About ME

I've been managing digital products for over 10 years, predominantly within the Publishing, Media and Entertainment industries.

Most recently, I've been working as Head of Web Product at DK, primarily focussed on helping the relatively new DK Education division to realise its ambition of being a key publishing player within that space. The first step of this journey was the envisioning, build and launch of DK Learning. Along side that I also managed all of DK’s other websites and apps including the main brand website DK.com, the English Language learning “companion“ website and app www.dkefe.com, immersive companion VR experiences like the RHS Resilient Garden linked to via QR code in the book among many others.

Previous to that I worked to envision, scope and deliver various initiatives, campaigns and product improvements on pottermore.com, including the Patronus experience, Ilvermorny sorting, 3d Hogwarts, homepage redesign, improved site search, casual quizzing and interactive storytelling.

I studied Photography and Digital Media at University. I enjoyed experimenting with digital media and photography, using software like Dreamweaver, Flash, Director and 3D Max as well as video editing and coding to create interactive multimedia pieces, my fascination was always seeing how far you could push the technology to see what could be achieved.

After university I worked in various web related roles, I worked as a web developer, editorial assistant and content manager. I started what I would consider my Product Management career proper at Penguin UK, now part of the "Big Five" publisher Penguin Random House and Bertelsmann. I managed a host of websites including Penguin UK, DKUK, Rough Guides, Puffin, Ladybird among others, predominantly working to improve ecommerce UX and conversion, also implementing changes to improve SEO performance. From there I went on to work for DK within their global team and managed the redesign and rebuild of roughguides.com, taking it from an end-of-life, poorly designed, SEO-unfriendly, non-CMS editable, visually dated site, to a highly visual, inspirational SEO-friendly site with ecommerce. This hugely increased page rankings and as a result doubled page views and sessions and gave the brand the online identity it deserved.

For me product management is all about people, to deliver successful products; you need board type people to help define and buy into the product vision, you need developer type people to be bought into and own the product from a technical perspective, you need designer type people to completely get the the vision and produce compelling UX that will deliver it, you need marketing type people to understand and believe in what you're doing and push it relentlessly, you need editorial type people to be able to do what they do best and wordsmith and create great copy and calls to action which will make user journeys seamless, you need production type people to commission great photography, video and artwork, you need data type people to help define KPIs/OKRs and help measure success, you need legal type people to ensure that whatever you're doing with data is compliant and you don't get sued, and most importantly you need the people using your product or feature to enjoy and get value from what is delivered and make them awesome.

Check out some of the products I've worked to deliver.