CV

Summary

Eighteen years in software product management and engineering, thirteen at a senior management level. Currently Product Manager on the Ads team at Google. Entrepreneurial mind-set combined with a passion for agile development, UX and data driven decision making. Strong technical and academic background. British, married with two children. Currently living in Islington.

Experience

Google

Product Manager

August 2018 – Present | London | www.google.com

ShipServ

Chief Product Officer

January 2013 – July 2018 | London | www.shipserv.com

August 2007 – July 2011 as Director, Product Management

World’s leading global B2B e-marketplace for ship supplies. $3bn GMV traded in 2017. 110,000+ users in 102 countries supporting 9,600 ships. Multi award winning: First Tuesday, Tech Media Invest and Red Herring 100.

  • Key member of management team achieving consistent YoY growth in revenue and GMV (Gross Merchandise Value). Responsible for product management, UX and engineering across all buyer and supplier solutions. 200+ major shipping companies and 65,000+ suppliers.
  • Responsible for a 6-person product/UX team and 24 engineers in four cross-functional product management and development teams located in London and Manila. Currently transitioning these teams to a DevOps model, support by Azure, Docker, Jenkins and Kubernetes.
  • Transitioned transaction fee based business model into a full e-marketplace model supported by a multi-sided platform covering diverse product categories with progressive monetisation on both buyer and supplier side.
  • Extensive use of web analytics and other analytics tools to optimise conversion rates and maximise OPEX reduction for buyers and ROI for suppliers.
  • Very broad customer and associated product portfolio, ranging from a B2C type user experience for occasional long-tail users such as tug operators and small suppliers in obscure ports up to SaaS applications and APIs for large global ship managers and industrial conglomerates.
  • Products include buyer and supplier side procurement and sales order management applications, search and recommendations engines, brand awareness and lead generation services and highly innovative business intelligence solutions derived from trading data.
  • Facilitated multiple demand acquisition and sales channels including web, telesales and direct sales. Responsible for partner management with over 20 marine ERP software vendors.
  • Drove organisation-wide adoption of Agile development model (SCRUM). Extensive use of live data prototypes to drive product strategy and UX design. Creation of financial models to support opportunity assessment.

Expedia Inc.

Director, Product Management, Expedia Affiliate Network

August 2011 – December 2012 | London | www.ean.com

Affiliate marketing division of the world’s largest online travel company. 10,000 active affiliates driving over $2bn in sales. International client list including many of the world’s leading airlines.

  • Leadership of the global product management team of thirteen product managers and business analysts. Introduced complete set of processes covering opportunity assessment, product discovery and scrum-based product delivery supported by web analytics.
  • Overall roadmap and delivery responsibility for a portfolio of products including a white-label hotel booking site, Hotel, Car and Air APIs and smart cross-sell and merchandising toolsets. Setup a high-velocity development team for small enhancements and production issues.
  • Drove turnaround and re-launch of ‘Chameleon’ product, delivering $40m+ revenues in 2013. Led migration and sunset program for three legacy products.
  • Led strategic push into mobile space with release of Chameleon Mobile, the industry’s first white label hotel booking mobile site, the optimisation of our APIs for mobile apps and the development of a mobile SDK for affiliates.

Ulysses Systems

Founding CTO

October 1999 – August 2007 | London | www.ulysses-systems.com

Leading vendor of marine and offshore management software with global client list.

  • Founding member of the management team, growing the business from inception to the employment of 120 people in six countries. Responsible for team of five product managers and 35 engineers spread across multiple international locations with four direct reports. Successfully implemented bonus schemes and company culture proliferation programs that contributed to a 100% retention rate of key product management and engineering staff for last four years.
  • Led the design and implementation of the award winning ‘Task Assistant’ platform for information management within the commercial shipping industry. This product is the market leading platform for quality/safety management deployed, at time of leaving, on 500 ships at 40 major shipping companies including BP, OSG and Eurasia Ship Management.
  • Designed and led the implementation of a highly acclaimed suite of ship management modules, covering planned maintenance, purchasing and crewing with five major releases delivered over five years all delivered on time and on budget.
  • Managed the design and implementation of processes and support systems covering product management, project management, architecture, automated build and QA. Also worked with technical architects to develop coding standards and UX guidelines.
  • Successfully relocated significant portion of engineering and other company functions to lower cost captive centre in Mumbai achieving annual savings of $800k.
  • Provision of high-level technical input into sales process, including responding to RFIs and participating in board level negotiations.

Corel WordPerfect

Software Engineer

October 1994 – September 1995 | Weybridge, Surrey | www.corel.com

  • Member of team developing internal systems for customer support.
  • Left to pursue Ph.D following securing of EPSRC funding.

Toshiba Information Systems

Software Engineer

June 1993 – September 1993 | Weybridge, Surrey | www.toshiba.co.uk

  • Developed internal asset management system using Borland C as part of industry placement in between B.Eng and M.Sc.

Education

University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology

Ph.D Computer Science (September 1995 – September 1999)

  • Thesis on development of a task-oriented user interface portal for business object based systems. This research formed the basis of the ‘Task Assistant’ product developed at Ulysses Systems.
  • Extensive research into principles of cognitive science as applicable to software usability, user interface models and technologies, component-based software development using COM and CORBA, principles of knowledge management and object-oriented modelling techniques.
  • Additional major research projects included ‘EuroBanquet’, a software system to assess the impact of EU legislation on consumer and business banking products and ‘BidPrice’, a software system that enables companies to optimise bid pricing for large scale manufacturing projects.
  • Consultant at Lloyds Applied Information Engineering working on development of generic visual modelling system.
  • Part-time lecturer of undergraduates in C++ programming.

M.Sc Information Systems Engineering (September 1993 – September 1994)

  • Courses included requirements engineering, project management, decision support systems and software quality management. Dissertation on user interfaces for business object based systems using C++.

B.Eng Software Engineering (September 1990 – June 1993)

  • Computer science degree with emphasis on software development. Awarded 2:1 (Hons).

Contact

LinkedIn:          http://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartlmay