Maureen Sarewitz, Product Manager in Seattle, WA, United States
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Maureen Sarewitz

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Bio

Maureen is a creative, user-focused, and data-driven product and digital strategy leader with over ten years of experience at companies such as Starbucks, Rover, and Wayfair, and with early and mid-stage startups. She marries enterprise goals, user insights, and data to deliver tangible results across the product lifecycle, including product strategy, roadmapping, implementation, and iteration. Maureen has extensive experience as an individual contributor and leader of PM teams.

Project Highlights

Innovation and Delivery of a Competitive Intelligence Platform
Led the design, development, and GTM for Sunny, a tool that notifies growth marketers when their competition launches new ads.
Homepage Revamp of Rover.com
Improved key metrics by redesigning the Rover.com homepage in collaboration with the UI/UX leader.
Personalization for Starbucks Rewards Loyalty Program
Enabled individualized offers and recommendations across digital channels by developing a net-new personalization platform for the loyalty program.

Expertise

  • Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
  • Digital Marketing
  • Go-to-market Strategy
  • Loyalty Programs
  • Personalization
  • Product Growth
  • Product Management
  • Strategic Planning & Execution

Work Experience

Operating Executive

2023 - PRESENT
Polaris Growth Fund
  • Provided support, guidance, and thought partnership to remarkable entrepreneurs and teams as part of PGF's Strategic Acceleration Team.
  • Advised and partnered with B2B SaaS portfolio company CEOs, COOs, CPOs, and CMO on growth, marketing, and product management strategy and execution.
  • Developed marketing and product management playbooks to support portfolio companies in implementing best practices related to marketing reporting and attribution, product development processes, and product road mapping.

Faculty

2022 - PRESENT
University of Washington
  • Developed an online project management course for the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at UW School of Public Health.
  • Taught the project management course to online MPH students.
  • Mentored students in the Master of Science in Entrepreneurship program at the Foster School of Business.

Founder and Managing Partner

2020 - PRESENT
Acacia Growth & Impact Consulting
  • Led the development and GTM for Sunny, a competitive intelligence platform for growth marketers.
  • Researched, designed, tested, and scaled the new user-facing pricing and packaging strategy for a digital gaming company.
  • Functioned as interim VP of Product for a healthtech social enterprise, building product strategy and execution processes, mentoring PMs, and leading recruitment.
  • Created the loyalty program strategy and product roadmap for a well-known CPG company.
  • Interviewed customers and stakeholders, analyzed data, and leveraged loyalty platform capabilities to determine prioritization and resource requirements.

VP, Product & Marketing

2020 - 2020
Osmosis (acquired by Elsevier)
  • Developed and implemented product and marketing roadmaps, driving 75% YoY growth via improvements to pricing and packaging, user onboarding, core product features and functionality, and marketing optimization.
  • Built a high-performing digital team, including marketers, product managers, user researchers, and UX designers.
  • Established business and communication rhythms with investors, board members, and internal stakeholders.

Director of Product Management

2017 - 2020
Rover.com
  • Propelled significant year-over-year revenue growth by leading a team of front-end PMs to deliver user growth and retention across web, mobile web, and app.
  • Increased conversion rates by over 20% after spearheading the revamp of a complex, enterprise-critical user signup and onboarding funnel that had gone awry.
  • Decreased the bounce rate and boosted searches and bookings after revamping the Rover.com homepage with the UX leader.
  • Led partnerships with engineering and UX teams to implement new resourcing, prioritization, and sprint planning processes.
  • Built the company’s first product operations team to focus on offline tests and inform product prioritization decisions.

Product Lead

2015 - 2017
Starbucks
  • Spearheaded multi-million dollar digital transformation of Starbucks app, which extended personalized marketing to four million additional loyalty members and drove over $24 million of incremental revenue in year one.
  • Managed the innovation for loyalty-related tech stack, including the proprietary personalization platform that doubled the revenue.
  • Led high-priority projects that introduced personalized offers and recommendations into the Starbucks app, dramatically improving the loyalty program unit economics.

Senior Category Manager

2014 - 2015
Wayfair
  • Managed $40 million worth of Wayfair’s business in a top strategic category, including improving COGS by over 150 basis points quarterly and growing direct revenue by 73% year-over-year.
  • Boosted engagement and conversion by collaborating with UX and merchandising teams to test new UI/UX approaches for the category, vendor, and product details pages.
  • Developed the roadmap to revamp Wayfair's wedding registry program.

Project History

Innovation and Delivery of a Competitive Intelligence Platform

Led the design, development, and GTM for Sunny, a tool that notifies growth marketers when their competition launches new ads.

Sunny makes gathering competitive intelligence quick and painless for growth marketers. Traditionally, this has been a tedious and time-consuming task, and there is no way to know when a competitor launches a new ad without proactively checking. With Sunny, users can add companies to track, set up email alerts, and view their dashboard whenever a new ad is launched or anytime they want. It also offers powerful features, such as the ability to favorite, filter, and save ads.

I was engaged by Five Four Ventures, a venture incubator, as an entrepreneur in residence to take Sunny from zero to one. I led the development and rollout of the beta product, then leveraged data and user insights to build the requirements for our MVP. Leading a team of front-end and back-end engineers and a UX designer, I built and launched the Sunny MVP in May 2022.

Homepage Revamp of Rover.com

https://www.rover.com/

Improved key metrics by redesigning the Rover.com homepage in collaboration with the UI/UX leader.

Rover.com is the world's largest marketplace for high-quality pet sitters. As the company quickly grew, its homepage became cluttered and less effective at communicating Rover's value and why visitors should trust them to find a reliable pet sitter.

Our stakeholder, user, and data research and analysis guided the homepage redesign with insights, including the need for:
• User testimonials to build trust,
• A more straightforward search bar,
• Content to showcase our domain authority,
• Personalization by customer type and country, and
• A different experience for returning users.

We created a "north star" vision for the homepage and a roadmap for getting there. Phase one of that roadmap significantly reduced the homepage bounce rate and delivered higher search and conversion rates.

Personalization for Starbucks Rewards Loyalty Program

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/starbucks-using-artificial-intelligence-connect-customers-boost-sales/

Enabled individualized offers and recommendations across digital channels by developing a net-new personalization platform for the loyalty program.

Starbucks did not have a way to deliver truly personalized offers and recommendations to its 20 million loyalty program members. Its ability to provide segmented offers was limited to emails, despite almost all its members using and transacting via the Starbucks app.

As the Starbucks product lead for formation, a joint venture between Starbucks and BCG, I collaborated with data scientists, engineers, and designers to build an AI-driven personalization platform that leveraged collaborative filtering models to provide truly 1:1 offers and recommendations to loyalty program members. I also adapted specific offers deployed via email only for the mobile app experience. Together, these efforts delivered over $24 million of incremental revenue during year one.

New User Signup and Onboarding Funnel

https://www.rover.com/become-a-sitter/

Increased conversion rates by over 20% by leading a significant investment to build a new, enterprise-critical user signup and onboarding funnel.

As a product management player-coach at Rover, I collaborated with a PM on my team to develop this new funnel. Our conversion rates had suffered, and the codebase for that part of the product was challenging. The B2C onboarding funnel needed to be more complex than most because we had to screen prospective pet sitters and walkers to ensure they would provide safe, reliable service.

After considerable user research, including prototyping, and extensive collaboration with our engineering team, we developed a solution and requirements that would improve conversion without adversely impacting quality, namely simplifying several parts of the funnel and creating a more intuitive user experience. We also ensured that the new funnel was extensible to Rover's new international markets. After six months of complex work, we launched the new funnel that boosted conversion rates by over 20% and improved applicant quality.

Education

2011 - 2013

Master's Degree in Development Economics

The Fletcher School at Tufts University - Medford, MA

2010 - 2012

Master's Degree in Business Administration

Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth - Hanover, NH

2003 - 2006

Bachelor's Degree in Political Science

University of Washington - Seattle, WA

Certifications

JUNE 2011 - PRESENT

Certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt

Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth

Skills

Tools

Slack, Jira, Asana, Canvas

Paradigms

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Agile Product Management, Digital Marketing Best Practices

Industry Expertise

Consumer Products, Lean Six Sigma, Food & Beverage, Education Technology (Edtech)

Other

Google, Strategy, Digital, Management, Economics, International Affairs, International Projects, Cross-functional Collaboration, Writing & Editing, Critical Thinking, Product Development, New Product Development, Digital Marketing, Hiring, Product Management, Mobile, Web, People Management, People Development, Personalization, Monetization, General Management, P&L Management, Growth, New Products, Go-to-market Strategy, Mobile Web, Product Growth, Strategic Planning & Execution, Loyalty Programs, User Onboarding, Funnel Optimization, User Engagement, User Experience (UX), Business Strategy, Marketing, Product Strategy, Coaching, Product Roadmaps, Team Mentoring, Stakeholder Management, Business to Business (B2B), Software as a Service (SaaS), Digital Product Management, Product Consultant, Product Launch, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Staffing, Product Strategy Consultant, Pitch Decks, Early-stage Startups, Startups, Product Planning, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Project Scoping, Analytics, Statistics, Econometrics, Organizational Design, Apps, UX Research, UI Research, User Interface (UI), User Research, Funnel Analysis, Direct to Consumer (D2C), Data Analytics, Business Operations, Sales, Edtech Design, Estimation & Planning, User-generated Content, Startup Funding, Advertising Technology (Adtech), Marketing Strategy, Instruction & Coaching, Mentorship, Project Management, Entrepreneurship

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