Trace Johnson
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Trace has 20 years of product management experience with extensive specialization in digital commerce funnel conversion. Trace has spent the last 6 years delivering personalized experiences and building the underlying data and analytics infrastructure required to do so at scale. Trace has a deep allegiance to the data, building and utilizing A/B and multivariate testing tools, and moving consumers to higher-value tiers along their life-cycle.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
CDP Product Management
Endeavor
- Led the architecture and development of a customer data platform for a global talent agency and content producer, including ingestion, transformation, governance, analysis, segmentation, and activation.
- Delivered a lead scoring data product, including third-party data appends, that drove 70%+ conversion lift.
- Onboarded 15 portfolio properties and provided data visualization and marketing services from a shared platform.
Product Manager
Angi.com - Main
- Doubled mobile payments conversion in less than seven months by simplifying the funnel.
- Improved customer satisfaction score by 30 points through usability enhancements.
- Increased SEM conversion by 20% through page speed improvements in less than two months.
Product and Data Strategist
Huge
- Designed and launched a website featuring asset management firm's vehicles including mutual funds and separately managed accounts.
- Led design, product management, and delivery via the Agile Scrum methodology.
- Defined the personalization and audience segmentation strategy to drive users into the sales funnel.
- Built interactive data visualizations on top of Microsoft Azure SQL databases leveraging Plotly data visualization.
Chief Product Officer
Discourse Analytics
- Drove a 25% improvement in FAFSA verification through attitudinal personalization at a top-10 research university.
- Integrated attitudinal profiles with Microsoft Dynamics and Dynamics-related products.
- Onboarded major public and private research university provosts' offices to inform targeted outreach and in-person interventions by student success counselors.
Head of Product
Intellei
- Developed interactive games and ad campaigns with a 70% conversion rate (registration with leading nonprofits).
- Created a bot framework by leveraging AWS Lex, serverless technologies, and a content management system.
- Provided a platform for interactive storytelling and gaming.
VP, Digital Product
Total Wine
- Drove 20% improvements in mobile carting rate that resulted in millions of dollars of incremental revenue.
- Generated 14% in cart conversion through iterative A/B testing and funnel optimization.
- Managed a team of 35 product managers, designers, and scrum masters.
Senior Director, Product
SocialCode
- Architected, built, and launched the Audience Intelligence product that leveraged third-party data appends, machine learning, and streaming analytics to stack-rank personalized audiences for paid media.
- Built a multi-armed bandit test and optimization tool that consistently drove over a 15% conversion improvement in direct response campaigns.
- Launched a centralized data platform and analytics capabilities for custom reporting solutions over hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising spend.
Sr. Director for Personalization
LivingSocial
- Deployed multiple personalization algorithms and strategies to improve conversion and grow net revenue through recommendations delivered via email, web, and mobile apps.
- Oversaw all engineering efforts for data engineering, data products, data science, email, and multi-channel personalization engineering teams.
- Automated and launched a behavioral digest strategy leveraging the propensity model to score and deliver relevant content to users that drove over $1 million per month in net revenue.
Director of Product Management and Escapes
LivingSocial
- Grew blended deal page funnel conversion by more than 40% through site optimization and new product launches.
- Launched a new escapes application to diversify the product offering, accessed 3rd party inventory sources, and leveraged existing internal operational processes for fulfillment.
- Executed multiple external partnership engagements with multi-billion dollar companies to provide a platform and supply services.
- Applied advanced analytical skills to provide deep and unique insights to business partners by querying a MySQL database and a Hadoop data warehouse.
Director of Product
Travelzoo
- Oversaw all local deals development, reporting, and operational applications supporting worldwide sales, production, and marketing teams to sell local deals vouchers.
- Delivered a payment tracker to track payments to thousands of local deals merchants worldwide.
- Built a customer service ticketing application to improve service levels and operational efficiency in all customer service processes.
VP of Product
mPayy
- Planned and executed all aspects of product development, including road maps, end-to-end design, documentation, development, release sequencing, testing, and analysis of a multi-channel secure debit payment system.
- Created a seamless merchant checkout for eCommerce and mobile commerce business models via API.
- Had the very first mobile payments app in the iPhone app store in 2007. Launched payment widgets on MySpace and FBML platforms.
Product Manager for Packaging and Marketing Systems
Orbitz
- Created business cases, championed and achieved executive approval and stakeholder buy-in for a multi-product merchandising system, CMS, and analytics solutions.
- Conceived and managed the launch of scalable and focused landing page templates that quadrupled conversion and drove around $15 million per month in transactions utilizing four offshore and four onsite technical resources.
- Redesigned funnel to the hub and spoke model for dynamic packaging (air + hotel, air + car, and air + hotel + car) and produced a 20%+ conversion lift.
Project History
Audience Intelligence
Architected and launched the strategic focal point of SocialCode's SaaS data product offering for its Fortune 100 brands.
• Onboarded a first-party CRM and transaction data
• Appended third-party data
• Built a single view of the best customer analytics model and report
• Ran our own lookalike modeling
• Instantiate audiences to paid social media platforms
Our launch brands included Capital One, Stitchfix, and Williams-Sonoma.
The product now represents the core of SocialCode to its brands.
Multi-property Customer Data Platform
To date, the CDP has data on over 6 million consumers and is providing the platform for a number of initiatives on the roadmap for Endeavor. The lead scoring data product has seen more than a 60% lift in conversion rate for the test vs. the control.
I started working with Endeavor in January of 2020, though the CDP formally began working in August of 2020. The first properties started utilizing analytics by October of 2020, and the first data product was published into the visualization tool for the Super Bowl mobile site in February 2021.
The CDP team I managed built utilities, APIs, and data services, and provides access to stakeholder clients across Endeavor. The CDP team has built an infrastructure that leverages the Endeavor email to access tools from transformation pipelines to visualization applications.
We have consumed data and provided services to 15 properties.
LivingSocial Escapes
Delivered $5 million in monthly gross bookings for LivingSocial's travel offering on its own technology stack in less than five months.
The company wanted to move upmarket to larger hotels and compete with Groupon, which required selling dated hotel inventory.
After testing the demand for this product through a series of MVPs, I led an RFP and vendor selection for a SaaS inventory solution. We then built:
• A standalone travel service to connect to multiple sources of travel supply (wholesalers, Priceline retail inventory, channel managers, and direct connects)
• Front-end search and booking experience
• Automated landing pages
• Authorization, book capture checkout process by leveraging single-use credit cards to book Priceline affiliate inventory
• Content management system
• Customer support system
• AP/AR accounting
When travel was deprioritized, the platform remained in operation, booking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of travel every day with less than an hour of support per month.
Education
Master of Business Administration Degree in Strategy, Statistics
University of Chicago - Chicago, IL
Bachelor's Degree in Economics
Northwestern University - Evanston, IL
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