University of Mary  Washington

Program Manager  -  Research Operations

United States

Automattic

Program Manager: Research Operations

Leadership
Direct programs for smooth product launch communications, documentation updates, feedback loops. Consult with partners on how to track impact and add scale to feedback, making it easy for Product Managers to prioritize fixes or feature requests.

Strategic Analysis
Create custom metrics to identify areas of our products that drive unnecessary overhead, directing where to investigate product improvements and creating an easy prioritization matrix.

Customer Research
Direct programs to quickly identify customer pain points. Conduct regular customer experience research and data-driven, narrative-oriented reporting on improvements. Synthesize and analyze findings across data sets and hundreds of thousands of customer touchpoints.

Key Contributions
-  Scaled insights to support avenues for 3 products and 100k monthly interactions.
-  Created first-ever metric to understand cost of bad user experience; collaborated with product and data teams to integrate reporting and automate metrics; facilitated information transfer / training.
-  Championed system to embed customer-facing support members into product roadmapping calls; led to smoother and more intuitive product roll outs.
-  Established new categorization infrastructure consistent across support avenues (live chat and email) and flexible across 3 products.
-  Mentored team of 10 support engineers from all 3 products in creating presentation to C Suite; led to direct product improvements.
            

    
    

    
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Led high-touch support program that offered video 1:1 onboarding sessions to <a href="http://WordPress.com">WordPress.com</a> Business Plan customers. Conducted generative user research studies to inform future offerings. Coordinated 50+ support engineers. Ran NPS data analysis and presented reports. Mentored support team on best practices for data usage.

Key Contributions
-  Completely overhauled monthly reporting process to incorporate customer experience; gained stakeholder buy-in to add insights capabilities, collaborated on and enhanced monetization strategy; increased reporting automation and data reliability while reducing no show rates by 10%.
-  Directly contributed to shifting roadmap for <a href="http://WordPress.com">WordPress.com</a> to more fluid editor-activated templates and enhanced usability; spearheaded research survey, assimilated trends, and presented to 200+ design and  leadership team.
-  Increased engagement from product and design teams 50%, leading to direct trackable product improvement.
            

    
    

    
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Program Manager  -  Customer Onboarding + Research

Provided live chat, email, and 1:1 onboarding sessions to gather customer feedback; presented insights to CEO and product team to inform customer experience improvement and product development projects.

Key Contributions
-  Led 25-person team in establishing customer-centric, automated support system that reduced incoming customer questions by 10%; developed testing, updated tagging process, and trained team on proper use.
-  Spearheaded customer research project; data used to identify pain points and improve domains dashboard.
            

    
    

    
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Happiness Engineer

Conducted needs assessments and developed customized, insights-driven email marketing campaigns for 100+ small business and brokerage clients. Managed blog and internal content marketing strategy. Published content with industry-authority publishers to foster community connection. Built landing pages.

Key Contributions
-  Introduced content automation strategies to reach wide customer base.
-  Clients earned $10K+ in commissions from reengagement campaigns.
Wrote drip email campaigns for small business owners, maintaining 40% open rates.
-  Consistent feedback showed messaging produced quality leads over time for clients.
            

    
    

    
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Happy Grasshopper

Content Strategist + Creator

Reviewed every piece of live content on the Internet that included one of our paid affiliate links. The purpose was to ensure our brand was represented in according with our guidelines and that the information conveyed was accurate and legal.

This was actually Capital One’s first foray into using Affiliate programs to market their credit cards, and we brought the program into legal compliance during my time there, while making it the second-most profitable marketing avenue that year.

-  Reduced High and Medium level errors by 70% in seven months.
-  Reduced paid advertisers by 30% (those were the bad ones).
-  Collaborated with brand and legal teams to create clear publisher guidelines.
-  Oversaw transition from GAN to Commission Junction, ensuring all content was updated correctly.
-  Worked with Business Analysts to determine ongoing practices that would help the publishers to    preempt compliance errors.
            

    
    

    
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Capital One

Affiliate Marketing Content Manager

Interviewed interesting Fredericksburgians on their passions, experiences, and pursuits, and featured them in the Front Porch Magazine!

Freelance

Freelance Writer

Composed and formatted proposals in response to government RFPs. Collaborated extensively on the business plan to present to investors. Prepared all copy for product catalog. Wrote content for manuals, policies, and training material.

Renegade Armor

Marketing Assistant  -  Technical Writer

Helped college students improve writing skills. Worked one-on-one with each student, assessing their writing level, adapting to their needs, and helping them improve in the areas that would make the biggest impact on their writing. It was fulfilling when they came up to me on campus and shared how their 'hopeless' paper ended up earning a B+ after we worked together :)

University of Mary Washington Writing Center

Academic Tutor

Content Intern at <a href="http://Tipmine.com">Tipmine.com</a>
Populated website with interesting how-to's: <a href="http://www.tipmine.com/gracie-mae">http://www.tipmine.com/gracie-mae</a>. Brainstormed marketing strategies. Collaborated extensively with leadership team to improve the user experience in relation to design and engagement.

Freelance for Leadership by Design
Assisted in the development of the company blog. Prepared marketing outreach strategies. Collaborated on articles written by the founder, aiding in the drafting and editing processes.

Editor of The Father's Love: Children's devotional book, available at <a href="http://andsomuchmore.net/index.html">http://andsomuchmore.net/index.html</a>.

Independent
Interview elderly and write their autobiographies / memoirs. Formatted stories into books with their pictures on <a href="http://Blurb.com">Blurb.com</a>.
            

    
    

    
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Gracie Ofslager