Brian Thomas Fidler
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Phoenix, AZ, United States
Toptal member since February 3, 2021
Brian is a detail-oriented and conscientious product leader with over 20 years of experience managing the design and development of digital products for mobile and desktop applications. Notable clients include MGM Grand, Coca-Cola, Mattel, BMW, and Kodak. He created a methodology resulting in a US Patent application referenced in over 60 other applications. Brian combines product management, web design and development, and digital marketing to deliver impactful solutions and drive results.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Digital Marketing
- Product Management
- Shopify
- Team Leadership
- Vendor Management
- eCommerce
- eCommerce Development
- eCommerce Platforms
Work Experience
Digital Marketing Director
Plexus Worldwide
- Improved both onsite and offsite SEO and increased the number of keywords ranking on the first page of the search results (SERPs) from 315 to 1,400. Also increased keyword phrases ranking in the top ten SERPs from 1,300 to over 8,200.
- Increased organic search traffic from 220,000 monthly visits to over 500,000 monthly visits.
- Directed the development of KPI dashboards to aggregate data from multiple sources and provide accurate reporting on KPIs relating to organic search results, paid search results, and conversion metrics.
- Streamlined content localization processes for new global markets. Reduced the volume of duplicate content translations resulting in a 6% reduction in costs and an average one week reduction in time between translation request and delivery.
- Managed a team of eight UI/UX, content, and SEO/SEM specialists to iteratively improve Plexus's eCommerce user experience and improve user story synchronization between our UI/UX designers and IT development team.
Web Product Manager - Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Analytics
Plexus Worldwide
- Migrated company website to a managed VPS providing full control over site updates and our release cycle, effectively reducing our publishing timeline from two weeks to an on-demand basis.
- Developed a shareable marketing program that leveraged Open Graph data and custom designed assets, allowing our distributors to promote products across social channels, resulting in over 120,000 shares per month in the program's first six months.
- Converted an existing blog into a headless CMS allowing our new site to consume and publish our existing blog content via an API. Removed the need to custom build blog capabilities into our new platform, saving over 200 hours of development time.
- Developed a "before and after" weight loss app, allowing our customers to create shareable social content that visually showcased the physical benefits achieved by using our products. Resulted in over 18,000 user generated, shareable, content pieces.
- Created a web app to support a video contest promotion that allowed our customers to upload custom videos shot from their mobile devices, directly to our judging platform. Over 90 videos were submitted by our customers.
Product Manager
Apollo Education Group
- Managed the integration of a financial aid processing SaaS to reduce the time required for a student's financial aid acceptance from roughly eight weeks to under two weeks. Project included more than 100 integration points with our legacy systems.
- Migrated user stories from SharePoint to Jira and added the necessary structure to allow integration teams to link their team's specific technical stories to the respective epics and user stories containing the high-level business requirements.
- Improved project reporting by developing Confluence dashboards to provide both granular and high-level project status and details for our leadership team.
- Assisted a higher education-focused CRM vendor to create a conversion funnel for stakeholder institutions. Helped onboard and train staff to understand how to utilize the funnel to convert prospective leads into enrolled students.
Manager, Multimedia Technology
University of Phoenix
- Transitioned the team from developing Flash-based classroom applications to developing JavaScript applications.
- Led initiative to migrate digital content from co-located IIS servers to AWS, providing a more modern infrastructure and allowing us to create richer content for our students.
- Developed a classroom video CMS that allowed students and faculty to create videos from their desktop and mobile devices, and upload those videos to the classroom. The solution included the transcoding of videos to support playback on various devices.
- Inherited an instructional design project management application that was 18 months behind schedule. Re-defined the MVP, reworked the UI, and leveraged the skills of multiple team members to bring the application to production in six months.
Owner
Brian Fidler Interactive
- Designed and developed content management systems, eCommerce sites, SEO and SEM campaigns, email marketing campaigns, presentations, brand identities and systems, marketing collateral, trade show booths, and other marketing and interactive solutions.
- Educated clients on the strengths and weaknesses of search engine marketing (i.e., Adwords) and organic search engine optimization (SEO) in order to create the most strategic blend to meet their business goals.
- Provided keyword research and strategies to help clients understand which keywords and keyword phrases to target for search optimization and search marketing.
- Developed eCommerce sites using WordPress and WooCommerce, Pinnacle Cart, Fox.io, and Shopify for a number of clients including Smart Bean Coffee, KailanX Cashmere Clothing, TYR Tactical, and BioMedical Solutions.
- Collaborated with clientele such as Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Austin Commercial, MGM Grand, Britannica.com, Robson Communities, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Swift Aviation, Sundt Construction Company, and Safeguard Security.
Web Presence Product Manager
Girl Scouts Arizona Cactus-Pine
- Reduced overhead by nearly $2,000 per month by migrating the council’s website to a more cost-effective content management system and hosting solution.
- Redesigned and redeveloped council's website, improving the user experience and adding eCommerce functionality. Increased overall traffic by 38%, page views by 59%, time on site by 44%, and traffic from Google SERPs by 109%.
- Updated design and eCommerce functionality helped increase overall Council sales by over 70%.
- Incorporated online donation and event registration functionality for Girl Scout sponsored events.
- Developed a program and curriculum to educate girls on website design and development processes, and provide them with resources to design and develop their own girl-focused websites.
- Leveraged social media to increase awareness for Girl Scout programs, summer camps, cookie sales, and volunteer opportunities.
Marketing Director
Naturally Vitamins
- Created strategy to focus on six targeted market segments, and developed digital and traditional marketing programs for each market segment.
- Built online lead-generation system resulting in more than 15,000 double opt-in leads.
- Developed trade show strategies and managed creative messaging, visuals, booth positioning, and promotional giveaways. Developed a booth-specific application to encourage attendees to sign up for promotions, resulting in over 1,200 leads.
- Created strategy to develop an online store locator while lacking a list of retail locations due to distributor privacy agreements. Distributed digital coupons and tracked redemption to individual stores, allowing us to populate our store locator.
- Managed the creation of health education content for both print and digital channels.
- Collaborated with legal counsel on distributor contracts, price maintenance agreements, and trademarks.
- Launched multiple products and one new product category in the nutritional supplement space.
Senior Designer
BritannicaSchool
- Designed BritannicaSchool’s Big 6 identity and Big 6 content section for BritannicaSchool.com.
- Designed and developed Flash-based interactive learning tools to encourage student learning through exploration of unique, animation driven, user interfaces.
- Storyboarded and developed a Flash-based, non-linear, presentation allowing the sales team to demonstrate and sell the BritannicaSchool.com concept to teachers and school board officials across the United States.
Interactive Product Development Manager
SHR Perceptual Management
- Led effort to add interactive capabilities to SHR's brand product and service offering. Clients included Coca-Cola, Mattel, GMC Trucks, Ford Motor Company, BMW, and Kodak.
- Created digital presentation platform to promote SHR’s design and brand research services. Platform helped reduce presentation overhead by more than $50,000 per year and established SHR as a technology leader in the brand positioning market.
- Created methodology to convert SHR’s proprietary research process into a digital process. Resulted in a US Patent application that has been referenced in over 60 subsequent patent applications. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20030191682.
- Managed the strategic digitization of thousands of images utilized in SHR's proprietary research process. Resulted in a dramatic improvement in process and workflow efficiencies, improving our research deliverables and reducing time to delivery.
Project History
Plexus Worldwide Blog
Created APIs to allow our web development team to integrate existing blog content into our website, reducing the effort required to create a custom solution.
The Plexus eCommerce site was being redeveloped and scheduled to launch in late 2017. The development team informed the digital marketing team that to launch on time, they would not be able to develop the blog functionality that we were currently using and that had been designated as an MVP feature. At the time, our site contained over 400 published and indexed blog posts.
To ensure that we maintained our content’s existing value and the ability to continue creating content for our site, we negotiated a solution where digital marketing would convert our existing WordPress site to a headless WordPress instance and create APIs for the new site to consume. This allowed our development team to avoid the overhead involved with creating a custom solution using Contentful, our new CMS. This strategy significantly reduced the time required to integrate existing content into our new site and enabled us to maintain and grow traffic and search value derived from our existing content.
Plexus Worldwide Before & After Tool
Developed a Before & After application that allowed our product ambassadors to generate ‘Before and After’ photo compositions to share their weight loss results via social media. In the first six weeks the tool generated over 18,000 shareable images.
Plexus’ CMO requested a tool that would encourage user-generated content and showcase the primary benefit of Plexus’s keystone product, Plexus Slim®. I worked with the product marketing, sales, and legal departments to identify the requirements and scope needed for an MVP. Additionally, I developed the specifications for the necessary infrastructure and identified SaaS vendors. I then worked with the Plexus UI/UX team to design and develop a prototype of the Before & After tool using WordPress. The prototype was so well received that Plexus launched the tool into production.
Plexus Edge® Video Submission Contest
Developed a responsive web application that allowed our product ambassadors to shoot video of themselves lip syncing to a song created by our creative team. Ambassadors were able to shoot and upload their video from their mobile device or desktop.
To promote Plexus Edge®, a new energy product in our nutritional supplement lineup, our creative team wrote a Plexus Edge song, and we created a contest to encourage our ambassadors to creatively shoot a video of themselves lip syncing to the song. To encourage participation, we created a responsive web app that was very user friendly and allowed an ambassador to shoot their video and upload it via their mobile device or the Plexus Edge website with very little technical knowledge. Consuming the videos required the app to allow easy upload to the cloud and video transcoding to ensure playback on various devices and platforms. Over 100 ambassadors submitted videos.
Hempsphere Website
Led the design and development efforts for CBD product launch.
Managed the design and development of Hempsphere.com, a startup CBD product. The site was initially developed to run on the Shopify platform however due to issues relating to payment processing, the site is currently running as a static site.
Education
Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
University of Phoenix - Tempe, Arizona, USA
Bachelor of Science Degree in Marketing
Arizona State University - Tempe, Arizona, USA
Certifications
Introduction for DAM Users & Content Editors
Cloudinary
Arizona Residential Real Estate Sales License
Arizona Department of Real Estate
Skills
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Flash, QuarkXpress, WP eCommerce, Slack, Confluence, Zoom, Google Analytics, Sketch, Figma, GitHub, Jira
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Agile, Desktop Web Design
Platforms
WooCommerce, Contentful, Rackspace Cloud, MODx, Shopify
Industry Expertise
Higher Education, Education Technology (Edtech), Real Estate, Residential Real Estate, Nonprofits
Other
Marketing, Web Content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Vendor Management, On-page SEO, Vendor Selection, WordPress, Content Management Systems (CMS), Content Management, Web Development, Web Product Management, Product Management, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Marketing, Analytics, Story Mapping, Media, Multimedia, Print Media, Media Production, Business Process Improvement (BPI), Business Process Re-engineering, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, JSON, Web Design, JavaScript, jQuery, eCommerce, Email Marketing, Design Management, Creative Direction, Front-end Design, Front-end Development, Logo Design, Wireframing, Creative Thinking, Creative Tech, Design, Presentation Design, Research, Print, Identity Design, Image Manipulation, Image Processing, Business Ownership, Remote Team Leadership, ExpressionEngine, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Creative Design, Web App Design, Web App Development, Mobile Web Design, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Technical Product Management, Product Ownership, Product Vision, Agile Sprints, Product Strategy, Product Marketing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Web Applications, Web & Mobile Applications, Prototyping, Mobile, Mobile UX, Backlog Grooming, Backlog Management, Websites, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Product Owner, eCommerce Development, eCommerce Platforms, Discord, Marketing Mix, Market Fit, Data Research, User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), Content Strategy, Branded Content, Google Search Console, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Semrush, Reputation Management, Paid Search, SEO Content, Team Leadership, Code Review, JSON API, APIs, Localization, Bitbucket, SEO Tools, Vue, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Branding, Digital Asset Management, Cloudinary, Video Processing, Linux Servers, Videos, Data Visualization, Dashboards, SaaS, CRM Systems, Ahrefs, Google Tag Manager, Training Content, Fintech, App Development, Event Management, Fundraising, Shopify API
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