Digital Product Ownership and Management Expereince
One of the key parts of my product management experience is the ability to switch from managing and leading teams, to rolling up my sleeves and getting the job done myself. For less technical products, where I am familiar with the systems (HubSpot, WordPress), I am able to do the end-to-end work myself, and have done so many times in the past.
Where it comes to custom builds and codes, I am able to articulate specifications in such a way that development teams are able to develop the products quickly and efficiently, and provide insights and understanding to non-technical stakeholders about the product.
Direct Product Management
My experience in product management was born out of my initial project management work that I was doing. I started working in digital project management during my early days at DeltaQuest (DQ), where I was working on building user stories and managing the backlog for a global job board system we were building.
After a while we realized that we needed to get traffic to the job board, and paid advertising wasn’t feasible, so we went down the SEO route, putting all of our time and effort into building out a custom CMS system that could handle all the specific requirements we had.
And this is how I got to the point where I became a product manager for the first time. Building out the base specifications, and then working with stakeholders, external clients and freelancers to continuously improve the system we were building.
We started with a bare bones CMS system with a WYSIWYG editor, and slowly evolved it. I built out user stories and managed the backlog for the following functions within the platform:
- 3rd party article submission
- Editorial queue
- Wallet for 3rd party writers
- Publication calendar for article scheduling
- Automated system for paying for published articles
- Automated ad spots within articles and sections
- Ad publishing engine, tracking clicks and impressions
- User accounts for managing email subscriptions, saved articles and orders
- Email subscription and sending engine
- Social sharing on articles
- Shopping cart for selling products and services
- Author profiles
- Article tagging and categorization
- Related article widget and algorithm
- Article templates (lists, videos, how to, basic article)
- Location specific pricing engine
All of these functions were built as part of the system itself, optimizing how the system operated under heavy traffic flows, and preventing cross function compatibility issues. The system was also SEO friendly, allowing CareerAddict.com, the primary business using the system, to grow from 13,000 unique visitors in its first 6 months to more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month today.
After focusing heavily on the creation of this CMS system, I then turned into commercialization for the product itself, building out additional revenue streams for CareerAddict.com. This led me down the route of building out a psychometric testing platform and transforming the existing job board that we had built.
For the psychometric testing platform, I didn’t just handle the technical product ownership, I also owned every part of the systems, from the tests, the results and the career matching matrix that was used to match test results to potential careers. Finally, I also handled the normalization of the data for the career interest, personality and motivation tests that we had on the system, taking the size of these tests down by 50% (in terms of the number of questions) and tweaking the accuracy of the results generated.
The components for the psychometric platform included:
Timed Tests
Timed aptitude tests, where the customer would select multiple choice answers in 3 different tests: Verbal, Numerical and Abstract Reasoning
Ranking Questionnaires
Questionnaire ranking tests, where the customer is asked to rank 5 statements in order of importance. This was used for: Personality, Motivation and Career Interests
Matching Matrix
Career matching matrix, where each one of the results for the 19 career interests, 29 personality traits, 18 motivational categories and the 3 aptitude tests were mapped to specific careers.
Results Matching Engines
Job and course matching systems to show customers different job openings they could apply for and courses they could take to progress in their matched careers
Pricing Model
Location specific pricing model that would change the price and currency of the tests based on the customers IP address.
Automated Funnel Builder
A funnel builder that would allow the company to create an upsell funnel using videos, career matches and other content to drive the customers to upgrade.
As for the job board, it was a complete rebuild from the ground up, where we stripped a lot of the unnecessary elements, and recreated an MVP in only 6 weeks. This system included:
- Job search
- Job seeker profiles
- CV / Candidate search
- Application management system with a job seeker relevancy algorithm
- XML job feeds
- Job posting for recruiters with a custom price engine based on their location
For each of these products, I managed the end-to-end technical development, from writing specifications, producing the roadmap, creating user stories, prioritizing the backlog, to the commercialization of these products, working on pricing, promotions, messaging and go to market strategy. After each launch we would run special feedback sessions with customers, both B2C and B2B to determine where we could improve on the value proposition of the products offered. This led to us gaining valuable insight and running continuous improvement sprints for each of the products built.
Product Management Consulting
After successfully building out some great products at DQ, I started selling these products and improvements to businesses. The last major product upgrade that I made whilst working for DQ was building a centralized web booking system for a chain of restaurants in Cyprus, who I landed as a client before leaving. This system would provide a booking calendar on each of their websites, and when a booking would come in through the website it would be fed to a central calendar that could be viewed on any device online, and filtered according to restaurant and date. Each individual restaurant would also have the ability to add booking directly into the calendar through a device (generally an iPad) on the premises, that would then update the online calendars for the restaurant.
The final part of the booking system was the ability to configure the individual availability for each restaurant based on date and time, so that it would prevent over booking.
After leaving DQ I joined Conversion Pros (CP) as their chief project officer. This was an agency role, where I would handle the project and product management of external clients, as well as support the serial entrepreneur owner in building and developing his own product ideas.
In many cases, I was not managing the product itself, but rather guiding the product, sales and marketing teams on how to get the best value for the product, helping with product pricing, and providing feasibility and competitor studies for these products.
After my stint at CP (the majority of the business operations were sold off, and the project / agency arm was shut down), one of the shareholders in joint ventures run at CP asked me to help them launch 4 new products over the course of a 6-month contract. For these products my role was purely to get them built out to be ready to go to market. This included:
- Supplier management
- Technical team management
- Website building
- Content Production
- Creative team management
- API and system integrations
Finally, in my most recent role at FXPRIMUS (FXP), my product management skills were recognized before I joined the company. They hired me to be the head of automation and acquisition, with a focus on building out technical products for the marketing team to use and leverage to grow the business.
This role did not last long, as the previous CMO left the company, and I was asked to fill the gap. This doesn’t mean that I stopped working as the marketing product owner, but rather meant that 2I added the responsibilities of a CMO to my existing role.
I excelled so well at this, that when FXP decided to launch an enterprise project management office (EPMO) in March 2021, I was asked to act as the board level representative for the department. Working closely with a newly promoted heads of EPMO, we worked to build out an operational structure that would suit all levels of stakeholders, with the head of EPMO managing the technical stakeholders (CTO and his team), and me managing the other stakeholders (CEO, CFO, CSO, the rest of the boards of directors and other heads of departments). My career trajectory at FXP was also changed to reflect this, with the target of having me evolve into the Chief Product Officer by the end of 2021.
Get in Touch with me
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Contact
Email: jweaver14@gmail.com
Phone: 07456392093
