Gawker Media LLC

Product Manager, March 2015 - Aug 2016*

Technology product manager specializing in native ads, commerce, video tools, content consumption, editorial tools, and reader engagement throughout Kinja, Fusion Media Group's (FMG) publishing platform. Kinja is a lightweight, intuitive CMS that focuses on supporting great journalism and the diversified revenue streams that enable it.

Gawker Media Group (GMG) was the publisher of the web’s most beloved media brands, including Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Jezebel, Jalopnik, reaching 100MM unique visitors a month -- more than one third of all Americans.

- Launched a redesigned editor that increased stakeholder satisfaction and ease of use, reduced feature code, increased feature reliability, and initiated the process of transitioning the feature page to SSL.
- Launched the platform’s first Account Settings and Blog Settings pages, providing more accessible and intuitive account management tools for Editorial staff.
- Product lead for a performance improvement effort, which decreased speed index by 20%, time-to-first-paint by 20%, time to load user info by 91%, time to load JS by 91%, and time to load fist ad placement by 91%.
Led extensive qualitative user research projects to measure outer-departmental satisfaction with the platform, providing key information that led to redefining the platform mission and improved long term interdepartmental communication.
- Product lead for a POC machine-learning based system that rates content sensitivity, which can be used to automate moderation for ad delivery logic, off-platform distribution logic, and comment sensitivity.
- Launched the “feature template”, a specialized post template to showcase spectacular stories, which increase display ad viewability to 85% on desktop and 73% on mobile and increased share interactions by 177%.
- Led and launched a redesign of the Kinja account settings feature and blog management dashboard.

Product Designer, Feb 2014 - March 2015

The the first member of the Gawker Media LLC product design team, I aided in building out and on-boarding the following team members and in defining team processes. While in this role, I primarily designed the information architecture for several features in coordination with the engineering, product, data, editorial, and business teams.

- Researched, designed, and tested a new editor feature that directly improved Editorial workflow
- Researched and designed notifications page improvements.
- Designed a tips feature to allow readers to securely send optionally anonymous tips to Editorial staff.
- Collaboratively redesigned article reading experience, content insets, commerce insets, and home activity feed.
- Aided in onboarding the Tech team’s first product design team (VP of Product, Executive Director of Design, and following design team members). This included creating documentation on the platform structure and functionality, developing roadmaps and resources, and directly training new staff.

* This is the same job I perform now, except that technically my employment shifted to Univision after they acquired Gawker Media LLC in September 2016.