TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP PHILOSOPHY
It’s easy to be seduced by the promise of cutting-edge tools and toys—but a particular technology is no more valuable than the people inside your organization who will harness it. A technology strategy must ultimately support both the organization’s growth objectives, and the operational needs of the teams on the ground. In this way, people and technology have a symbiosis which must be carefully maintained if the organization is to thrive.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Nanoleaf, Toronto, Canada — VP, Product Insights & Analytics
MAY/2024 – SEP/2024
Responsible for designing and implementing first-party programs and tools to measure satisfaction, sentiment, and affinity throughout the product lifecycle.
- Through focused insights delivery, improved beta product satisfaction average by 66% (as measured at external testing completion) ;
- Tripled external testing completion rate through implementing a game mechanics layer on top of normalized testing protocols ;
- Successfully expanded scope of pre-production beta program to include all in-development product lines, representing a total aggregate lifecycle value > US$250m.
Nanoleaf, Toronto, Canada — VP, Commerce Operations
JAN/2021 – MAY/2024
Designed and implemented programs and repeatable processes to support business development, supply chain, and sales operations to the net benefit of end customers in 120 countries. Managed procurement and integration of third party technology solutions alongside in-house development of proprietary solutions. Staff complement : 20 FTE staff across five distinct teams in three global offices.
- Led the solution development and implementation of a hybrid API/EDI technology stack, improving labour productivity significantly in logistics operations ;
- Designed and implemented various business process automation projects which in aggregate improved gross revenue per labour hour significantly in logistics operations ;
- Streamlined integrated inventory management and forecasting processes, ultimately reducing stock-on-hand requirements globally and improving free cashflow.
Professional experience abridged for brevity. Full chronology available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwamenear/.
NOTABLE PROJECTS (ABRIDGED)
Headless eCommerce Implementation — Shopify Plus (2019)
Architected and led the implementation of a headless eCommerce stack leveraging Shopify Plus (Enterprise) as the underlying order management system for the global group. The implementation featured a serverless application (static html node) for marketing and commerce UX, custom integrations for global 3PL sites, and a mix of custom and customized off-the-shelf integrations for marketplace selling and programmatic advertising. Revenue increased 12% in the quarter after launch (on a normalized for seasonality basis).
ERP Implementation — Microsoft Dynamics (2021-2022)
Led the implementation of a cloud ERP to the benefit of the global group of companies at Nanoleaf (multi-tenant implementation including product localizations for Canada, France, and Hong Kong). Project involved designing and developing extensions for the ERP in-house, to micro-optimize for unique business process requirements in trading with global subsidiaries.
Order Management Integration Design — MS Dynamics (2022)
Led the scoping, solution design, and implementation of a bespoke handling layer in Amazon AWS which automates the bidirectional extract-transform-load functions required to transport payloads between an IMS or ERP system and external sales channels. The system was designed to handle connection points over RESTful APIs, SOAP-based APIs, or via flat files (sFTP, primarily).
Beta Questing — Various Vendors (2024)
Developed and implemented a research-driven program for significantly improving the launch of new products and services which are in pre-production development. The program brings customer-centric design to the center of R&D activities, by involving end-users for both ideation as well as testing of software and hardware prototypes. A holistic approach to tester recruitment and test delivery was utilized—featuring game mechanics and reward milestones to boost test completion rates and convert testers to brand advocates over time.