Resume

As the first product hire and Lead Product Manager at Acorn-i, I was excited to join and help build a modern Advertising and eCommerce Agency backed by technology. I set up our product management processes to discover and deliver solutions for our Analytics platform, Ignite. It’s since grown to include advanced Advertising automation, which utilises machine learning technologies.

To help organise how we’d prioritise opportunities, I set up a Now, Next, Later approach for roadmaps to communicate and discuss our prioritised experiments and outcomes. I report to our CTO and work closely with peers, Co-Founders and Customers to ensure I continually learn about our market and potential opportunities from our data and user feedback. Where these align with our vision and product strategy, I work to discover viable solutions we can implement to improve productivity.

We outsourced our software delivery to TechMagic in Ukraine. I am responsible for the day-to-day relationship management, chairing our daily stand-up, refinement and sprint planning meetings to collaborate with our design, engineering, machine learning and quality assurance practitioners. I use servant leadership principles when guiding our team about the market needs and providing written narratives, user stories, and other artefacts to empower them with the information necessary to realise the desired outcomes for our customers. Lastly, I am responsible for maintaining our external help documentation and running onboarding sessions to train new Ignite users around the globe.

All our combined hard work culminated in The Brandtech Group's acquisition of Acorn-i for our technology in June 2022. Acorn-i has licensed Ignite to customers in the UK, Europe, United States, South Africa and Japan.

In my final 14 months at The Exchange Lab, I became the Senior Product Manager for the Vendor Integration team. I received the promotion because I became responsible for a Junior Product Manager, and our team actively managed a portfolio of applications that were responsible for moving between seven to ten terabytes of data daily, fueling campaign reporting and analytics workflows for our global customers.

Secondly, the organisation had begun collaborating with other GroupM agency teams that were deeply impressed with our bulk data collection and processing capabilities but wished to retain their brand identity in client reporting. I was increasingly involved in stakeholder management and delivering the technology needed to publish data for Client Data Lakes to facilitate the needs of their Data Analysts.

In 2015, WPP acquired The Exchange Lab for our technology platform Proteus, an Analytics and Automation platform for Programmatic Advertising. Our new parent company, GroupM, charged us with rolling out our technology across the Agency Group. This vision required us to reinvent our data collection and reporting capabilities to meet these needs at a previously unimagined scale.

Post-acquisition, I became the Product Manager for the newly formed Vendor Integration Engine team, rebuilding our data collection capabilities to meet the scale of a Global Media Agency Group. I then worked with internal Stakeholders and our AdTech partners to ensure we could retrieve data from their platforms in the desired format, frequency and quality. The team and I used Kanban to address new capabilities and scaling challenges pragmatically.

I produced user stories and technical documentation to share the required information. Typically, this included details from API documentation supplied by our vendors or definitions for their custom data feeds. Our team used the ‘Three Amigos’ process, where I, the Product Owner, would present the new requirements to our team’s Engineering and QA Leads and clarify the scope based on their experience.

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

While in this post within the SEO Group, I worked with data analyst colleagues to analyse the impact of several Google search algorithm changes to Ask and About.com domains. These changes resulted in reduced traffic and lower advertising revenue. To tackle these issues, we identified strategies to fix over-optimised content and migrated several websites to the ask.com domain.

I joined the European Teams at Ask.com, where I initially worked on search quality and competitor research projects across several Q&A websites. After a company pivot, I began working on products supporting our SEO strategy, building sites to host millions of question-and-answer pairs generated using data from our query logs. My role was to work with design, engineering and content management peers to build several content farms. We monetised these websites with advertising and had $2,500,000 in annual recurring revenue from the UK and EU. I regularly reported the current ad revenue, page views, popular topics and other visitor measurements to stakeholders and identified new content niches for development using our data.

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.

While at Loughborough University, I read their Computing and Management BSc degree and received a well-balanced education in programming, database, human-computer interaction and operating systems from the Computer Science School with management, finance, psychology, and marketing classes from the Business School. I took the four-year variant with an Industrial Placement employed as a Web Developer by Andalucia.com and relocated to the south of Spain for one year.