NITA MENON                              (732) 419-2439                 nitamenon@yahoo.com

 

SUMMARY

•    Passionate about combining technology trends, customer lifestyles and existing organization capabilities to create outstanding new products.

•    Established record of leading the diverse teams (UX, internal/external partners, technology and operations) of startup and large scale multi million dollar global products in a collaborative manner so as to drive incremental and breakthrough innovation.

•    Expertise in negotiating and dealing with multiple stakeholders and driving new product development.

•    Strong strategic, short and long-range planning abilities; skilled in setting product and technology strategies in complex environments with diverse stakeholders.

•    Diverse background covers engineering, user experience and innovation driven by analytics based on customer insights.

 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Principal and Co-founder, Elevate3, Hamilton, NJ

2010-2014

Consulted with several large clients like Associated Press, Capital IQ (a division of Standard & Poors) and Edison Properties to help them realize the full potential of their businesses using technology.

At Associated Press: Worked as part of team on www.apimages.com, an product aggregating close to 20 mn photographs and videos taken by AP reporters since the early 1900s. The apimages product brings in close to 30% of AP’s revenues.

•      Responsible for a complete digital transformation of AP Images - conceptualizing and contributing several innovative ideas into the product.

•      Ideas taken from prototyping to product delivery include:

o      Highlighting the breadth and depth of AP’s large image repository quickly (Incremental innovation) - To counter ineffective searches and poor realization of commerce revenues from the product worked on analyzing and understanding the image searches being conducted on the platform. Added several key interaction changes, such as context sensitive search, co-mingling different categories of images and intelligent infinite scroll. Most important innovation was introducing a NLP driven entity recognition based semantic search - allowing the application to quickly match search keywords to prominent entities thereby reducing scrolling and enhancing findability of images.

o      Image collections (breakthrough innovation) - To optimize search and facilitate quick purchases of images; prototyped and drove through delivery the concept of image collections. “AP Image Collections”; featuring key photographs from an important event such as the Olympics allowing users to quickly get to a collection of editor curated images rather than having to search for individual images. Worked with multiple stakeholders to deliver this complex feature - technology teams members (from metadata and taxonomy, search engine, user experience and e-commerce and middle tier), business  teams (from marketing, project management, lob heads), operations teams (infrastructure, customer service, training).

 

At Edison properties: Devised and drove through to implementation a large scale strategic effort focused on bringing the digital presence of Edison properties up to date. Sites include www.manhattanministorage.com and www.parkfast.com.

•      Instrumented agile development at both these projects; thus allowing for stakeholders to plan for the long term and to have the team focused on delivering to the short term.

•      Accomplished a strategic roadmap for the merger of assets acquired by Capital IQ as a result of the acquisition of www.themarkets.com. Presented and sold several ideas to the C-level at TheMarkets – to separate Master data, client data, content and transaction data into separate repositories connected with several SOA based services poising the data for integration to Capital IQ systems.

•      Dramatically raised visibility of user experience group within the company and improved products’ usability.

 

Chief Architect, Themarkets.com, New York, NY

2006-2010

•      Developed a multi-year technology strategy and execution roadmap for a $20mn re-architecture effort of a large highly visible internet portal with over 1700 of the world’s top hedge funds as its clients.

•      Built product development organization from ground up and established 4 key groups: Web Engineering, Operations, User Experience Design, and Quality Assurance.

•      Developed best practices for vendor management and facilitated several long term outsourcing relationships to help scale the IT organization.

•      Led a cross functional globally dispersed technology team of over 30 resources in the US and over 100+ resources in multiple offshore locations. Managed and mentored the software team to help guide each individual to perform to the fullest of his/her potential while at the same time achieve their aspirations.

•      Streamlined internal and external processes, improving efficiencies between Interaction Design, Visual Design, User Experience Research, Prototyping, Product Management, Engineering, and Quality Assurance teams.

•      Instrumental for taking several products from conception through to delivery. Products include

o      themarkets.com - Realizing the potential of the financial data entrenched in equity research documents - led the conception through to architecture and delivery of a complex financial data aggregation and mining platform. Following the approach of minimum viable product - led the product development and delivery through two years in the process building out semantic search capabilities, sentiment analysis on financial data and taxonomy building using RIXML. Took the product from being a simple document search to a complex financial data portal. These changes saw an increase in product revenue from $5mn to $60mn over a 6 year period.

o      Aftermarket research - To continue to realize the potential of data, introduced the Aftermarket research product - to bring on board a different segment of users (other than institutional buyers) such as law firms, college students, Research professionals to tap into the depth of financial data after the time sensitiveness of the research was exhausted.

o      Contributions management - Turned an operational asset into a revenue generating product by externalizing several patent pending entitlement and security measures implemented into the management of equity research contributions.

 

Sr Systems Consultant, Xchanging, Philadelphia, PA

2003-2006

•      Instrumental in leading a $18+ mn consulting engagement at ACE INA, one of the largest commercial insurers providers in the world.

•      Part of the team leading the strategic re-architecture of underwriting solutions across 14 different lines of business.

•      Responsibilities include negotiating with various stakeholders, managing vendors, hiring an implementation team and building and managing the expectations of the client throughout the re-architecture.

•      Negotiated and worked through the complexities of deploying a system with inputs and conflicting priorities derived from over 14 different line of business heads.

 

Project Lead, Vedas Inc, Bedford, MA

2000-2003

•      Managing and delivering to several large clients included Johnson & Johnson (OneTouch) and Microsoft leading the offshore and onsite teams to successful delivery.

•      At Johnson & Johnson: Responsible for prototyping a new approach to the management of type 1 diabetes in juvenile diabetic patients. Worked with the OneTouch meter to allow an online monitoring and streaming of glucose readings allowing administration of insulin quickly and effectively to these patients who are typically always on the go.

•      Participating in presales meetings – to present on technology and delivery through offshore engagement.

Team Lead, Birla Consultancy and Software Services, Mumbai, India

1996-1998

•      Re-architected a failing and poorly performing Automobile financing system, to make it a successful and productive system for the users of a large financial corporation. 

 

Sr Developer, Kotak Mahindra Finance Ltd, Mumbai, India

1995-1998

•    Worked on a team to completely automate the automobile Hire, Purchase and leasing activities of Kotak Mahindra Finance Ltd.

 

EDUCATION

•    MBA (PGPX), IIM Ahmedabad, India                                           Mar 2015

School is ranked amongst to the top 25 business schools of the world by Financial Times             

Ranked amongst the top 25 management graduates in India in 2015

 

•    Bachelor of Science, University of Bombay (Mumbai), India           Mar 1995

Majored in Statistics and Operations Research

Ranked amongst the top 10 university rank holders

 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

•    Technical: SQL Server, ASP.Net MVC with Razor, jQuery, Angular, C#, WCF, Web services, Rest services, Responsive Web design, Windows Workflow (WF), Team Foundation Server 2012 and .Net Framework 4.0, ERWin, Visio, CDN Akamai, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), IIS, Apache Tomcat, JSP, Java, J2EE, Microsoft Project, R, Stanford NLP Parser, API development, Lucene, Solr Search engine

•    UX, Visualization and Design: Visio, Balsamiq, Powerpoint, UserTesting.com, Google Analytics, Chart beat, Tableau Public

•    Cloud: Amazon AWS, Azure

•    Financial datasets: Reuters RKD APIs, Factset Estimates datafeeds, Capital IQ APIs, Edgar Online APIs