Natalia Williams

Thought leadership for digital roadmap, driving innovation through a complex, large-scale retail organization.

• Responsible for motivating, engaging and influencing multi-disciplinary teams including Product Management, Business Analysis, Digital Production, Site Operations and Content Management. Direct reports include Director of Product Management, Sr. UX Architect, Manager of Digital Production and Manager of Internet Systems.
• Manage Product team to delivering products from inception through delivery. Monitor conversion, demand, profitability and product portfolio mix
• Manage two UX Architects responsible for developing customer experiences for lean development. Spearheaded the Visual Style Guide team responsible for communicating brand and customer experience standards across Bloomingdale’s digital properties.
• Analyze existing e-commerce vertical shifts and how they affect the ability to compete, gain market share, grow revenue and sustain or grow profitability.
• Advocated for and Established Lean development teams to increase speed to market and optimization through iterative “build-measure-learn” cycles. Responsible for driving $30M in incremental demand over two years and reduction in capital spending by almost $6M.
• Reduced time to market and friction between Creative Design and Digital Production team by introducing a third party content management solution to enable Creative Art Directors to design editorial templates for near-real-time publishing of editorial content. Resulted in a two-week reduction in development of editorial content to bloomingdales.com
• Identified more than $500K of operating expense in for elimination in 2016 through monthly review of dot com budget.

Inspire, motivate, and mentor a team of highly-driven digital professionals in product development and management of bloomingdales.com across mobile web, app, tablet and desktop.

• Created Business case for establishing off-price digital presence for Bloomingdale’s Outlets driving $300K in incremental demand in the first month
• Focused production on maintaining fidelity of digital properties by establishing website standards and regular User Acceptance Testing to uncover issues with site experience. Fixing defects led to $1M expense savings over 2015 Holiday season.
• Product Management - Provide product leadership to a team of 9 Product Managers and one Director in the development of bloomingdales.com enhancements in an Agile environment. Product Owner responsible for developing high quality products and successful go-to-market approaches by partnering with development, program management and merchandising executives. Work closely with analytics team to hindsight effectiveness of enhancements; translate data into actionable insights, strategies and financial plans
• Product Strategy - Collaborate and coordinate with series of stakeholders, including: Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s executive leadership team, Macy’s Inc. Portfolio Management and internal business owners to develop yearly product roadmap.Explore new business opportunities to determine brand viability and revenue benefit and building relationships with external partners and vendors.
• Digital Production - Manage a team of 19 Producers and a Scrum Master responsible for editorial content publishing, developing microsites to support marketing and promotional events. Example: http://www1.bloomingdales.com/shop/tabletop-builder/set-your-table#customize-your-table&dws=1049061&fws=295466&gws=1049445. The Set Your Table tool development was led by Digital Production in business requirements definition and execution. Support more than 1000 combinations of table settings. Partner with Marketing Effectiveness and Creative leadership to translate requirements into a strategic approach that is executable and delivers on goals
• Internet Systems - Manage a team of Site Operations Analysts responsible for supporting Interwoven custom-build PIM, DAM and CMS. Business Analysts work with internal systems users to define enhancements to systems to support Merchandising, Creative and Marketing teams.

Responsible for leading a team of 15 Product Managers and one Release Manager to develop and support a multi-million dollar portfolio of e-commerce enhancements for a superior Omnichannel retail experience.

• Driven enhancement portfolio for two years that resulted in increased traffic, conversion and engagement supporting 30% demand growth YOY
• Builds and develop high performing teams, building in succession planning and career development, leading to high employee engagement Extensive experience fostering and maintaining relationships with external partners
• Acquired talent to build team from 5 to 15 Product Managers needed for current and future business requirements in less than two years.
• Forecasts project resource requirements, manage delivery schedules, and anticipate/mitigate associated risks in a complex development environment. Responsible for exploring and scoping new opportunities and determining strategy for execution. Lead other product managers in driving high priority initiatives from conception to launch.
• Develop and nurture relationships with geographically-distributed leadership across Macy’s Inc. to collaborate on product vision Influencer of a varied set of stakeholders with competing interests; responsible for diplomatically guiding toward win-win outcomes.

Lead the full product lifecycle from ideation and detailed requirements definition through to delivery and ongoing analysis to measure success.

• Work in conjunction with various teams including development, user experience, QA, project management and analytics. Analyze and prioritize competing alternatives and requests, balance customer needs (both internal and external) with business priorities, and clearly articulate the rationale behind decisions.
• Deeply understand user behavior - drive analyses to understand customer attitudes, needs and expectations for interacting with bloomingdales.com. Work closely with key stakeholders to define internal systems and processes necessary to support product offerings and train internal teams to ensure success.
• Delivered replatform of major areas of bloomingdales.com on budget and on time
• Built International web presence, working with marketing to hit first year demand plan of 1% penetration to TTL domestic demand

Lead UI Designer and Product Manager on Macy's Inc enterprise projects. Elicit system requirements, develop PRDs, model business process, conduct heuristic evaluations, lead usability testing, develop use cases, develop wireframes, develop functional specs. Leading designer on Corporate Style Guide to implement common usability standards and common user interface components.

Matrixed to projects across enterprise to build internal customer experiences, authoring wireframes and functional specs for development. Led usability testing for applications, improving productivity for applications for internal customers. Developed enterprise web portal application for eight divisions (over 10,000 users) using goal-directed design methodology.

• Recognized gap in development execution on front-end product requirements and drove creation of new UI standards group to evangelize accessibility, usability standards compliance, and reusability of front-end code

Collaborated with team Usability Analyst to improve the information architecture of the Mirant Corporate Intranet.

Performed task analysis and persona creation and human factor techniques such as cardsorting. Developed wireframes and functional specifications for developer implementation. Interfaced with all levels of management, Corporate Communications, development team and outside consulting agencies.