WELCOME

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

I’m currently a product leader at Asana, where I’m working on their permissions and access control system, and learning how a product-led company does product.  It’s been extremely rewarding to learn their process, systems, and comparing that to where I learned process at Walmart.com (the king of process!).

I got into product and became a senior product manager at OneLogin. I worked with a group of product owners, founders, and generally great humans that can only be described as rockstars. I earned a place among them by learning, staying humble, and general GSD, and I’m very proud of that.  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 OneIdentity and most of the team moved on to new places.

I still have so much love for content, though – in my prior 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