work

WEB AND MOBILE

After conducting user studies and a major competitive analysis I determined that the Apartments website needed to more closely mimic the ILS' (Zillow, Trulia...) in order to more effectively deliver our community content to prospective tenants. When presented to marketing leadership we decided to engage a professional design firm to overhaul the website top to bottom resulting in a lift in page views, qualified leads, and apartment leases.

CHATBOT

The Apartments division had two significant problems; too many calls coming into the Customer Call Center and poor quality leads coming in from the website. After conducting extensive research I decided that we could kill two birds with one stone leveraging Artificial Intelligence in chatbot technology. Based on our most common user profile (Millennials), we designed and developed a chatbot that could answer FAQs as well as qualify leads with an Apartment Finder wizard that asked questions and narrowed the funnel until a perfect set of apartment options were available. 

The call center volume decreased, and the number of chats increased from an average of 6 per week to over 10 per day.  Lead quality improved and the Wizard increased lead volume by over 25% in some communities. 

RECOMMENDATION ENGINE

The CMO of the Apartments division had a problem with high bounce rate on the most popular pages of the site. We conducted usability tests and found that the Community pages were originally designed as the end-all for a user's search, leaving few options for them to discover more content ultimately causing them to browser-click off of the website. I came up with the idea to leverage AI and wrote a PRD for the Apartments Recommendation Engine, the Amazon "You May Also Like" for apartment communities. We used an off the shelf data model to collect and analyze click-stream data, and user behavior to suggest communities that closely matched what the prospects were searching for in a new apartment home. 

We ran a POC on just 10 out of 160 communities for 30 days and generated an incremental 529 quality leads which increased lead to lease conversion rates by over 12%. 

LEAD GENERATION

100 years ago I worked for CNET for 6 years in Product Management. I ran several web businesses including "Internet Services" and "Web Services", two online businesses that provided information and resources on ISPs (internet service providers) and web hosts. Since we helped consumers find ISPs (AOL, AT&T, WorldNet, CompuServe...) I thought a tool to help them choose a new provider might be useful so I came up with the idea of the Bandwidth Meter which allowed users to test their internet connection speed. The BWM results showed them their connection compared to others that were faster and offered them the ability to upgrade. The tool was used so extensively that we decided to monetize it by selling sponsorships for faster connections. We charged a $2.50 CPC (cost per click) which was outrageous back in the day, generating hundreds of thousands a month of incremental revenue for the company. Ah, the good ol' days. 

COMPARISON ENGINE

Before YouTube had a B2B business model many startups launched as the "YouTube for Business". These startups were called OVPs (online video platforms). While working for an OVP running product and marketing I realized that our competitive base was growing rapidly. Before long there were over 100 OVPs so I conceived VidCompare, an OVP comparison engine for companies to conduct research on the space and to help them procure online video services for their business. 

I built and ran the business during nights and weekends and quickly generated a solid following, enough to sell advertising on the site which generated over $30k annually. We used fledgling OVP (at the time) Vimeo to host and serve our VidCompare promo video.

As the VP of Platform Product Management for Westfield Corporation, one of my first jobs was to unify 140+ websites into one design look/feel, and onto one content management system (CMS). I conducted a large CMS evaluation of over 30 platforms and landed on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to manage and publish content for our websites. We melded 10+ designs and 6 platforms into one in a project that took nearly a year to complete. At the end, we empowered over 350 content publishers and marketers to leverage an incredibly powerful marketing tool to drive leads, generate revenue, and extend our brand.