Ian Randolph

Trainline.com sells over £1 billion in train tickets each year to over 30 million active users. I led the team as PM which rewrote every line of code from .NET to Node.js and React and integrated with new back end services as part of the re-platforming effort, scaling team from 15 to 50 with no loss of velocity or morale. Led discovery and delivery of new integrations – UK coach and all major EU rail providers – which included redesign of end to end booking flow. Started and held responsibility for A/B testing team which went from 15 to 150 A/B tests in a year, netting conversion gains worth over £3 million in gross margin. As PM for data science, led discovery and integration of first data science features on the web, including rebooking prediction and price prediction.

I co-founded my first company to eliminate choice overload online. We raised £250,000 and built a team of 8 to build and test Handpick to help fashion shoppers find what they're looking for. The brain of the product was a machine learning model implemented in Apache Hadoop and Mahout which replicated the intelligence of a stylist, learning how a stylist would rate a dress' sexiness, elegance, date appropriateness, and more with >70% accuracy. With this data, we built a web-based fashion aggregator which allowed you find fashion using natural language (e.g. 'I'm looking for an elegant black dress for an evening event') and associative search (e.g. 'I'm looking for something like this, but backless'). I was involved with all aspects of the business but took particular ownership of algorithm development, laboratory testing (we tested the interface with a UCL research lab which had eye-trackers), and marketing. Ultimately I realized too late that we had left the marketing too late and we ran out of money, but someone will realize the values of our vision one day.

Led end to end product design and development for visual values quiz and dashboard. I selected the model and assessment upon which to validate our quiz, led creative development to discover the most engaging and diagnostic questions, and worked closely with data scientists to model the most diagnostic composition of questions to predict a person's values from a minimum of items. Explored several monetization paths, including retail through DSPs as well as by offering a dashboard through which employers could send out quizzes and view results and so filter candidates for cultural fit. We were scoping pilots with HSBC and Hayes before the project was cut short due to a change in priorities resulting from a merger, but after I left the quiz was monetized as part of the DSP avenue initially considered.

Worked with designers and developers to build an interface for monitoring chronic disease and preoperative care patients along multiple vital dimensions, including a fully customizable questionnaire interface and device integrations. In tandem worked with team to design and develop admin console for the configuration of hospital deployments for any disease area. Both web applications are currently in launch.

Youniverse was a chatbot which served as a kind of journal and coach for people seeking to understand themselves better. This positioning was not clear when I took over the product, and rewriting the landing page and ad copy to fit this positioning increased sign up conversion rate by 50% and dropped CPA through paid channels by 90%. Largely rules driven when I took over the product, I also led an integration with IBM Watson to create more dynamic interactions.

Synthesized psychological research on social norms and behavioral economics to derive an equation to predict the likelihood of individual behavior change given the information signals and sources in the individual's social environment. The social quorum heuristic played a pivotal role in a more complex algorithm which successfully predicted the Arab Spring riots of 2010 two weeks ahead of any action by monitoring the distribution of behaviorally influential memes in the blogosphere.

I do the marketing and advise on everything else for my wife's business, founded to help women all over the world achieve their career potential. I run her top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel campaigns through Adwords and Facebook.