Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Experienced problem solver, quality-driven people person, and someone who loves to help. In order to effectively help I deconstruct whatever challenge I'm faced with in order to really understand it, so I can solve it and move past it. To me, being helpful means understanding what is needed vs what is desired and trying to find the most pragmatic solution that not only helps in the short run, but doesn't end up haunting you in the long run. I jokingly describe myself as lazy, but I mean that in the sense that I don't like going back to fixing the same issues over and over again - a high-quality solution means fixing something once. While I thrive on challenges, what really motivates and energizes me is working with others, because I believe in working in a collaborative, and supportive way that helps bring out the best in others.
Working as the Product Area Director in the Data Infrastructure Management & Enablement area makes me responsible for all aspects relating to making data available for execution (onboarding & remote data access), maximizing the value of any available data, as well as enabling data extraction for use in down-stream systems. In addition to this, I am also running a cloud migration project, acting as the Product Manager for a number of products, and mentor junior PMs and help them get into the groove of the product mindset.
Joined the product org during a period of restructuring where I took over a number of products including Relational Data, External Content, the Unified Customer Profile, and Open Data. As part of the SAP acquisition we needed to critically re-evaluate product roadmaps and strategies, then reprioritize and allocate resources to embark on a fundamentally transformative cloud-migration initiative. With the new strategic direction the need for a wider reorganization effort in the product area was identified which I was closely involved with, including rebranding and identifying new team requirements. Notable Achievements: • Developed North Star for our Remote Data strategy, ensuring that engineering teams have a vision to work towards. • Completely overhauled the pricing strategy for key products in order to maximize revenue streams and profitability. • Put together and executed a roadmap for reducing ops loads through decommissioning and handovers in line with the new area structure and strategy. • Created a new demo data standard from the ground up, by breaking down key stakeholder requirements and translating these into necessary data models, and then manually creating the necessary datasets for a fully-automated demo deployment system. • Stepped in as acting Product Area Director for 6 months to free up resources needed to support larger cross-org cloud transformation projects. • Built up the confidence of a number of colleagues across both product and engineering within the area, resulting in my teams being some of the lowest churn risk with highest motivation levels in the org.
Returned to Emarsys to take on the challenge of clarifying value propositions to enable commercial teams to more confidently commiunicate USPs, core value, and benefits to prospects. Notable achievements: • Collaborating with the Vertical & Product Marketing department, taking care of high profile content requests including video scripting and voicing, ebook creation, solution document creation, as well as ad-hoc content QA, editing. • Designed and executed multi-lingual global communications campaign standard to showcase being recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalisation Engines. • Redesigned the global communications infrastructure at Emarsys, focusing on the cross-departmental ability to effectively communicate with and engage contacts in an aligned and centralized approach. The infrastructure was redeveloped to focus on enabling a unified communication journey with a contact-centric perspective as a way to eliminate data silos while improving overall engagement, uptake, and satisfaction. • Collaborated with the Account Based Management Function to create custom content and campaigns for high-value lead and prospect targeting. • Provided high-level content creation support including video scripting, landing page and PPC content creation, to content QA and fixing. • Identified several gaps in terms of data availability and quality across acquisition systems and engagement channels, enabling teams to provide a stronger and more automated experience going forward. • Worked with global marketing teams and resources across time zones including the US, UK, and EU.
I took on the challenge of Head of Operations to help establish sustainable and scalable framework that could really help ready2order flourish as they grew. With more investment capital coming in, the business had a unique opportunity to start taking the product to the next level, and my skillset proved to be the right fit to help make that happen. Notable achievements: • Rebuilt the entire Customer Success function with emphasis on enabling self-service support. This included process design and acceptance, collateral creation, training provision, and finally introducing an ITSM layer to facilitate strategic decision making to help make this a success. • Established formal inter-departmental escalation paths across Customer Success, Development, Finance, Information Systems, Legal, and Product Management across the board, from simple bug handling support, to major incident handling procedures (including prioritization criteria). • Initiated & facilitated standardization of working practices by transitioning the entire organization to Jira & Confluence, which included tailoring setups for each department to optimize efficiency and transparency. • Designed an out-of-hours support solution and then helped with vendor selection, and subsequently managed the move from one out-of-hours support partner to another, from planning to piloting, training, feedback, and finally enablement.
Joined ready2order as they entered a growth spurt following successes in the market as they were looking to secure more investment funding by critically assessing the status quo and identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement. Notable achievements: • Mapped out existing technical landscape, analyzing historic business drivers, and establishing a new tech-stack topology that would lay the foundation for next-level growth. • Established the Information Systems department from the initial business process designs, to implementation, documentation, and roll out.
The Emarsys Services Org had matured to such a point where they needed dedicated resources that looked after their collateral, from internal materials and tools, through to customer-facing collateral to help enable commercial teams to more easily pitch value propositions. My combined expertise with Emarsys meant that I was perfectly positioned to take on this challenge and help provide them with the end-to-end content coverage that was needed. Notable achievements: • Defined, created, integrated, rolled out and maintained all service related collateral from the SKU creation to commercial contracts, as well as managing the back-end product catalog in Salesforce. • Identified gaps and created positioning collateral to support commercial teams, across the board from web copy, to brochures, sales decks, lesson.ly training courses, and additional enablement materials. • Defined and built a contract generator using MS Word and MS Excel that allowed commercial teams to create standardized contracts across 7 languages, and 10 currencies. • Was a core member of a Quote to Cash project (CPQ/CLM) breaking down contracting mechanics to turn it into template logic that facilitated fully automated end-to-end contract generation. • Provide ad-hoc project management support.
With the continued growth of the product, a second documentation team was created in a satellite office, so I stepped up to look after the team members in Vienna as their Line Manager. Notable achievements: • Managed Language Service resources, Localization and Quality Assurance, including performance monitoring, enablement, team building & support. • Provided strategic content support for Sales Enablement, Integrations, Legal & Compliance, Implementation Services, and Product Marketing. • Reviewed and assessed workflow fitness both upstream and downstream of the content creation to extend efficiencies across the content lifecycle. • Developed style guides across content types and domains, and ensure that terminology, grammar, style, and usage aligns with corporate taxonomy. • Managed the Documentation & Localization team in Vienna, including line management duties such as quarterly reviews, and freeing up resources for their continuous development (courses, events, etc.). • Hiring, onboarding, and training of new Localization Manager.
As more of my expertise was needed outside of documentation, and the documentation team itself was growing, I started taking on more more high-level content challenges as part of my actual role. Notable achievements: • Designed and implemented localization workflow integrations for web content and design collateral via Alchemy Catalyst that could contextualize text strings for translators via data-transfer processes, which eliminated the scope for confusion. • Designed and oversaw the development of JIRA & Asana integrations to enable robust & transparent collaboration across teams and systems without any loss of efficiency. As part of this I provided training and knowledge sharing via Confluence and SharePoint on how this worked, as well as support for content deployment. • Acted as the Lead content creator for the corporate website re-launch in 2016, defining the styleguide for webcopy, as well as defining standards for all our various corporate product video types. • Provided strategic localization support, developed Quality Control processes, and scaled up localization resources and capabilities.