Product Manager in Denver, CO, United States

The Redeam Operator Portal is the primary user interface that our customers—tour, activity, and attraction operators in the travel industry—interact with our channel management and voucher processing platform.

The operator portal is a continually evolving interface supporting multiple complex capabilities and the first use cases for the operator portal including self-service onboarding, voucher redemption, user management, product/channel (reseller) mapping, inventory allocation, channel management (revenue optimization), and transactional reporting and dashboards.

I led the effort as the VP of product management—managing a product manager and a UI/UX designer as well as participating as an individual contributor. My direct contributions included market/user investigation (market fit, competitive analysis, core use case articulation, and so on), a high-level definition of functional requirements, core back end requirements (user story) definition, UI guidance, and framework selection, prototype testing, prioritization of functional delivery (aligned to core use case priority), internal QA and coordination of external QA testing, go-to-market planning, and rollout of MVP including presentation at industry events.

After a previous team's re-platforming of Dice.com's front end, search engine visibility of job postings had been overlooked, severely neglected, and not regarded as a priority for the business under their brand/content marketing-based strategy.

Working with our front-end development team and internal SEO expert, I championed the effort to dedicate development capacity to every sprint to improve our organic search rankings and results. Using simple improvements in title tags, on-page optimizations, page-load performance, crawlable skill & geography landing pages, and optimization of our index and sitemap files, we could quickly and dramatically improve Dice's visibility and organic traffic. The addition of participating in the Google for Jobs program and its optimizations produced a halo effect that improved organic traffic by an order of magnitude beyond the results previously achieved.

As the director of product management for B2C, I obtained buy-in from the executive team who didn't understand SEO's value and continually protect the team from distracting feature projects. I served as the product owner, delivering a prioritized backlog until I could fill my team with a product manager with the necessary SEO expertise.

Working with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photography team at The Denver Post and a development team from Digital First Media's (DFM) corporate interactive group, we built and iteratively optimized a prototype media center architecture and platform to feature the work of the photography and multimedia teams. Leveraging the success of that experiment, we deployed this strategy and productized platform across Digital First Media's footprint of 75 daily newspapers using dedicated implementations for larger titles (e.g., San Jose Mercury News, LA Daily News, St Paul Pioneer Press, The York Daily Record, and New Haven Register) and a regionalized dynamic model enabling smaller markets (6+).

As the director of product management for the News & Niche products for DFM, I championed this strategy with the executive team, publishers, and regional editors. I oversaw development, ad integrations (productization), and functional optimizations as a PO in a scrum environment. I traveled to each market deployment to lead the training of the technical, editorial, and multimedia teams on the platform, presentations to local executive teams, and training of the sales teams for the presentation of this product's unique value for premium advertisers.

I led the design and implementation of a self-service developer portal that streamlined DevOps provisioning of cloud enablement, environment setup, tool access, and data connectivity; it also included the introduction of a new AI/ML low code app development platform for one of the largest health insurance companies in the US.

The comprehensive program includes:
• A DevOps provisioning self-service portal for cloud enablement of developer resources, CI/CD pipeline automation, corporate governance, and API and proxy creation/management for a fully self-service and automated model.
• Enablement of a low-code/no-code app development platform and marketplace incorporating AI/ML-based skills, models, available APIs, and other assets for use by nontraditional developers.
• Implementation of multiple business-driven, AI/ML-powered use cases to realize an immediate value, estimated at over $500 in revenue and realized cost savings.

The Olive Dynamic Newsstand was an HTML5-based, print-to-web content transformation and digital replica platform serving the newspaper and magazine industries. This product replaced the legacy Flash-based product (Olive Digital Edition), which had served the market for more than ten years and was rapidly being deprecated by all major browsers.

I led the development, design, launch, and iteration of the core product itself but also created unique advertising and content enrichment capabilities that allowed publishers to create their highest reader engagement publication format.

As the director of product management and marketing, I developed a two-year visionary roadmap incorporating web concepts and dynamics to the print replica industry, including the use of AI content matching capabilities. The advertising and enrichment programs generated substantial interest and results, with publishers looking for new revenue and product opportunities., particularly those who were willing to experiment with the platform, driving unmatched innovation in the industry.

We leveraged these success stories in Olive's marketing efforts to evangelize dynamic content strategies with publishers and innovative use of the platform.

HTML export tools had been introduced with QuarkXPress version 5.5. Starting in version 7, the QuarkXPress development team and I further extended the power of the QuarkXPress page layout platform with high-quality HTML5 support and tools that allowed print design professionals to repurpose their content, layouts, and assets for rich digital experiences, specifically the web, eBook, and interactive (Flash and interactive PDF) formats.

As the product manager leading the effort, I engaged the marketplace to understand better how page designers might want to publish digitally, what tools they preferred to use, and how they wanted them to work. I authored requirements to reflect their most common needs for asset conversion. I also preserved and further developed the ability to produce a full website, incorporating modular best practices and export formats. Stand alone, HTML5 "flip book" and eBook publishing output capabilities were enabled as low-cost, secondary features whose value and adoption almost eclipsed that of the originating ability.