Simone T.

Simone T.

Product Manager

Toronto, Canada
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About Me

A passionate and driven team player with more than 16 years of online experience, Simone is committed to creating fantastic customer digital journeys. She has experience working in online gaming, the domain sector, and eCommerce. Having worked at small companies with significant digital footprints and Fortune 500, Simone offers expertise as a digital product manager and is certified as an agile scrum product owner (SPO) and an agile scrum master (SCM).

Work history

Al Shaya
eCommerce Project Manager
2022 - Present (2 years)
Remote
  • Worked with teams to build the Online Returns functionality on a platform supporting over 90 global brands.

  • Managed vendor relationships that are supporting the eCommerce capabilities needed through the order management systems.

  • Collaborated with stakeholders to gather their requirements and provide timelines on delivery.

  • Supported a legacy OMS and IBM Sterling OMS and was part of the digital transformation occurring in the organization to move towards more eCommerce capabilities.

Pick n Pay
Program and Product Management
2021 - Present (3 years)
Remote
  • Collaborated with senior executives to build a product roadmap and product strategy for the next two years.

  • Mentored the UX team and set up customer insight tools to test the hypothesis and focus on the right features to bring to life based on what customers wanted.

  • Led the redesign of the eCommerce website focused on improving efficiencies and UX journeys and deploying a headless storefront with Hybris Spartacus.

  • Improved shoppable moments for favorites, shopping lists, and purchase orders that allow customers to add to the cart quickly and easily.

  • Participated in the build and launch of the AI search tool to improve the customers' personalization as they search for products they love and are yet to discover.

  • Created documentation to map out promotions linking, CRM promotions, a platform for eCommerce promotions, and ERP promotions platforms looking to streamline the complexity amongst the systems.

  • Researched progressive web app features to apply to the retail grocery website.

Stanley Black & Decker
Product Management Contractor
2021 - 2022 (1 year)
Remote
  • Collaborated with business stakeholders to define digital requirements needed to run their business channels.

  • Defined requirements with the front-end and back-end development teams.

  • Merged with third-party vendors to enrich eCommerce websites.

  • Collaborated with teams to build out pilot websites to test and learn.

  • Acted as the lead product manager on the employee store rebuild to allow employees to access the discounted product.

  • Acted in the scrum master role while coaching eCommerce project manager how to fill the role.

Grocery Gateway
Head of Digital Product Management
2019 - 2021 (2 years)
Remote
  • Worked with the digital team to build a product roadmap.

  • Served to build requirements for a digital transformation of the grocery website.

  • Coached and mentored four product owners to become subject matter experts.

  • Collaborated with business channels to define requirements into working digital components to achieve sales growth but also focused on user experience.

  • Incorporated Agile processes within a waterfall environment, converting teams to work agile.

  • Crafted hybrid mobile apps and gained exposure to setting up a progressive web app for an online grocery chain.

Tucows
Digital Product Lead
2018 - 2019 (1 year)
Remote
  • Managed a SaaS platform for millions of website owners as the senior manager for product management in the internet industry.

  • Built and maintained APIs from bugs to improvements and integrated new value-added services for customers to manage their website globally. Managed vendors for all API endpoints and new contract sign-ups.

  • Served as product owner, writing detailed user stories with acceptance criteria using Atlassian products and defining the definition of "done" across the scrum teams.

  • Launched GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulations) onto the platform and APIs managing thousands of retailers and hosted registrars. Worked with marketing on go-to-market strategies and regular newsletter content.

  • Launched new top-level domains to the B2B market, orchestrating launch and marketing endeavors.

  • Set up a process to streamline incoming vendor communication to write user stories for updates to the platform and APIs.

  • Coached and mentored junior project managers, orchestrated lunch-'n-learns to share information on product management and ongoing updates within the product team.

  • Conducted client surveys to validate hypotheses for upcoming platform upgrades.

  • Communicated the weekly progress of the product team with internal stakeholders and created an intake form of new requests and could be prioritized against the RICE method.

Well.ca
Head of Product Management
2015 - 2017 (2 years)
Remote
  • Negotiated promo deal with Visa and development funds to integrate Visa Checkout payment solution in the checkout flow.

  • Worked closely with VP of Operations on supply chain management through improved order management and warehouse systems.

  • Launched responsive site to allow customers to interact with Well.ca on their desktop, smartphone, and tablet.

  • Negotiated an affiliate opportunity to launch Well.ca baby registry using a third-party universal baby registry.

Walmart Canada
eCommerce Product Manager
2014 - 2015 (1 year)
Remote
  • Worked with third-party systems to build and maintain digital products and features on www.walmart.ca.

  • Worked with marketing, retail stores, legal and compliance, design, engineering, and content management teams to launch products to market and advocate for the best-in-class digital customer experience in an omnichannel environment.

  • Led the build of Lists from MVP to the more robust product offering.

  • Led the build of a baby registry, built all back-end and front-end user stories, and prioritized to launch MVP.

Betfair, MicroGaming, Atlantic Lottery
Digital Product Management
2000 - 2012 (12 years)
Remote
  • Worked to build product roadmaps with major business clients and account management teams in the gaming industry.

  • Built and supported business requirements with the development team to create new games and features on the casino platform.

  • Constructed Washer Toss, a mobile game for the lottery corporation, to support their mobile strategy into the Canadian Maritime demographic.

  • Worked with legal and compliance to ensure that all the work built met the standards of different gaming entities around the globe.

  • Built blackjack into the poker platform to support cross-functional gaming.

Bilditon
Product Management Consultant
Present (2024 years)
Remote
  • Collaborated with senior leadership to define business processes.

  • Wrote user stories for UX designers and developers, defining what the business wanted and why.

  • Performed user acceptance testing and created defects in Jira to prioritize work in a Kanban board.

  • Brainstormed new features and business logic with senior leadership.

  • Coached scrum masters in their role, trained teams on scrum ceremonies and how to get the most out of an agile team.

Metroland (Toronto Star)
Product Owner
Present (2024 years)
Remote
  • Built mobile push notifications for Android and iOS supported by the Appcelerator platform, acted as the product owner of the save.ca mobile app.

  • Trained and mentored the development and UX team to build user-centric features.

  • Constructed processes to support the Agile framework across the group.

Portfolio

Responsive Website Build

Simone worked with design, front-end UI, and back-end development to prioritize and groom stories to build a responsive website. Participated as product owner and scrum master in the scrum to drive the project forward to its final deployment.

Lists

Researched market and competitive analysis, worked with UX to define user journey, and conduct customer analysis. Built MVP acting as product owner to define user requirementsfor APIs and UI needs. Worked with marketing and other required teams for the go-to-market strategy for both soft and hard launch.

Baby Registry Creation

Researched the Canadian and International baby market and looked at Stats Canada on how many babies are born each year. Worked with finance to build a compelling business case to show target market share and break-even analysis. Worked with UX to define the end-user journey. Conducted focus groups and quantitative surveys with the business insights team to understand the user and build out user personas and empathy maps.Worked with UX, engineering team lead, and stakeholders to define blue skies product.Drilled down to create a minimal viable product (MVP) and present it to stakeholders for sign-off.Prepared the statement of work (SOW) to engage a third-party vendor to facilitate front-end development and QA.Helped build Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) for a baby registry.Acted as the product owner, participating in Scrum (grooming, planning, stand-up, demo, and retrospective).Worked with regional store managers, marketing, PR team, social media team, content management team, knowledge base, compliance and legal, customer support, and external marketing vendors to prepare the soft and hard launch.

General Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR)

Simone worked with internal stakeholders to define and capture requirements needed in the domain lifecycle to treat end-user and B2B client data. She worked with international clients across the globe.

Search Improvements

Grocery Gateway uses internal Solr search on Hybris version 2011 to allow shoppers to find the products to add to the cart. The original team had hardcoded the search boost rules, and it was not functioning correctly. Simone was able to remove these barriers to allow for a more free-flowing search capability.

eCommerce App

Simone participated as product lead that is building an app that utilizes Android and iOS technologies, which will allow clients using the platform to build robust, inexpensive eretail mobile apps through one application, lowering the need for large and expensive mobile development teams to publish and launch to end-users.

eRetail in Hardware industry

Stanley Black and Decker is a leading hardware company in the US markets but also has a strong global presence across the globe. In a world of digitization, Stanley Black and Decker have undertaken to build on their existing digital capabilities.

Education

Education
Bachelor's Degree in Languages and Linguistics
Edith Cowan University
1994 - 1996 (2 years)
Education
National Diploma in Public Relations
Cape Technikon
1991 - 1993 (2 years)