Sam Merrick

Virgin Red is a merger between the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles loyalty currency and the Virgin Red Vaults engagement app. It was launched as a beta version in 2020, followed by the public launch in 2021.

I was the lead product manager for the mobile apps and a responsive website. I conducted quantitative and qualitative research to ensure that a proposition and features were desirable and usable for prospective members.

Student Beans is a leading student discount provider in the UK. It connects brands that want to market to a young audience with students who want to save money.

I was the SEO product lead at Student Beans leading the team to find the best way to improve page load times to meet Google Core Web Vitals. After exploring multiple possibilities, I found that the best route was to rebuild the site in Next.js to take advantage of a server-side rendering. Then, I pitched the idea to senior stakeholders, who green-lit the project. Finally, I mitigated the risk by breaking down the site into individual pages, first rebuilding the high-impact SEO pages.

Virgin Red Vaults was the predecessor of Virgin Red. It was an engagement app that offered discounts and competitions across the Virgin Group.

I held product ownership of Virgin Red Vaults while it was in maintenance mode. Despite a considerably reduced development team, I increased engagement by adding a simple banner that identified different content types.