Professional Background
Experience
After leaving The Motley Fool I took some time to travel, hike the Appalachian Trail, and think about what I wanted to build next. In 2024 I completed the Climatebase Fellowship, a structured cohort program that gave me a foundation in the climate space. Since then I’ve been consulting for small businesses on product, SEO, and web, and spending a lot of time building with AI tools — the most energizing stretch of learning I’ve had in a while.
- Completed the Climatebase Fellowship (2024), a structured program for professionals transitioning into climate-focused roles
- Provide ongoing product, SEO, and web consulting for small businesses, including Wild Blue Travel
- Built several AI-assisted personal projects using Claude Code, including What Mile?, an interactive map-based geography guessing game, and Carbon Tracker, a browser widget for tracking website carbon footprint
Completed 2,190-mile thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, demonstrating exceptional perseverance, planning, and long-term goal achievement in challenging, resource-constrained conditions.
The Motley Fool is where product management became my full-time focus. I joined as a Technical SEO Strategist, sat with the product team, and worked directly with developers on technical implementation. Within a few months I was promoted to Product Owner for fool.com, a big role at a company that ran almost entirely on content and organic reach. I spent the next two-plus years there, eventually moving into a Product Lead role to head up a new subscription initiative.
- Led a new subscription product initiative from discovery through pre-launch, conducting user research and building interactive prototypes that secured executive buy-in
- Launched a unified member dashboard consolidating multiple product experiences, improving navigation for millions of users
- Collaborated with the CEO and executive team to introduce a new product development methodology across the organization
- Owned the product roadmap for fool.com during a period of rapid growth, focused on expanding organic traffic and broadening content beyond investing into personal finance
- Used SQL and analytics independently to understand user behavior and inform prioritization, without relying on a dedicated data team
- Facilitated cross-functional discovery with engineering, design, and marketing, stepping into a gap left by a team that had struggled to align previously
- Partnered directly with engineering to implement technical SEO improvements, including a full refactor of the site’s XML sitemaps, while embedded on the product team
Cvent brought me back east after Zillow. The role was narrower than expected, focused on the marketing site with limited reach into the broader product and engineering organization, and it became clear quickly that the path I was looking for wasn’t there.
- Led global SEO strategy for the marketing website, advising executives on technical recommendations and building implementation roadmaps
HotPads was one of four Zillow Group rental properties — and unlike its siblings, it ran almost entirely on organic search. No marketing team, no paid acquisition. Just Google, email notifications, and push alerts for repeat visits. That made SEO existential, not just strategic.
- Built and launched the SEO Links API in close collaboration with engineering, reducing front-end server calls by ~10% and improving crawl efficiency across the site
- When a Google Quality algorithm update caused a 20%+ overnight traffic drop, led the diagnosis: deep research, industry networking, and direct consultation with Google alumni inside Zillow to understand the update’s intent
- Concluded the real fix was long-term investment in content quality and user experience — not technical quick wins — and designed a roadmap accordingly
- Shipped the Nearby Listings widget to reduce bounce rates on long-tail pages with no inventory, and added in-page filter prompts after data showed that users who changed filters spent more time, visited more pages, and submitted more inquiries
Merkle is where I started, and where I figured out what kind of work I actually wanted to do. I came in as a paid search analyst, switched to SEO once I realized how deeply it was entangled with web development, and got promoted nearly every year: specialist, senior specialist, account manager, senior account manager. I managed an eclectic client portfolio across various industries, including aviation wire, flowers, nationwide retailers, and a UK tabloid, because I enjoyed the challenge that came with learning and understanding different businesses. By the end I’d hit a ceiling, and knew I was more interested in building than managing campaigns.
- Pitched and led a full site architecture and content buildout for A.E. Petsche (Arrow Electronics), growing their site from roughly 20 pages to hundreds of targeted product and category pages, creating the organic search presence they had essentially none of before
- Restructured how the team operated: shifted specialists from support roles into owning their accounts directly, which improved work quality and freed managers to focus on strategy rather than being a communication layer
- Coached a team of five with different approaches for each person, from giving high-initiative team members autonomy to run with projects, to intensive preparation work that helped less confident team members lead client calls independently