About Me

Summary

Award-winning UX & digital strategy, innovation, design, and product-management professional for 13+ years, on over 85 projects.

Instrumental in the planning, design, and launch of over 45 successful new websites, new online products, SaaS, software applications, and mobile applications, for Fortune 500 clients and start ups, serving millions of users.

Recognized expert in all of the major disciplines that form digital-product development: business and product strategy, brand strategy, research, gap analysis, concept innovation, business analysis, UX/UI design, and project management. Seasoned leader of strategy and product-development departments, with a track record of hiring and retaining the best talent.

High-level expert in social media and the attendant practical, organizational, managerial, and political challenges involved in evolving business models and transforming businesses into online virtual communities.

  • Identified & evaluated dozens of strategic online business-opportunities for clients and employers
  • Sold millions of dollars worth of digital product-development projects.
  • Managed dozens of projects, with budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars.
  • Directly saved companies millions in product development and operational costs.
  • Built product-development organizations from scratch many times.
  • Often brought in to troubleshoot; rescued a half-dozen major projects from failure.
  • Accelerated time lines by 30%-50%.
  • Generated hundreds of millions in revenues for clients and employers from planning, design, and delivery of digital products.
  • Pioneered many time-saving, quality-enhancing processes and prototyping techniques, used and taught widely
  • Solved many complex and difficult UX/UI problems involving both high cognitive and technical challenges for software, web, and mobile

International—brought up and educated in the UK, lived and worked in Japan and India for several years, before settling in the US.

An inventor at heart, maintains intermediate-level skills in modern web graphics-design, AJAX, PHP, db design, and other technologies because execution ability is key to successful design and management.







Award-winning digital strategy, innovation, and product-management professional for 12+ years. Instrumental in the planning, design, and launch of over 40 websites, redesigns, new online products, and mobile applications, for Fortune 500 clients and start ups. Passionate about digital media; infectiously enthusiastic; ruthlessly analytical; skilful at relationships, articulate, and dedicated to my team. Finance-literate and ROI-focused.

Areas of excellence include the following:

· Quickly grasping B2B and B2C businesses strategically and tactically, and identifying new online business-opportunities for digital products that further them

· Ensuring that projects are founded on the right strategic plans and business justification, with appropriate analytics and performance measurement

· Research, stakeholder analysis, planning, product innovation, business analysis, decision analysis, design, and development practices, including UML modeling

· Visionary approaches to virtual communities and social-networking, seizing their strategic business benefits beyond online marketing

· Expert in UI design, prototyping (incl. web, desktop software, iPhone, Blackberry), and usability assessment, crafting better interfaces between the virtual and real world—web, mobile, GIS, & beyond

· Maximizing the customer and business potential of open product-architectures

· Developing and managing teams; communication (interviews, written reports, presentations), collaboration, conflict resolution, project management, project controls, project troubleshooting & rescues

· Professional meeting-facilitation of complex multi-stakeholder groups

Extensive domain knowledge and experience in many industries, including media, publishing, retail, ecommerce, financial services, banking, healthcare, recruiting, training, professional associations, content management, mobile telecommunications, sports & leisure, life sciences, enterprise software, government, transit, nonprofit, oil and gas, utilities, construction, architecture, and engineering.

Maintains a modern competence in programming and scalable Internet technical architectures to assist with managing and communicating with tech teams, and prototyping concepts (DHTML, CSS, JS, AJAX, PHP, mySQL, and OO & db design generally).

I live with my wife and son in Englewood, CO.

Professional Contributions and Awards

  • Denver Business Journal,  ”Top Forty under 40″ award for my professional contributions to online businesses, and work helping a community non-profit. (2008)
  • Guest speaker at Colorado Interaction Design Society (IxDA) (2008)
  • National conference speaker/workshop leader  (360|Flex Atlanta) on The Future of Usability for Rich Internet Applications (2008)
  • National conference speaker / workshop leader (Club Technology Summit) on Integrated Digital Communication Strategy (2008)
  • Colorado Business Magazine Guest Columnist, “Website Paradigms Business Leaders Should Keep in Mind” (December, 2007)
  • Recruiter Magazine’s Award for Best Online Service for eFinancialCareers. Product manager  (2005).
  • ICA London (Institute of Contemporary Arts), guest speaker, on “How Information Technology Shapes Social Organization: 3000BC–Internet” (2002)
  • Rational Software UK Internet Working Group member for UML Web Extensions (2001).
  • First UK mobile-web applications and portal for Vodafone. Led IA team (2000).
  • Multiple award-winning LastMinute.co.uk, one of the first online discount travel sites in the UK. Project management team (1999).
  • Multiple award-winning UpMyStreet.co.uk, one of the first location-based consumer information aggregation services. Worked on IA team (1998).

Education

London University (UCL) (PhD program)

Ph.D. (withdrew in 2nd year to pursue digital-media career), Philosophy, 1998 – 1999
Won British Academy Major State Scholarship.

Oxford University (MA)

MA (Hons), summa cum laude, Language & Linguistics, 1995 – 1996

Oxford University (BA)

BA (Hons), summa cum laude, Literature & Literary Theory, minor in Ancient Middle Egyptian hieroglyphics and Old Babylonian cuneiform,1992 – 1995.