WELCOME

In my career, I’ve been a product manager, technical writer, QA tester, CEO, photographer, coder, marketer, designer, art director, videographer, community manager, strategist and new business developer.  I pride myself on results and thrive in bringing order to ambiguity.

Currently, I’m a senior product manager at Hyperproof, a compliance software tool that helps  compliance teams work with auditors and teammates. I own the audits and partnerships areas, making sure that our customers can work seamlessly with auditors, partners, and any other external folks.

Previously, I was the head of product operations at BENLabs, an AI company bringing a 0-to-1 product to the creator economy and entertainment market (they do product placement – like placing Birkenstocks in the Barbie movie, for example). It was a little like being a chief of staff to the head of product and the CTO – I did any and all things necessary to help the teams execute. In my first three months that looked like coaching product managers and stepping in as the PM for teams without a product lead while we hired. Then it became implementing a centralized planning process which led to predicability, and ushering the more established agency business units into a technology-first culture.

I was a product manager at Asana, building roles and permissions, where I led a team working on permissions and the access control system. Because Asana is interdependent and features cannot be isolated from each other, I navigated extensive approval processes to ship 3 new features on sensitive products reaching 147,000 customers and millions of users in 200+ countries. It was fascinating how a product-led company ran product.  It was extremely rewarding to learn their process, systems, and comparing that to where I learned process at Walmart.com (the king of process!).

I first got into product management and became a senior product manager at OneLogin, an identity and access management company, optimizing their administrator portal and working with data reporting. I worked with a group of engineers, founders, and generally great humans that can only be described as rockstars. We shipped delegated administration, where an admin could specify exactly what kinds of access others could have, which earned us big praise from our enterprise customers like Airbus, Tesco, and Uber. I’d characterize my time at OneLogin as continuously learning, doing hard things, staying humble, and general getting-it-done, and I’m very proud of that – we earned a Leader place in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  Also, I learned how cool and fun cybersecurity is!

Before transitioning into product, I started as a technical writer at OneLogin, writing documentation and UX copy, working with product managers, designers and engineers. I learned the (very complex) product quickly, and my background in user empathy, customer focus, and servant leadership skyrocketed me to a role overseeing two engineering teams focused broadly across the product user experience, and also getting deep into reporting, analytics, and privilege management.  Then OneLogin was bought by One Identity and most of the team moved on to new places.

I still have so much love for content – in my role as Senior Content Marketing Manager at Little Passports, content WAS the product. My biggest achievement was increasing subscription renewal rates by rethinking the renewal communications to make the experience friendlier and more understandable. I wrote Help articles for sensitive products like automatic subscription renewal and revised the entire email campaign (30+ emails in total) that encouraged customers to renew. Our goal was to increase renewal rates by 40 bps, and after our first series of revised emails were sent, we improved 50 bps.

I also wrote, photographed, and created dozens of creative blog articles to teach kids STEM – many featuring my daughter’s tiny hands (see below).

Before that, I was on the creative team at Walmart.com as a Content Strategist, where I developed content experiences that blended storytelling, inspirational content and commerce. Right out of the gate, I migrated two of our content centers (Beauty and Baby) to responsive templates and added curated shops within our content, leading to an AOV increase of 45%. At the end of my tenure, I was leading large cross-functional groups on messaging strategy and execution for store events like Back to School, and served as editor-in-chief for the central Tips & Ideas content hub.

As Community Manager for Pearl.com, I led the communications strategy and community management for a group of about 500 regularly active professionals (the folks who answer questions). I advocated on behalf of the professionals to company, and from company to professionals on a daily basis through blog posts, product planning meetings, email marketing, real-time social media communication, or in-person feedback sessions.

At Pearl.com, I helped with:

1. A nice $73K spike in yearly revenue from a response rate contest I designed and implemented

2. A collaboration initiative that began and maintained a series of user testing sessions that continues to inform countless products

3. An 60% increase in engagement that resulted in a better informed, happier professional population.  How do I know?  I also implemented regular monthly satisfaction surveys so that Pearl.com can measure professionals’ morale quantitatively.

4. Anatomy of an Answer, a comprehensive, research-based guide on what elements of an answer create lasting customer satisfaction (which also led to higher customer NPS!).

5. Through blog posts, email campaigns, and in social media, addressing sensitive community issues like payment percentage and quality control

5. Creating instructional materials for features and systems, for a non-technical audience

Content Marketing experience at Monster Worldwide

While at Monster Worldwide, I was promoted multiple times and at the end of my tenure as Managing Editor, Content and Community I was responsible for 19 communities and coached the editors that ran them.  We had a lot of fun driving advertising and lead gen revenue by creating interesting, engaging content both onsite and through newsletters, white papers and advertorial landing pages – along with fostering social media engagement and blogger partnerships to increase our reach.

My contributions had the following impact (data from Google Analytics):

1. In June 2008 I was assigned to FireLink for a 9 month span, in which I doubled our user base, increased page views by 179%, unique visitors by 118% and user engagement (pages per visit) by 23%

2. In 2009 I was given additional responsibility for AdminSecret (therefore running 2 sites at once), and due to my work page views increased 337.5%, unique visitors increased 284% from the previous year

3. In late 2009 I took on NursingLink and improved the site’s SEO on priority keywords to first page Google ranking, bringing in 22% more search engine referral traffic (about 50% more visits sitewide – SEO can do great things!).

About me, generally speaking

I learn and adapt quickly – I thrive in a fast-paced, creative and driven culture. I’m constantly searching for ways to improve.

Bonus info if you’re still reading: I love to cook, especially Mexican food. I adore painting, running, hiking, swing dancing, vintage fashion, huge art installations, well-conceived design, and all things creative. And hey, thanks for making it the whole way through!

You can contact me at kayla.baxter@gmail.com.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/krbax

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

About.me: http://about.me/kayla.gesek