Resume

While at Loughborough University, I read Computing and Management BSc. The goal of this course was to give students a well-balanced education of hybrid skills, covering Computer Science courses with additional modules from the Business school 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.

Acorn Intelligence is an Agency specialising in Amazon Advertising and eCommerce, a space commonly referred to as Retail Media. The Brandtech Group acquired Acorn-i in June 2022 for our Omnichannel technology platform called Ignite by Acorn-i. Ignite is used by agencies and brands to solve common problems by providing its users with a comprehensive suite of eCommerce reports, customer lifetime value measurement, stock forecasting, and automatic optimisation of retail media investments. We've solved these problems and many more by building software that eliminates repetitive data-intensive tasks with automation and machine learning.

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 consolidate our business strategy and user feedback to form our product strategy and roadmap. 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 upon the project scope, I collaborate with my peers working across our data collection and machine learning applications.

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.

I was the Lead Product Manager for the Vendor Integrations team in the Product and Engineering department. Together we developed software to retrieve and process data from our AdTech partners. The team and I were responsible for a portfolio of three products:

1. Vendor Integration Engine, a highly scaled data collection engine.
2. Data Lake, for conforming event-level advertising data required by our data warehouse.
3. Entity Store, for normalising campaign setup metadata used by dashboards.

At the time, our system typically processed seven to ten terabytes of new data daily. To do so, we utilised AWS EC2, S3, EMR and Elasticsearch. In addition, there was a small React web app to administer the application and Grafana dashboards for monitoring.

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 to the team and solicited feedback to realise the complete solution based on their expertise. The new item would be added to our Kanban board when requirements were certain.

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

Post-acquisition, we refined our product vision for GroupM, 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. The team and I built the functionality necessary to meet the data collection requirements and scale to support a worldwide media agency group. I collaborated with external providers to create custom data feeds or utilised public APIs to retrieve the desired datasets. Once the integrations became possible, we refined the details as “three-amigos” before formally kicking off the development. We built a scaled platform that collected data from thousands of data sources to support hundreds of customers globally.

Pre-acquisition, I worked in the same capacity but regularly moved between initiatives to enhance data management and industrialise error-prone manual activities. To that end, I worked on greenfield projects covering the following topics:

1. Creative Management for bulk uploading advertisements into multiple AdTech systems simultaneously.
2. Campaign Management for media planning and automation tool to create advertising campaigns across several AdTech platforms to speed up everyday setup tasks.
3. Inventory Management R&D to build a prototype for blocking websites with non-brand-safe content.

After being promoted, my responsibilities in the SEO Group focused on product growth for senior stakeholders at Ask.com and About.com. Due to algorithm changes by Google Panda to penalise large content sites – it was necessary to be more scientific to identify potential problem areas ahead of time and protect advertisement yields.

To that end, I spent much of my time on investigative work to identify poorer content. I largely achieved this by 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. The results of this ongoing analysis highlighted poorly structured pages requiring revision by Content Managers and poorer user experiences. We tackled these pragmatically and reinvented the product over several design sprints.

Ask Jeeves’ mission was to answer the questions of their users. The company had a strategy to produce content and provide answers to common 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 into 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.

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 results quality for the European Director of Operations.

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.