Blending community, product, and program management, I have spent more than 20 years building safe, inclusive platforms and services that drive action, grow revenue, and increase retention.
My experience has put me in leadership roles for 8 and 9-figure products, helping companies and organizations like CNN, FedEx, Sony, Cisco, NOAA, and Forbes.
Key Areas
Online community
More than 20 years of end-to-end responsibility for platforms where people interact with one another in a live fashion.
Product
Working experience on CNN’s product team, in addition to guiding product and engineering teams through roadmaps and sprints.
Program
In a previous role, I simultaneously oversaw subscription community products for Forbes, Ad Age, Men’s Health, and the Business Journals.
Subscription products
Public, mainstream products like CNN+, with 150,000 subscribers in two weeks, but also a network of private, professional online communities generating 8-figure revenue.
D2C products
Much of my career has been spent on products that eliminate a middleperson and create a direct relationship between a company and its customers.
Interactive and live streaming products
Spent 18 months building CNN+, a new streaming service. This included Interview Club, which produced multiple live shows per day, where a question could go from submission to approval to being asked by a CNN personality, in the span of 60 seconds.
Membership products
Led private, paid membership programs for Forbes, Ad Age, Men’s Health, and others, with tens of thousands of customers.
Launched and operated free-to-join public online communities with membership totals in the six figures.
Content moderation
I have been personally involved in hundreds of thousands of individual moderation and policy decisions, and led both full-time and volunteer moderation teams.
Trust and safety
A history of creating safe, healthy online platforms, with an emphasis on protecting those most at risk.
Policy
I have authored platform policies used by global brands and independent communities to combat hate speech, inauthentic behavior, misinformation, and unwanted activity.
Selected Accomplishments
- 20+ years guiding community programs, from small organizations to household names.
- After taking over a 2-year-old, stagnant paid subscription offering for a well-known consumer brand, grew active customers by 587.4% in 12 months and 761.7% in 24 months, driving a 7-figure revenue increase.
- Built a streaming service for CNN as a founding team member of CNN’s Interview Club, an interactive Q&A platform that connected CNN viewers with experts, newsmakers, and on-air talent. At launch, it was the only user-generated content offered on a CNN-owned space. More than 150,000 paying subscribers signed up for the service in the first two weeks.
- Wrote the book Managing Online Forums, published in 2008, which has influenced countless community builders and is available in more than 1,000 libraries worldwide.