University of the West of England

Senior Director of Professional Services at Comcast

Comcast

Executive Director and Head of Global Delivery, Syndication Partnerships

My role focusses on the following areas: 
Leadership 
- Responsibility for a department of 50+ Professional Services team members spanning business consultancy, solution architecture, product owner, scrum master and engineering disciplines.  
- Strong focus on hiring, developing and retaining a high performing, engaged team to support the wider business goals of the organization.
- Establishment of a departmental culture that fostered collaboration, integrity, employee development, engagement, and a self perpetuating desire to evolve individually and collectively.  

Revenue Growth & Management
- Sales collaboration: working hand in glove with Enterprise Sales Leader to support business development activities via the provision of technical pre sales consulting expertise. 
- Identifying opportunities for product adoption and revenue growth with existing customer base.
- Creation of financial models to accurately forecast revenue and operating budget required to deliver against committed and projected business. 

Delivery of Products and Services
- Responsible for the deployment of OTT Products and Services across the EMEA and APAC regions.
- Responsibility to define, align and evolve a scalable services delivery framework across multiple business units to support revenue growth.
- Responsible for delivering a strategy to more widely adopt Agile practices delivering empowered, high performing teams, a significantly improved customer experience and an enhanced working environment. 
 
Relationship Management 
- Establishment of strong relationship within senior leadership teams across  a customer base of tier one Broadcasters, Content Owners and Operators driving customer satisfaction and acting as an advocate for customer needs internally. 
- Establishment of key relationships in a globally matrixed organisation across Executive Leadership, Commercial, Legal, Product, Engineering and Finance teams.

Senior Director of Professional Services

- Leadership of multi disciplined department of 43 team members. 
- Responsible for delivery of products and services across major Operators and Broadcasters in the EMEA region with budgets ranging from $1-5 million. 
- Close collaboration with Sales organization to deliver technical pre sales consultancy to secure new business in the region. 
- Designated side lead for the London office representing the EMEA organization internally and externally.

Director of Professional Services

- Line management of 16 Project Delivery specialists.
- Definition and refinement of project engagement frameworks that maximise internal efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
- Key contributor to the delivery of $10m of revenue over a 12 month period with a profit margin of 60%. 
- Extensive involvement in a pre sales capacity, delivering client pitches and responsible for the creation of services related contracts.

Senior Manager, Professional Services

Kaltura provides the worlds first and only Open Source Online Video Platform. 
Over the last year I have been working as a Product Director in both Infrastructure and more recently Front End roles which have included:
•	Oversight of a 14 person strong engineering team  
•	Responsible for the conception of a product roadmap that both supports commitments to customers and delivers overall product vision and strategy  
•	Breaking down complex strategic goals into well defined, manageable work packages that will evolve the Kaltura platform
•	Close collaboration with customers to ensure that business goals are well understood, well catered for and in turn exceeded by a long term product vison 
•	Close collaboration with engineering teams to ensure that product requirements, deliverables and exit criteria are well understood 
•	Working closely with delivery management teams to ensure that roadmap commitments are executed in a timely fashion 
•	Focus on detailed analysis of data to drive decisions  
•	Creation of detailed documentation including, well defined product requirement documentation, product presentations, demonstrations and collateral for sales and customer training
•	Working closely with product marketing teams to hone go to market strategy and pricing 
•	Ongoing prioritization of product backlog balancing product needs across multiple stakeholders

Kaltura

Director of Product Management, Video Player

Director of Product Management, Platform as a Service

As Director of Professional Services I was responsible for the delivery of Media & Entertainment projects globally at Kaltura
The role includes: 
- Overseeing the successful delivery of 70+ high profile Media & Entertainment projects globally ranging in budget from $50k - $5m
- Overall responsibility for profitability of projects across the Media and Entertainment vertical
- Taking a heavily client facing approach, consulting and collaborating closely to understand customer’s business goals and thereby deliver actionable, measurable project deliverables that meet success criteria
- Projects involved a wide range of online video and related technologies including; SaaS, Hybrid and On Premise deployments; delivering content across multiple devices, leveraging multiple delivery types such as HDS, HLS and MPEG DASH; monetising content either via ad or subscription funded models; securing content from AES encryption through to the implementation of fully fledged DRM technologies 
- Hired and manage a globally distributed team of Technical Project Managers and Solution Architects
- Focus on creating an environment for personal and professional development and growth within the team
- Working closely with global sales teams throughout the pre sales process to ensure a smooth sales to projects handover, customer on boarding and retention
- Working to foster cross department collaboration, joining the dots across the operational infrastructure and beyond including Professional Services, R&D, Customer Care, Sales and Customer Success Teams
- Define and standardise best practices of the Professional Services organisation.
- Acting as an escalation point both internally and with customers
- Proactive approach to crisis management to ensure that wherever possible escalations are prepared for internally and avoided 
- Ensuring customer retention through consistent excellence in project delivery across the vertical.

Director of Professional Services, Media & Entertainment

Kaltura provides the first open-source platform for the creation and consumption of rich-media web applications. Since its public launch in September 2007, Kaltura has won numerous awards and endorsements, including the coveted TechCrunch40 People’s Choice award, Mashable’s ‘Open Web’ award, and LeWeb’s ‘top 30 web startup’ award

The role of Technical Project Manager is heavily client facing, focussing on the delivery of complex projects for high profile customers in the Media sector across the EMEA region.  

Responsibilities include: 
- Working closely with customers and Kaltura Solution Architecture teams to gather requirements and define scope of projects.
- Working closely with Development and QA teams across Kaltura Professional Services to ensure successful delivery of projects in an Agile environment.   
- Careful management of project resources to track projects financially ensuring their profitability. 
- Ensuring regular communications and reporting is in place with clients and all other internal and external project stakeholders.
- Management of multiple concurrent projects. 
- Procurement of external resources and management of third party suppliers when required.
- Creation and regular maintenance of project documentation.
- Ensuring customer satisfaction throughout the design, development, deployment and post deployment phases of a project.

Technical Project Manager - EMEA

The ePlayer is the world’s largest premium sport VOD broadcaster delivering 3.6 billion streams worldwide over 2012 and attracting a monthly audience of circa 80 million unique users.

The role included:
- Working closely with Product Management and commercial teams to identify and deliver the strategic development roadmap of the ePlayer.
- Taking project briefs and defining project requirements, scope, approach and identifying and managing risk.
- Working within an Agile environment to identify Product Backlogs and prioritising resulting work into development sprints. 
- Implementing processes of delivery around and management of 20 strong Development team based in the UK, Hungary, Slovakia and India.
- Management of multiple concurrent projects. 
- Procurement of external resources and management of third party suppliers when required.
- Creation and regular maintenance of project documentation.
- Ensuring regular communications and reporting is in place with clients and all other internal and external project stakeholders.

CLIENTS INCLUDED: 
The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, L’Equipe, La Stampa, The New York Times, The LA Times, and The Chicago Tribune

Perform

Project Manager - ePlayer

A leading video technology and production company with a suite of online video and live broadcasting services.

My work at IP covered three main areas:

Account / Project Management
Managed all aspects of the delivery of each project including:
- Creating detailed project plans based on client requirements, milestones, budgets and deliverables.
- Working closely with designers, developers, video production professionals and other external suppliers to ensure all aspects of a project are delivered on time and to budget. 
- Close monitoring of budgets and workflows to ensure efficiency and profitability. 
- Maintaining clear and consistent communications with clients at all stages of the process, fostering strong relationships that created an environment for generating repeat business.

Video Production
- Managed all shoots and edits to ensure client requirements were met and exceeded.
- Introduced streamlined digital workflows to improve turnaround times and quality of content.
- Developed encoding best practices to ensure content was delivered at as a high a quality as possible across all devices.
- Sourced and managed a team of video production professionals keeping costs to a minimum without compromising production values.

General Operations  
- Ensured that all elements of the business were as streamlined as possible, working with and identifying new suppliers on a regular basis to ensure that operational efficiency was maintained.
- Worked with senior management to develop, implement and deliver on long term business strategies and goals.
- Identified and recruited a range of talent including developers, designers, and video production professionals to work with.
- Ensured that the business was in a position to scale up as required.

CLIENTS INCLUDED: 
London Stock Exchange, MTV Networks, EMAP, DARE Digital, Geo Mission, UBM, BBH, Panasonic, Ketchum PR, Ted Baker and Marketforce

Indigo Papa

Operations Director

Specialists in the delivery of digital media communications solutions including webcasts and virtual events.

My work at In Situ involved:
- Designing, producing and delivering webcasts for a number of different clients across the Enterprise sector.
- Developing strategies that ensured that clients’ digital communications produced the maximum reach and impact whilst maintaining the best possible return on investment.
- Consulting with clients to help open new revenue streams and provide previously unseen levels of exposure for their products, messages and services.

CLIENTS INCLUDED:
Johnson & Johnson, Remington, Vitesse Media and Biomed Central

In Situ Productions

Senior Project Manager

Peppermint Events are industry leading providers of event management and event production services at outdoor music and sporting events. 

As Senior Project Manager my work was integral to Peppermint Events’ operations at large scale outdoor events and in the management of private and corporate events. 

My role was wide ranging and included: 
- Creating financial projections and budgets for each event ensuring profitability. 
- Negotiating deals with varied suppliers. 
- Managing logistics of site builds.
- Increasing the overall efficiency of the business through ensuring that stock deviation never ran higher that 1% at each event.
- Managing senior event management teams (30+).
- While with the company I played an integral role in delivering turnover of £3m over a four month period.

CLIENTS INCLUDED:
Brown-Forman, Done & Dusted, Diageo, Capitalize, Bestival, Lovebox and Red Bull

Simeon Leiserach