Chief Product Officer — NOW//with

NOWwith creates and curates new forms of social commerce for consumers by integrating talent, e-commerce, and video into a seamless unified shoppable experience. As Chief Product Officer, I managed all aspects of prioritization, budgeting, and goal setting to ensure strategic alignment across the organization. This work included collaborating with the founding team to define a product strategy and roadmap for NOWwith’s consumer, brand, and talent platforms. The majority of my time and energy focused on the following three areas of our business: Product, Partnerships, and People.

Product: Developed best-in-class social commerce tool suite used by consumers to discover & shop for products that are promoted by celebrities; partnered with business, sales, and marketing teams on GTM & growth strategy

Partnerships: Pioneered all product development for interactive video & universal checkout SDK, which provided publishing partners ability to activate at-scale shoppable video experiences on their proprietary properties

People: Hired as first non-founder executive to build core product development team from 0 to 15 members, including Design, Development, & User Research leads; developed core vision, product strategy, and long-term roadmap

Phil was a natural leader of the team and implemented valuable structure to a growing team. His vast talents from building our actual product and website/app development to physically building out our office and being instrumental in building out the team were tremendously valuable.”

— Lauren Wilner, Chief Merchandising Officer

Problems I worked on...

[ FOR OUR CONSUMERS ]

• How can we identify and build best-in-class products fusing talent, premium content, and products through a unique combination of ecommerce and video (live and on-demand)?

• How can we create a compelling consumer journey that converts visitors into repeat customers starting with discovery all the way through the funnel to conversion?

• How do we test and fine tune our products through data-driven decisions that rapidly improve engagement and conversion, especially in scenarios where those products have not yet been tested with a large subset of consumers?

• How do we balance the need for innovative growth strategies while ensuring our products are exposed to a subset of users that can provide useful insights?

• While in the midst of a global pandemic, how can we develop new innovative practices for the production of shoppable video content with celebrity talent?

[ FOR OUR TEAM ]

• How do we build and scale products while managing multiple teams across both first and third-party design and development resources?

• How do we identify and activate development and design resources that deliver immediate results today while accounting for growth and scale tomorrow?

• How can we build flexible solutions that allow our business to innovate? For example, how can we deliver e-commerce at scale within video while empowering partners to do the same?

• How do we manage the demands (founders, partners, investors) for an early stage startup while ensuring the business remains on track and on task with a consistent strategy?

[ FOR OUR PARTNERS ]

• How can we build products and services that scale and seamlessly integrate with publishing partners and products?

• How do we concept, test, and launch scalable solutions for our platform while empowering our partners with related products that do the same for their platform(s)?

• How can we help talent, brands, and publisher partners generate new incremental streams of revenue from their fans and consumers across both their O&O platforms and social channels?

• How can we onboard, integrate and sync hundreds of products and brands to make them shoppable across a library of first and third-party live and on demand video content?

Achievements:

• Researched, resourced, and subsequently hired the company's first core set of design, data and development teams. In the first year, our team grew from zero in Q4 2019 to a team of eight in Q1 of 2020. As of Q2 2021, the product team has grown adding several exceptionally talented designers and developers with the talent spread across four countries. This team’s design and development work helped position multiple platform deals and secure a 10 million dollar investment from former MLB baseball player, Alex Rodriguez and e-commerce pioneer, Marc Lore.

• Launched NOWwith’s first e-commerce video platform, a responsive marketplace featuring shoppable interactive videos helping consumers discover, shop, and share products promoted by their favorite celebrities and influencers.

• Led R&D and subsequent e-commerce activations including platform integrations in support of multiple critical service layers including: brand onboarding (e.g. product ingestion, inventory syncing), CMS (headless and static), video and data.

• Oversaw the design and development for a universal checkout SDK, a critical component for publisher and partnership activations. This SDK provides our publishing partners the ability to activate at scale shoppable video experiences on their owned and operated properties. Consumers can watch and shop products while viewing video across NOWwith’s channels as well as its partner’s.

• Identified, envisioned, and oversaw the instrumentation of all platform measurement across NOWwith’s shoppable ecosystem including but not limited to video, marketplace, and checkout. These integrations provided critical insights positioning the team with capabilities to track and segment user activity while also identifying user trends across the entire conversion funnel.

• Helped founders establish the NOWwith brand as we moved through the early stage exploratory phases of a startup through discovery. A process including user research, rapid prototyping, design, and development to deliver on time and under budget NOWwith’s first e-commerce video platform experiences.