Resume

I am a Technical Product Lead with over 13 years of experience employed by Acorn-i, an Advertising and eCommerce Agency. I am responsible for our SaaS analytics platform, Ignite. I am also Dyslexic, and I credit my ‘dyslexic thinking’ too many of my successes by helping me spot patterns, analyse data, simplify information, think laterally, and build empathy.

I am passionate about Product Management, and I regularly read books and attend meetups to learn from the community. I’ve also completed the Product-led Certification by Pendo and Mind the Product. In addition, I’m a hobbyist programmer, tinkering with software projects in the interest of lifelong learning. My successes include a personal website hosted on GitHub Pages, where I occasionally Blog about Product Management and a self-published Python package on PyPI.


Education

Loughborough University

Computing and Management BSc Hons 2:1

2005-10-01 - 2009-07-31 • 3 yrs 10 mths

While at Loughborough University, I read Computing and Management BSc. The goal was to give students a well-balanced education of hybrid skills, covering Computer Science courses with additional modules for management, psychology, and marketing. I took the four-year variant with an Industrial Placement. I was employed as a Web Developer by Andalucia.com and relocated to the south of Spain.


Employment

Acorn Intelligence Ltd

Acorn Intelligence is an Agency specialising in Amazon Advertising and eCommerce. The Brandtech Group acquired Acorn-i in June 2022 for our technology platform Ignite and expertise in Retail Advertising Media.

Technical Product Lead

2019-08-05 - Present • 3 yrs 10 mths

As the Technical Product Lead, I am responsible for our Product Management processes and Ignite. I work with our CTO, Cofounders, SaaS Customers and Client Services team to synthesise our product strategy and roadmap from their feedback. Our processes allow me to prioritise the desired outcomes that will delight our customers and work through these themes with UX, Engineering and Quality Assurance colleges to realise a suitable solution. Depending on the project scope, I collaborate with my peers across our data collection and machine learning applications.

Customers using Ignite range from Brand owners, Agencies and Holding Groups to solve recurring problems linked to data collection, cleaning and visualisation task and delay people from monitoring their eCommerce business, Customer Lifetime Value & retention, stock forecasting & replenishing, and optimising performance marketing. We've solved these problems by building software that eliminates repetitive data-intensive tasks with automation and machine learning.

Ignite provides its users with a consolidated view of their revenue from Amazon, Rakuten, Shopify, Takealot, Walmart & WooCommerce sites, along with their advertising purchased via Amazon, Facebook, Google and TikTok.


The Exchange Lab

2013-12-02 - 2019-07-12 • 5 yrs 8 mths

The Exchange Lab was an independent programmatic advertising agency that developed its only proprietary technology, Proteus, to help and support our advertising operations across various platforms. As a member of the Product Management practice, I lead my assigned Product Development team contributing to the design and development of solutions that drove our reporting platform. WWP acquired the Exchange Lab in December 2015.

Senior Product Manager

2018-06-01 - 2019-07-12 • 1 yr 2 mths

I was the Senior Product Manager for the Vendor Integrations team in the Product and Engineering department developing software to retrieve and process data from our AdTech partners. The team and I were responsible for a portfolio of three products for performing our data collection and ingesting several terabytes of data from APIs, streams and flat files daily.

I produced stories and technical documentation to share information with the engineering team. Typically, this included details from API documentation supplied by our vendors or definitions for their custom data feeds. During Feature Kick-off meetings, I presented these new requirements and solicited feedback to refine our solution based on their expertise.

I was promoted in 2018 to reflect the change in my responsibilities, as I’d become responsible for a Junior Product Manager who’d joined the Vendor Integration team.

Product Manager

2013-12-02 - 2018-05-31 • 4 yrs 6 mths

While working as a Product Manager at The Exchange Lab, my role had two distinct phases, before and after our acquisition.

Post-acquisition, we redefined our product vision for WWP, and Proteus became the single point of data collection and reporting for programmatic advertising. This vision required us to reinvent our data collection and reporting capabilities to meet these needs. I became the Product Owner for the newly formed Vendor Integration Engine team. Our team reimagined our capabilities to meet the data collection requirements and scale to support a Global Media Agency Group. This work frequently required me to collaborate with our group’s AdTech providers to create custom data feeds or use their APIs to retrieve the desired datasets.

Pre-acquisition, I regularly moved between initiatives to enhance our data management capabilities and industrialise error-prone manual activities.


Ask Jeeves

2010-01-01 - 2013-10-04 • 3 yrs 10 mths

After completing my degree I joined Ask Jeeves took an internship working as a Research Assistant. After six months I was formally hired as a Junior Product Manager. I then worked across multiple initiatives to improve the relevance of search results and creating curated answers to common questions.

Product Manager

2012-01-01 - 2013-10-04 • 1 yr 10 mths

After being promoted, my responsibilities in the SEO Group focused on product growth for senior stakeholders at Ask.com and About.com. However, due to algorithm changes by Google that penalised large content sites – it was necessary to be more scientific to identify potential problem areas ahead of time and protect advertisement yields. As a result, I spent much of my time on investigative work to identify poorer content.

I found poor content using Data Science tools for Natural Language Processing and reviewing website traffic. The goal was to detect and modify over-optimised content pages or unsatisfactory content requiring revision by Content Managers and poorer user experiences. We tackled these pragmatically and reinvented the product over several design sprints whilst monitoring key metrics.

Junior Product Manager

2010-06-01 - 2011-12-31 • 1 yr 7 mths

Ask Jeeves' mission was to answer the questions of its users. The company had a strategy to produce content and provide answers to frequent questions published on several Q&A answer microsites. These websites formed part of the broader SEO strategy to create unique content discovered through other search engines and drive traffic to our platform. We achieved this by reviewing popular searches classified as questions and outsourcing the creation of appropriate answers to publish new Q&A content and monetising them with Google Ads. I reported the current ad revenue, page views, popular topics and other visitor measurements to stakeholders and identified new content niches for development.

Research Assistant

2010-01-01 - 2010-05-31 • 5 mths

I joined the European Operations Teams at Ask.com, based in London, working on data collection and research projects. This work included a competitor analysis for Q&A websites and auditing search quality for the European Director of Operations.


Andalucia.com

Web Developer, Industrial Placement

2007-07-01 - 2008-07-31 • 1 yr 1 mth

While studying at Loughborough University, I participated in the Industrial Placement programme. I did this at Andalucia.com, operating from the Costa del Sol. My responsibilities at Andalucia.com included constructing and modifying client websites for sister company Andalucia Web Solutions, updating content on Andalucia.com, and trafficked advertisements to the same site. Andalucia.com is an information portal publishing information for tourists and expatriates in the south of Spain. The company has operated the website since 1996.