Product/Program Manager
As our team grew in and services by the product team expanded I was promoted in August 2015. The product and tech team, along with creative services began doing even more work with Participant, Pivot TV, along with sales and editorial with TakePart. Some of my responsibilities included the following:
Trained and assisted staff on use of TakePart.com, Pivot.tv and Participant.com on Drupal CMS
Led the production of various film, TV, social impact, sales and marketing campaigns across Participant properties: Participant.com, TakePart.com and Pivot.tv
Created wireframes and comps for campaigns with Sketch, Adobe PS, and InVision
Collaborated with sales, marketing and social impact teams to ensure quality campaign experiences using Jira/Confluence
During my time as ProgramManager I was responsible for the lifecycle of campaign sites for all film, television, sales and editorial content. I had to expand to new divisions of the company and increase the number of campaigns, and company websites, I managed. I also fostered a great relationship with the our marketing, editorial, technology and creative service team.
Increased awareness of new releases and premieres with unique pages visits ranging between 250k-400k
Collaborated with sales, marketing and social impact teams to ensure quality campaign experiences using Jira/Confluence
Challenges & Solutions
Challenges
Leading project initiations with large teams for more complex projects and campaigns
Working with Creative Services to streamline the process for adding design assets to our websites
Using CSS and new productivity/design platforms
Solutions
I took notes on project initiation for our tentpole projects until I knew what the key points were for leading discovery and project planning meetings. I also learned the benefit of meeting notes and agendas.
Working out a good process with the Creative Service team took time. After a few blunders we had a meeting and I walked them through how our products worked on the front end and back end of our websites. From there we established basic guidelines for design and style guides To save the Creative Service team time, I would use the Photoshop files from the key art to create the backgrounds and banners I needed whenever possible.
I began adding the Creative Service to our project meetings, rather than making requests as an internal vendor. They were integrated into the project initiation process, giving them an opportunity to give feedback on wireframes and comps.
I had to learn as much as I could about CSS, InVision, Jira, Confluence, DaPulse (now Monday), Trello, Asana, Photoshop and more in order to do my work effectively. Sometimes I read a manual and other times I would watch a video. If troubleshooting myself didn’t work I asked to taught.
Highlights
TakePart
TakePart Presents: Big Issues
TakePart Presents: Big Issues consisted of 12 campaigns, each one included a series of articles and actions for users to engage with. I built all 12 of the campaign pages with help from our developers for any major custom campaign elements like games and interactive maps.
Many of the improvements that were made to the campaign features we used for building our pages came from requests from our editorial team.
TAG / TakePart
Branded Sales Campaigns
After creating a process that make building pages more efficient I began creating branded pages for the Sales team.
Branded pages for TakePart was the first time I had to working external clients and designing pages according to another brand’s style guide.
Sales campaigns usually started off very basic and grow in phases, evolving in step with the official marketing campaigns. We would often work with the Editorial team for added content, when possible.
Pivot TV
Working on Pivot show pages was the first time I work on anything related to broadcast television. I had to learn how to work against a changing timeline week to week and month to month based on the content.
Once work escalated I had to learn how to train a new group of people on how to maintain the updates to their pages.
My work with Creative Services expanded to their editors. We worked together to figure out the best format for our ambient video backgrounds.
