Contempo

For this initiative at Chartbeat, our product marketing director and I were given the challenge to think through market expansion opportunities: How might we leverage our existing capabilities in new ways and for new market segments?

Among my contributions to the project:

• Co-led R&D team to expand outside media vertical, in partnership with our product marketing director

• Our team’s product discovery process moved from a potential market need to a vetted business plan with 300+ member waitlist in 3 months

• Pilot-tested research tools to scalably recruit and engage with hundreds of users outside our traditional customer groups, including via moderated and unmoderated methods

• Leveraged LinkedIn’s Ads functionality to refine our market-sizing analysis and test hypotheses around value propositions.

• Ensured alignment at all stages with executive leadership and, as a team, presented plans to company’s board of directors

HuffPost Listen to America

Under a tight 6-week deadline, our team built a new storytelling format for 170+ stories published as part of HuffPost’s Listen to America initiative. This project encompassed a multi-week bus tour that took HuffPost journalists around the country to meet with folks in their communities and cover underreported stories through a collaboration with a local publication in each city the tour visited.

From a product standpoint, our work included the project’s full digital presence on both on-site and distributed platforms. But as we approached the challenge, we wanted to take this opportunity to develop a storytelling template that would be flexible enough to support the premiere pieces of reporting from the project, as well future reuse by the newsroom.

Among the challenges we tackled:

• Close coordination with editorial stakeholders producing a variety of forms of storytelling (video/text/photo/graphics)

• Support for nuanced branding requirements of 23 co-publishing partners

• Satisfying both short-term requirements of the project, as well as long-term reuse of the format for custom content deals

• Mapped out the project's full scope, especially bringing clarity to non-technical tasks and internal admin needs

• Kept subscription redemption process simple, resulting in double the predicted conversion rate

• Ran weekly check-ins with key stakeholders to ensure all deliverables were on track

• Helped recruit partners by demo-ing the program's tools and redemption UX

• Sheperded the program through beta testing, during which we fixed bugs and ironed out the partner on-boarding process

• Tested all facets of the program, including consumer-facing sign-on process, partner-facing email marketing tools and internal-facing admins

Washington Post Classic iPad App

As part of this project, we overhauled our hybrid iPad app — ditching HTML5 views and rebuilding article pages, galleries and section fronts using native technology.

The challenge posed to our team was how to support the rich, embedded storytelling elements — like tweets, Instagrams, YouTube videos, etc. — that were increasingly interwoven into our stories. Unlike when using HTML5 views to render content, these didn't work out of the box. But our efforts paid off:

• The app's crash rate dropped to one-fifteenth of what it was when using hybrid setup.

• Article load-time dropped significantly, and user complaints around offline reading bugs vanished.

• The newsroom noticed no drop in support for embedded content.