Florida International University

Miami University

Sr. Product Manager/Program Owner at Office Depot

Delray Beach, Florida, United States

I have lead 4 different teams over the past 3.5 years: Business Marketplace,  Publishing Tools, Content Promotions & Personalization, and Onsite Search, Navigation & SEO. Working closely with the Marketing and Merchandising teams to drive and build a roadmap with goals of a responsive site, dynamic publishing, personalization, an internal marketplace and search relevancy. Using competitive analysis, usability testing, and A/B testing to set priorities and measure the impact of the features that are delivered.  Responsible for translating, managing, and driving the feature development by understanding the customer's needs and how they translate to sales, margin, and conversion.     Accomplishments:	Built a marketplace business case which included marketing funding, an operational team, revenue, and subscription fees.  Presented this to the executive team where it was approved for funding.	Lead multi team steering committee on roadmap and priorities for the rollout of a new CMS 	Building brand new ways to publish to the site with a less manual process and reviewing tools to build out a suite of key marketing/merchandising tools.	Evaluated auto optimization tools for promotional content	Increased site sales by 2.5% when launching the My Office Depot Toolbar to the B2C site and 4% on the B2B site.	Lead Product Management team for Black Friday by delivering additional functionality through dynamic ads and an updated UI. 	Effectively communicating strategy and deliverables to engineering and business stakeholders. This includes UX/UI enhancements, core product enhancements, and product strategy. 	Drove moving all search and browse results pages into an Experience Manager responsive design that gives the business team flexibility, personalization, and an improved look and feel.   	Increased search functionality customer feedback scores 420 basis points on the B2B website and 370 basis points on <a href="http://officedepot.com">officedepot.com</a> year over year.

Office Depot

Sr. Product Manager/Program Owner

Continuously improving the customer experience by representing the needs of end-users by keeping the on-site search, taxonomy pages, and product pages relevant and innovative.  This is done by evaluating market trends, competitive analysis, usability testing, web analytics and working with key stakeholders within the company to determine what features to build. As the liaison between the business and development teams, it is necessary to collect business requirements and develop solutions by coordinating development and testing for new features and functionality.  Accomplishments:- Built key relationships across cross functional teams in order to expedite business needs.   - Experienced in Agile software development; gathering and driving development of enhancements through use-case development, wireframe review, usability testing, user acceptance testing and implementation.  - Create and prioritize the product backlog.  At the end of the development sprint, responsible for verifying that the acceptance criteria is met as the business requires by working with development resources to keep project on track. - Effectively communicating strategy and deliverables to engineering and business stakeholders. This includes UX/UI enhancements, core product enhancements, and product strategy. - Use a data driven approach to decision making.  A detail-oriented evaluator who utilizes KPI's by evaluating on-site search patterns, user behaviors, site analytics, and project metrics to optimize the conversion funnel.  - Drive innovation in current projects such as zero results search pages, discontinued sku pages, multivariate sku page for a family of skus, vendor agreements (HP, Bazaarvoice), sales ranking calculation for browse results,  and search algorithm modifications.  - Utilize Endeca, Coremetrics, Maximizer and Tealeaf software to optimize search, analyze KPI’s, observe user behavior, evaluate a/b tests, and create business requirements for future projects.

Senior Business Analyst, Search & Product Content Agile Development

Maximize online sales and profit through online merchandising, promotions, and eCommerce feature functionality requirements.  online business performance by analyzing KPI’s, collaborate and provide recommendations to merchandising and marketing organizations on best practice approaches in merchandising on the web to optimize conversion, accelerate cross-sell and attach sales, and deliver product level landing page experience with the ultimate goal of increasing online revenue.  Accomplishments:-	Creating measurable integrated marketing strategies based on strong research and analysis driving average promotional sales of $650K per week.-	Managed seasonal promotional periods such as Back to School driving $38.1M in online sales for Office Supplies. This required the team to work directly with merchants, vendors and marketing to vet offers, work with the creative team to deliver the ad tiles/promotional pages, and work with the production team load the final tiles to the website. Once ads were loaded to the website the team was responsible for QA and on call emergency needs.-	Worked with development teams to enhance website functionality by understanding new products, promotions and the way customers shop online.  Ultimately creating a better shopping experience.  -	Based on competitive analysis, CoreMetrics data and collaborating with cross functional online teams such as paid and natural search, email marketing, mobile, and merchants updated and built storefronts using Endeca, updated taxonomy, tested and updated web content, and simplified On-Site search results for both B2B and B2C online environments.  This helped customers effectively navigate to the right product and category to increase page conversion.

Online Category Manager

Optimize the performance of the flagship e-commerce site. Using my detail-oriented and analytical merchandising and marketing skills to allow the consumer to easily quickly and easily understand the products in the dynamic and growing Digital Home Services industry (e.g., Broadband, TV, Phone, and Mobile services).- Update offer content as necessary, working in conjunction with Provider Management team, as well as the Content Management team.- Work with partner support and QA organizations to establish best practices for monitoring the quality of dynamic offer content.- Optimize funnel by testing changes in offer content, offer presentment, and offer mix, using controlled A/B or multi-variate experiments (with internal or external tools)- Analyze online conversion rates at all stages of the funnel, from landing page through to confirmation- Gather consumer feedback using a variety of techniques (e.g., surveys, usability, focus groups) to test offer content- Test offer mix and presentment, and impact on conversion and activation rates

Acceller, Inc.

Product Merchandising Manager

Manage Corporate Marketing communication through weekly conference calls providing analysis for expense, strategy changes, and sales promotion.  Responsible for creating marketing event recaps for senior management, combining the current event strategy, sales/markdowns, expense, and analyzing creative placement. Identifing opportunities for improvement by media type.  Accomplishments:                Increased sales by $4 Million in the 4th Qtr by researching sales by store to recommend 14 additional store hours.n	Research an annual storewide budget of $29 Million providing strategic direction and pricing to Vice President and Marketing Directors to increase sales.

Macy's

Storewide Marketing Analyst

Identified causes of ROF (Rolling Operating Forecast) variances and established alternative courses of action to improve the ROF process.Accomplishments:	Developed quantitative methods for projecting costs by studying actualized advertising costs vs. plan by media type.	Implemented a new structure with Marketing and Finance teams to ensure forecast accuracy.	Corporate leader for employee volunteer program delivering a 26% increase to the goal hours.

Financial Analyst

Negotiated markdowns, orders, & returns to vendor to achieve stock projections and sales plans by completing a weekly open to buy budget.  Financially responsible to write monthly orders in key classifications by predicting fashion trends, revising style updates, and maintaining receipt flow.Accomplishments:	Guided the assortment planning and financial profitability of T Tahari – Annual Volume $2 Million.   Increased sales by 7.6%.	Strategically allocated INC merchandise content to increase sales for a $500K advertising budget.

Assistant Buyer

Assisted Buyer planning and proofing all advertising/copywriting/marketing of merchandise. Maintained precise flow of all purchase orders-from writing orders to order completion.  Studied trends, patterns, and colors to design private label dress shirts.

Bon-Ton Department Stores

Summer Internship for 2001, 2002, 2003Analyzed SAS output using statistical calculations/formulas.  Ran weekly/monthly response rate reports using SAS and Excel.  Created and verified presentations in Powerpoint and Excel.

Melissa Malinovsky