trust & Safety, and pairs it with a strong bias for action.
Adam Medros
Former CEO at Spark Networks
“I got to work with Mara at Spark Networks, where she led product initiatives across trust and safety and matchmaking — areas that are both operationally complex and critical to the customer experience.
Uli Rudolph
Personal snuggle companion. Supports emotional well-being.
“My mother follows a routine to my satisfaction, cooks great meals, submits to my whims, and is highly competent. Could improve on clinginess.
I've always dreamt and made things — design school, a startup, misc. side quests, now this site. Only now, I can make it all a shipped reality on my own.
Actively growing
This site
First Claude Code project — designed, built, shipped, and debugged it solo, AI-generated photo and video included.
Spicebound
An AI book-discovery app for romantasy readers. I own product, design, architecture, data strategy, AI prompt; coded by outsourced dev team. Started as a vibe-coded practice project circa pre-Claude Code that I decided to make official.
Books from the scroll
The five books name-dropped in one reel — caught in a list, the creator's notes and all, instead of lost to the scroll.
Quotes, resurfaced
A lock-screen widget that resurfaces the 100+ quotes buried in my Notes app.
More being noodled on.
I'm at my best working on products where strategy, creativity, and real user needs overlap — the kind of products people have feelings about.
Eight years in, my career path has seen a bit of everything. A little over a year as a formal Product Manager at Spark, leading product across multiple brands with millions of users — fraud, compliance, multilingual translation, AI matchmaking, all in one year. Four years founding Weaver, where I built a dating app from an idea to a live product with paying customers and did a little of every job. Around three years as a UX/product designer at Epic plus freelance after that, where I learned the foundations of usability, HCI, and understanding users.
Underpinning it all, my industrial design degree is where the design thinking and user-centered instincts I continue to leverage took root.
On the side, I'm product and architecture on Spicebound — an AI book-discovery project for romantasy readers. I shaped the product, system architecture, data sources, and the AI prompt; a small dev team builds it. It started as a vibe-code experiment I liked enough to make real.
What I bring that doesn't fit on a resume: real founder reps, intuitive user empathy and user-centered approach, comfort with ambiguity, growth mindset, figure-it-outer, emotional intelligence, and a habit of owning hard problems with minimal oversight.
What I'm into
Open to Product Manager and similar roles in consumer tech (B2C, B2B2C) & AI. Or just say hi — I read most everything.