Mark Macdonald

Experience

Product Lead, Community Growth 2022 - 2024 (almost 2 years)

Led Product for Community Growth at Strava, in player/coach role with two IC PM direct reports.

Helmed collaboration with ML teams to enhance user engagement, implementing... more

Newsela

Sr. Product Manager 2021 - 2022 (9 months)

- Led team to develop data visualization tool running sentiment analysis across journalistic articles
- Integrated media APIs (NY Times, Guardian etc.), and built client... more

Academia.edu

Senior Product Manager 2020 - 2021 (about 1 year)

In collaboration with Product Designers, Engineers and SRE, I lead product development for content discovery, recommendations and email notifications, helping to optimize... more

Gazet

Product Lead / Founder 2016 - 2019 (about 3 years)

Bootstrapped the product development and launch of content-curation platform powered by community of editors.

- Undertook extensive user research, through use of surveys... more

Exit

MissionU

Contract Engineer 2017 (about 1 month)

- Hired in contract role to design/develop internal video management front-end, re-build marketing site and develop improvements for student application process.

-... more

Skimlinks

Founding team: Sr. Director, Publisher Development

2009 - 2014 (over 5 years)

First client-facing hire. Integral in scaling company from 6 to 60 employees, and integration on 1.5 million publisher sites

Hired/trained technical Publisher Development... more team across SF, NYC & London

Member of senior management leading company strategy, performing market analyses, presenting to partners and investors. Primary liaison for VIP clients (Pinterest, WordPress & Amazon)

Collaborated with product/engineering teams in agile dev environment and led 3rd party API integrations

Senior Director,

2012 - 2014 (about 2 years)

Founding team of content monetization startup in first customer facing role. Collaborated with design, engineering and operations teams as product stakeholder in agile development... more environment and led revenue expansion for 1.5MM sites.

- Conducted customer development/analyses supporting product launches that scaled to over 15 billion API calls/month

- Designed and developed statistical models and custom reports using SQL, Tableau and additional tools to successfully monitor/reduce churn across high value accounts 

- Directed cross-functional team integrating 3rd party APIs leading to technical partnerships with 31 affiliate networks and a variety of additional tools (Salesforce/Zendesk etc.)

- Led growth of Publisher Development team, hiring, training and managing 14 customer success and business development positions across SF, NYC and London

- Key member of senior management team leading company strategy. Responsible for developing customer insights effort, segmentation analyses, defining team reporting/OKRs, communicating best-practices and contributing to board updates

- Primary liaison for VIP customers (inc. Pinterest, WordPress, Washington Post) and represented company externally through conference presentations and participation in industry councils

Account Director

2009 - 2012 (about 3 years)

Account & Operations Manager

2009 (about 1 month)

Swoopo

Procurement Manager 2007 - 2009 (about 2 years)

Hired as third UK employee prior to product launch and involved in user testing, development and translation of German startup’s innovative auction platform.

∙ Established... more

Employee

Skimlinks, Swoopo, MissionU, Gazet, Academia.edu, Newsela, Strava

About

Achievements

Product leader with a track record of driving growth and user-centric innovation in technically complex, design-driven products.

Most recently, led Community Growth at Strava - serving over 120 million athletes globally. With over a decade of experience spanning startups (Skimlinks founding team, Gazet founder) to scale-ups (Newsela, Academia.com), I've developed expertise in all stages of the product lifecycle and a dedication to supporting inclusive teams.

I’m continuously fascinated by the potential of technology to change the context of human behavior. Building responsible products addressing this requires effective collaboration across varied teams and I strive to bring a sense of curiosity, humility and humor to my work. I’ve found that developing effective products requires sympathetic leadership, continuous customer development, and considered analysis of product use.

Describe the most impressive thing you've done.

Skills

Javascript Backbone.js AngularJS Node.js MongoDB MySQL Express.js HTML5 & CSS3 Git Bootstrap Gulp.Js Firebase TDD Mocha Chai Jasmine Product Development SCRUM Agile React.js

Locations

Silicon Valley San Francisco Oakland

Education

Projects

RecallJS

Recall.js uses spaced-repetition learning to help software engineers learn, practice, and remember technical interview questions.

With Chris Rinaldi, Garrett Cox

Glint

Glint helps people rate and give feedback about ideas

Glint is an idea bank that allows users to submit proposals, give feedback, and rate other ideas using virtual currency. It's for developers looking for… · More

With Michael Hari, David Rabkin, Kalev Roomann-Kurrik, Chris Rinaldi, Garrett Cox

Mark Macdonald

Product Lead | Ex Strava, Newsela, Academia.edu