CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER | CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

Impactful leader with a strong track record of driving transformation and aligning teams to deliver organizational value and improved business results. Exceptional executive-level product, technology, strategy, and general management with a focus on cross-functional collaboration by leveraging strong communication and team-building skills. Consistently delivering revenue growth, margin improvement and enhanced Net Promoter Scores.

Resourceful executive known for designing innovative products and technology roadmaps to achieve business objectives while presenting complex concepts in a relatable manner to stakeholders.

Core competencies include:

Global Leadership | Transformational Leader | P&L Owner | General Management | Operational Excellence | Strategic Planning and Execution | Product Management | Innovative Solutions | MarTech | SaaS | Strategic Partnerships | Product Development | Customer Centric | Mergers & Acquisitions | Cyber security Leadership

 

EXPERIENCE

PowerReviews, Inc., Chicago IL July 2021 – November 2023

Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer

Assisted consumers make better purchasing decisions and to help businesses drive sales and improve products and services.

• Executive sponsor for prominent clients including Walmart, Albertsons, Gap, Post, and key clients. Established and nurtured strong relationships to align product development with their strategic goals and supported a 92+% client retention rate.
• Spearheaded strategic partnerships to fuel innovation and enhance product offerings that were rooted in revenue generation, and on track to deliver substantial earnings within the 1st year. Partnership examples include Ibotta, Walmart, BazaarVoice, Fetch Rewards, Meta and more supporting $30 million in revenue.
• Led efforts to transform the platform, enabling seamless handling of escalating product volumes, review coverage, and syndication. Added Walmart’s 350 million products to our existing 500 million product DB and improved processing time by over 20x, going from 72 hours to 3 hours of processing time.
• Championed a data science-oriented approach, leveraging machine learning that reduces costs, accelerates time to market, and bolsters innovation across the organization. Estimated to save $350,000 in costs in the 1st year and spawned new product solutions.
• Cultivated a product-centric culture, emphasizing business outcomes and solutions, employing an MVP methodology supported by active client engagement. Rebuilt and revitalized engineering and product leadership teams to embrace empowerment, learning, and customer-centric values driving an 92% retention rate and improved delivery quality and time.
• Successfully led and managed though a cyber security incident with nominal business impact.
• Introduced and established best practices around cyber security training, management, and monitoring enabling us to support and grow our enterprise level account portfolio by 50%.

 

Label Insight, Chicago, IL | Hybrid July 2020 – July 2021

Chief Technology Officer

Recruited as a commercially minded CTO and to facilitate readiness and sale activities, contributing to an amazingly successful sale/exit of the company. Led Engineering, Data Science, and Data Operations teams.

• Instilled a customer-centric culture, reducing product processing turnaround time from over 45 days to 10 days within the data operations team.
• Leveraged data science and machine learning to enhance operational efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness which achieved a 41% reduction in Cost per Product and lowered offshore data processing costs by 53%.
• Collaborated with the CPO to establish a product and engineering- led organization, emphasizing business outcomes through an MVP approach. Aligned engineering capacity with a well-defined roadmap.

Triad Retail Media, St. Petersburg, FL December 2017 – December 2019

Senior Vice President, Product and Platform Technology

Enabled the world’s leading brands to engage consumers on the largest digital retail platforms to Turn Shoppers Into Buyers

• Pioneered the formation of a dedicated Product team, revolutionizing the organization's understanding of Product Management.
• Led initiatives at Triad, collaborating with prominent retailers such as Walmart, CVS, and Office Depot to capitalize on their e-commerce and digital platforms.
• Successfully launched Triad's inaugural AI/data-driven media product, yielding $5 million in its debut year. Catalyzed the creation of three additional market-ready products stemming from the MVP's success.

 

Catalina Marketing, Chicago, IL | Remote July 2009 – December 2017

Group Vice President, Product Platform and Technology, January 2013 – December 2017

Oversaw the Product Platform and Technology unit in defining the Catalina platform and product features and capabilities to be leveraged by all global products and networks. Served as conduit between Technology, Analytics, Sales, Product Management and Global Media Operations. Manage a product portfolio of $45M in Capital spend.

• Spearheaded cross-functional initiative to simplify legacy platform, reducing investment level by 50%.
• Participated in evaluation/due diligence in acquiring a company to accelerate personalization capability – enabling new market entry 12 months faster and saving over $2M in development costs.
• Developed and managed strategic relationships with partners, including Target, ShopRite, Meijer and vendors like Microsoft, Adobe, You Technology (Kroger), and Inmar that supported $600M in revenue.
• Led Agile implementation and execution – driving productivity, which enabled improvement of delivery estimates by 70%, with greater flexibility to pivot directions to fit organizational needs.
• Slashed the number of active projects by 50%, enabling the organization to focus on better investment of the $45M capital budget and eliminate waste through resource capacity evaluation and planning.
  

Group Vice President and General Manager, Digital Rewards, January 2012 – January 2013

Advanced to turn around a Digital Business that was on track to lose $9M and refocused it to gain competitive advantage, as opposed to a “me too” digital strategy. Led Catalina’s Digital Rewards business centered on delivering personalized syndicated digital media to retailers and publishers’ websites, mobile apps, and email solutions. Managed $15M P&L across Digital Rewards business unit and 40 employees.

• Repositioned and refocused group’s alignment, reversing potential $9M loss within 3 months.
• Refocused the team to contribute $3M back into EBITDA.
• Collaborated with cross-functional groups to improve and maximize margins by 40%.
  

Vice President, Digital Solutions, July 2009 – January 2012

Brought the Catalina business model to current and next generation, starting with Internet, mobile, social media, and emerging platforms and mediums. Prioritized, managed, and communicated the global digital product roadmap to the organization. Managed $20M capital budget, 5 direct and 25 cross-functional reports. Partnered with international teams in France, UK and Japan, extending and building digital products in those markets. Managed cross-functional teams to successfully deliver products to market.

• In the first year, launched a $15M revenue SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, enabling brands to have a secure, fully white labeled coupon solution with embedding capability in all media channels.
• Led team in launching a $7M SaaS coupon website for large retailer, Target.com (http://coupons.Target.com), in 6 weeks, supporting 2M impressions per day – providing instant credibility of Catalina’s delivery capability.
• Partnered and led global teams (US, France, Japan) that rebuilt a $15M revenue generating coupon platform in 18 months, while launching 7 websites (four in US/three in France) in the same year.
• Set strategy and led team in building the $10M revenue driving digital coupon and “Load to Card” product through partnerships and deep integrations with retailers or their partners.
• Launched a $500k pilot program with Pepsi, Safeway and Foursquare that drove in-store purchases
  
  

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

Calumet Photographic, Chicago, IL

Chief Technology Officer and General Manager Global Ecommerce

 

Q-Interactive (Formerly CoolSavings.com), Chicago, IL

Senior Vice President, Technology | Vice President, Technology | Director Of Development

Senior Developer

 

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science, BS, Management Information Systems, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL

 

CERTIFICATIONS

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
• Cybersecurity: Managing Risk in the Information Age (Harvard Online)
  

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

• Member, Association of Coupon Professionals - Digital Coupon Task Force
• Member, Technology Executive Club
• Member, Technology Executives Network
• Chicago Chief Technology Officers group
• Product Led Growth group