Experience

Kyra

• United Kingdom
• Technology, Information and Media
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Product Manager

  • Sep 2022 - Present

  Kyra is a Gen Z media company creating engaging digital content that resonates with youth culture. We represent world class digital native talent, produce digital content with the biggest and best consumer brands and develop media properties publishing daily content on platforms that matter to Gen Z. I will be working on KyraIQ, the data side of the company, creating and launching unique data driven products and features that service brands, the creators, and the Kyra team. Stayed tuned!



Blott Studio

• United Kingdom
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Product Manager

  • Nov 2021 - Sep 2022

  Being a part of Blott.io has been an amazing experience thus far. The opportunity to work on a range of clients, in different sectors is one that I relish. I'm proud to have been part of the creation and development of amazing customer-focused products. - Working on various products from a life insurance website, to a hiking web-app, to an IOS crypto app for teens and parents. - Assisting clients in product strategy; helping them to identify the product vision, goals and objectives and turning those into achievable outcomes. - Helping clients define their problem, user problems, and validating ideas. - Translating client requests into design and developer ready tasks. - Creating UX focused wireframes and user journey maps using Figma, for handover to UI designers - Leading and managing cross collaborating design and development teams to execute deliverables in timely and effective manner - Managing the client relationship and ensuring work is complete in time, and inline with budget and project scope.



BuildApp

• South Africa

• Product Manager

  • Feb 2020 - Dec 2021

  Starting at BuildApp, I took over the outsourced international development team. I quickly realised that the relationship and work quality was not going to work for my client. I sourced and found a local team, including a designer, who took over the development and design of the product. We rebuilt the entire app and the ecosystem, and did so on Xamarin which allowed for one codebase for IOS and Android which was an issue previously. My role was broad, and wore multiple hats. From managing the team, to weekly scoping sessions and kanban board maintenance, to client briefings, to QA and UAT, to facebook marketing and conversion funnels. It was a challenge ensuring I'm not spread too thin, but I like a good workplace challenge.



Umuzi.org

• South Africa
• Non-profit Organizations
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Strategy Manager

  • Mar 2017 - Sep 2019

  At Umuzi we had 6 different career tracks, with Strategy being one of them and during my time I lead this department. I mapped and wrote a Design Thinking curriculum and assessment plan that complied with SETA requirements, and upon completion awards the students a NQF 5 in Business Analysis. I also taught students, and conducted sessions where we go through the material and explain the content in greater detail. I ran teams within recruitment and the strategy department, and grew my experience in managing people and ensuring project planning is done correctly and deadlines are met. We were very agile, and used KanBan boards to manage our tasks.

• Head Of Recruitment - Project Manager

  • Mar 2017 - Sep 2019

  My main role was to build systems and processes to help the recruitment team store and analyse the thousands of learner applications we received every month. In doing so, I built 5 different systems, each trying to achieve slightly broader and larger goals. We rapidly prototyped our systems and were prepared to fail. I learned to deal with uncertainty and to be even more agile in my approach to problem solving. We ran a recruitment round every 3months, with clear requirements of what we need to recruit for. I helped to successfully recruit over 200 learners for various learnership positions, out of more than 15 000 applications. I also maintained and update our SquareSpace site to reflect changes in the recruitment process to maintain good UX and gather useful information for our recruitment decision making. I regularly created new Facebook Ads based around lead generation forms, which linked to Mailchimp where I wrote and created email campaigns to encourage new leads to apply. My focus was on optimising the conversion funnel and using growth hacking techniques to push applicants to complete.



Be Your Legacy

• South Africa
• Executive Offices

• Mentor

  • Sep 2018 - Nov 2018

  This was an incredibly enlightening experience, as it was the first time I had mentored small business. I was in charge of assisting 2 small companies with developing project plans and setting business objectives. I helped a young man in Cape Town with his 'waterless car-wash product', and another man from Limpopo with his coal mining company. We first began by understanding their business goals and objectives, and then broke those down into short term objectives that would ultimately realise the business goals. I believe that with more time and being more hands-on, we could have really turned their businesses around. The mentorship was unfortunately only for 3 months; a longer relationship would have been more fruitful for the businesses.



DataEQ

• United Kingdom
• Software Development
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Analyst

  • Sep 2016 - Jan 2017

  Although short, my time at BrandsEye was filled with an immense amount of learning. I had the opportunity to review the social media for some of the largest corporates in the South Africa. I was tasked with providing weekly and monthly reports with detailed explanations of not only how their social media and online presences performed during the period, but why it performed like that. Hence the term 'analyst', as a large part of the job was in interpreting the data and findings trends, patterns and insights for the client to use. I also had the chance to work on some extra work, such as the FeesMustFall campaign which ignited much online conversation in SA. We analysed millions of tweets, facebook posts and online mentions to draw an insight on the sentiment South Africans held toward the protest. It was very interesting to see how split the country was, and how age and race played a huge part in people being either for or against the movement. Another very interesting project I worked on was to analyse social media data around Strictly Come Dancing (SCD) UK. A betting company approached us to ask if we could determine the winner of SCD based off of social media sentiment toward each contestant, as the show's winner was voted on by the public as well as the judges vote. Through extensive data analysis, I was able to determine that there was a weak correlation between who won, and who was voted out each week, and the social sentiment toward that contestant. It was quite amazing to see that there was a correlation, however 'weak' it may have been.



forgood

• South Africa
• Technology, Information and Internet
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Product Manager

  • Sep 2014 - Aug 2016

  forgood, with a lowercase f, is a NPO platform that connects volunteers and donors with charities in need. www.forgood.co.za is the web portal, which was our initial product. I ran the development of a fully integrated CMS which allowed us to white-label the product and sell it into corporates. Before I left, we had already signed major clients like Discovery, Makro and TsogoSun. I occupied a dual role as product owner and project manager. This involved running an outsourced development team and maintaining the core product. Designing, conducting research, competitor analysis and wireframing for the product were also major responsibilities. I also managed the outsourced paid media agency we used for our online presences. Continual data analysis and growth hacking, including google analytics and tag management were some of main objectives. I also did UX and UI design for the product, which involved running workshops and surveys with our users. Additionally, I assisted with community management and content generation for social platforms. A small project I am proud of: running a successful campaign around spring cleaning, which was in partnership with Uber South Africa. We partnered with Uber to allow people to donate goods and have them picked up from their homes, as we recognised that this was the major roadblock in user donating items - having to drop them off.



Quirk

• Advertising Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Junior Data Analyst

  • Jan 2014 - Mar 2014



StuffSA

• South Africa
• Media Production
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Intern, Writer

  • Aug 2013 - Oct 2013



Umuzi.org

• South Africa
• Non-profit Organizations
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Intern, Assistant, Project Manager

  • Jun 2013 - Jul 2013



VML

• United States
• Advertising Services
• 300 - 400 Employee

• UX Intern

  • Feb 2013 - Feb 2013



DataEQ

• United Kingdom
• Software Development
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Product Development, Intern

  • Nov 2011 - Mar 2012



Quirk

• Advertising Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Internship

  • Dec 2009 - Feb 2010