P. Edmon Graham

Digital Product Owner with 7 years of Agile leadership and a proven track record in mentoring cross-functional teams to exceed growth and adoption targets. Executes strategies that result in cost control while better aligning with business goals. Results-driven technologist that bridges technical and non-technical teams. Developing for the web since 1996.

Work

New Balance, Inc. (2017–2024) - Boston, MA

New Balance is a heritage sporting brand that has been in operation since 1906. It is the largest private sports company in the US and an innovator in shoes, apparel, and manufacturing. I worked on the $2.5B e-commerce train on Team Sports, focused on B2B and B2C custom apparel and uniforms. Upon NB’s transition to Scaled Agile, I moved to a Scrum Product Owner role, which was a refinement of my work as Technology Lead. I owned the product vision for Team Sports and held responsibility for technical knowledge, stakeholder management, and optimizing the value of digital products.

During my tenure at NBTS, my team increased revenue from $6.5MM annually to over $22MM in a static market, meaning every dollar taken was one wrested from a competitor. Team Sports is strategically important because institutional athletes are the most likely to be athletics customers as adults. Uniforms and custom apparel create a one-on-one unique interaction with the brand.

The specific value of NBTS e-commerce was unique in the industry, a platform that both fully supports B2B and B2C customers under the same umbrella. The Account information is driven by ERP, but we extend the shopping privileges onto users not formally associated with those accounts via custom Team Stores. This provides temporary Account pricing and entitlement as well as the collection of orders for invoiced payment types rather than just consumer types paying with cards.

Apart from Team Stores, the other core feature of the site is the ability to create and order custom apparel. NBTS supports a visual customizer where if you can build it, our factory can make it. This is the case for both fully custom apparel manufactured from piece part definition and embellished apparel which is warehoused and customized.

Product Owner, Team Sports B2B Commerce

My role as a Scrum Product Owner was to manage a complex end to end workflow from product definition to factory on a nine-month roadmap. NB operated a 10-team release train using Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). 9 of the teams managed global e-commerce stack parts and I managed the Team Sports stack. Custom apparel is operationally more challenging than warehoused apparel as many more systems need to be involved to get a product to a manufacturable state. Over the 2-year period we had planning metrics, we increased the accuracy of the incremental plans by almost 70 percent.

I led a revolution of Team Sports e-commerce over the past four years, spearheading a complete digital transformation of (product) definition to doorstep. Systems that were changed in my tenure that I had some part in include:

• Product Information Manager (PIM): Deck PIM to InRiver
• E-commerce: Salesforce B2C (Demandware) to Salesforce B2B (SF Platform)
• Tax: Avalara legacy SOAP to modern REST API
• Payments: Cybersource to Adyen unified with point of sale (POS)
• OMS: custom Deck Commerce OMS to modern cloud Deck Commerce OMS
• Marketing software: nothing to SAP Emarsys
• ERP: Aurora to Microsoft Dynamics 365

The key importance to the ERP transitions with the move to Salesforce B2B was a large reduction in friction and time in activating customers. Prior to the B2B site it could take weeks through very manual processes. On the new platform, we could let people shop within 24 hours of credit onboarding with entitlement, tax, and pricing set by ERP. We created new shipping programs for ERP that will unlock around $20MM–$40MM in site wholesale over the next four years.

My main functions as a Product Owner on the project included:

• Being the main point of contact for Team Sports e-commerce on any issue.
• Developing and maintaining the Jira product roadmap within a larger SAFe framework.
• Owning and publishing communications with stakeholders on releases, features, and critical defects on Teams, email, and Confluence.
• Owning risk and dependency with other teams in the SAFe train and their roadmaps.
• Extracting user requirements for most Personas.
• Developing User Stories and non-functional requirements.
• Evaluating and refining the test suites.
• Assisting business with valuation and impact metrics.
• Regular collaboration on solutions and architecture.
• Writing and reviewing documentation for end users.
• Establishing quality metrics for app and web performance using Dynatrace, SiteImprove, and other software.
• Addressing IT and security issues against stream SLAs.
• Onboarding and training programs for end users and external Customer Support Representatives (CSRs).

One specific project that is worth mentioning I was developing in the last of my tenure was an application to use machine learning (ML) tech to evaluate whether user artwork could violate copyright or trademark, a major legal risk in producing custom apparel and the most significant hurdle to full self-service.

The last main function of my job was to handle and troubleshoot priority defects and vendor issues. Many times this required getting my hands dirty with active technical work, especially on the service level.

Development Lead

My first three years at NB were as the Development Lead on Team Sports although since we did not have an agile team at the time I still managed many of the responsibilities mentioned above. The main difference in these times was in my original position I was much more hands-on with the development process, writing some code but primarily being responsible for code review directly. I also directly wrote code for some of our services including Docker deployments.

I was hired to wrangle a project that was solely worked on by external contractors that had swung wide of both quality and cost needs. Over my first year we brought the team internal, moving to an agile development process over time. It was critical to stabilize the system because over this year we nearly doubled site revenue.

The most important technology that we implemented was the new visual customizer. We developed the customizer in concert with the company Unmade, and it completely changed the way customs were handled. Prior to the new customizer, we had an internal product that was backed by thousands of lines of data on a spreadsheet per SKU. Changing these definitions was nearly impossible and the inability to make any adjustments meant that about over 90% of custom garments required a designer to manually produce a plan for the factory. This process can take up to 21 days and represented a massive blocker to ordering. After the visual customizer, we reduced this number down as much as 60% depending on sport and reduced the time to factory from 21 days to 12 days on average.

HLK (HughesLeahyKarlovic) (2016–2017) - St. Louis, MO

HLK is a Saint Louis-based advertising and digital marketing agency that connects creative and technology through market-based insights. The unique value of HLK is that most agencies do not maintain the capacity to do significant technical development in house. Their large and capable full-stack and data science capability makes them uniquely positioned to help technical enterprise with marketing problems. While I was working at HLK, my core responsibility was solving and estimating projects.

I also served as a more active product owner on any large scale or important front-end architecture in HLK. I developed the Shroud component architecture for Bayer’s transition from Sharepoint for marketing sites to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). This library was used on hundreds of marketing activations across Bayer’s dozens of seed brands and provided a comprehensive, accessible library of common components for any site that only needed minor style adjustments to meet brand guidelines.

I was the go-to person for web prestige and my projects won four ADDY awards. These sites include a 2018 Gold ADDY for the Chris Long Foundation website, a 2017 Gold ADDY for Waterboys, as well as work on the 2016 national Gold-winning St. Louis Browns site.

This is FUSION (2015–2016) - St. Louis, MO.

FUSION Marketing was an agency focused on real world marketing activations for events, channel, and loyalty solutions. FUSION purchased Endeavor’s (then WME) money-bleeding digital division and rehabbed it spectacularly and eventually the whole thing was repurchased by Endeavor. Later a new FUSION Marketing of the parts that Endeavor did not value were spun off, which is the company currently operating under that brand today.

I worked as a senior developer focusing on a radical redesign of the company website and event activations. I was the sole coder on the website apart from some of the blog templates in WordPress which used to show an intern how to do basic WP coding. I used some radical techniques at the time such as skewing all background elements on the page 45 degrees creating a wild diagonal effect and then reverse skewing all the child elements to straighten the copy and images. Was this a good idea for performance? Probably not but it did win STL and Midwest regional ADDY awards for Ad Industry Self-Promotion. I also worked on a few simple web activations for Campari and NASCAR.

On site activations, we mostly worked combining real-world interaction points with off-the-shelf IOT and robotics hardware including Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi. Most of my programming on these was in Node.js and Electron and I helped my coworker Keith Chester organize some of the first Node.js meetups in St. Louis.

Some of the site activations I worked on were as follows:

• A live trivia game with jumbo buttons that convention goers could play for prizes run by emcee Todd Thomas
• A king of the mountain game prototyping intense and performant RFID beacon technology tracking players with bracelets. Players used the RFID bracelets in concert with Nerf weapons to capture strategic points through an area tracking team score by time.
• A racing came for the Daytona 500 based on the 80’s arcade game Super Sprint where four users operated cooperatively to move a car through a simple track against another team of four. Users needed to spin the wheels at either the same speed to go straight or slower on one side to turn. The bodies were then pained to look like popular stock cars.
• Lots of different kiosk software for conferences using Electron and Microsoft tablets.

Although I only worked at FUSION for about 8 months, that does not reflect a negative time there, I had an offer of a massive increase to move into a more management focused role at HLK. I had a wonderful time working for this company and I found the experience with Electron and light robotics very useful in my personal life and hobbies.

Coolfire Studios (2014–2015) - St. Louis, MO

Founded in 2002, Coolfire is a boutique production company bringing together award-winning talent and innovative solutions to produce top-tier commercials, TV shows, branded entertainment, and films. I worked as the development lead in the digital department supporting Coolfire’s properties such as Fast-n-Loud and Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s as well as other marketing clients.

Some of my projects included:

• WordPress sites for show properties
• WooCommerce store and subscription service for Thomas Coffee
• Internal reporting and analytics dashboards
• WordPress site for Craftsmen Industries

Cordell & Cordell (2012–2014) - St. Louis, MO

Cordell & Cordell is a nationwide domestic litigation firm focused on divorce and family law practice areas. I worked as the sole web developer for the company, managing WordPress, Joomla, and PHPBB.

• Moved company site from Joomla 1 to WordPress.
• Developed strong IA, SEO, mobile web, and speed which lead to a 3x traffic increase in 9 months (330K/mo to 1.22MM/mo).

Byte Fair (2009–2017; 2024) - St. Louis, MO

Byte Fair is my consultancy company that was on hiatus during my tenure at New Balance due to rules blocking freelancing. I focused specifically on cultivating strong relationships with brilliant designers and then helping them with small-scale projects centered around CRM, e-commerce, and marketing. I didn’t really know it at the time but my experience with e-commerce helped to rapidly accelerate my success at New Balance on an enterprise-level project.

As most websites change fairly rapidly there is not a wealth of work still standing today actively, but I did projects for the heritage tannery Auburn Leather, the extraordinary and innovative Steak and Shake franchisee Debo’s Diners, municipal Linux and data administration for the city of Fredericktown, and WordPress and CRM development for Container Freight Services (CFS).

Quanta Services | Utilimap Corporation (2008–2012) - Illinois

Utilimap Corporation (acq. Quanta Services) is a company focused on contracting for power and telecommunications lines and equipment. I was an electrical field inspector which consists of many performing many evaluations of efficacy and safety of the grid including emergency repair coordination, pole integrity, load analysis, regulatory compliance (also for telecom), and GIS mapping. I worked all across mostly Ameren’s Illinois service area on circuit analysis and thermal inspection. It was a very interesting mix of labor and knowledge work.

I spent a lot of time driving and listened to probably 500 audiobooks on Audible. I’m tempted to list them all here.

Nerds on Site (2007–2008) - Greater St. Louis Area

Nerds on Site is a distributed SOHO consultancy and development shop based in Canada. I worked as a mobile IT Consultant for one year servicing business that I and the company generated via leads. My duties and projects included:

• Small office and residential IT troubleshooting and basic hardware work
• Interactive kiosk installations across Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas
• Web development and CRM onboarding
• Database development

Skills

Awards

Certifications

Education