Denis Somar

Denis Somar

Product Design Leader in in New York, He/him

About

I'm a product designer and product manager with 17 years' experience sketching, building, and coaching. I love brainstorming and building software, teams, and companies with an eye towards fun UI, collaboration and making helpful products that connect people.

Work Experience

2020 — Now
Remote
  • Ecommerce 2.0: End to end design of B2B ecommerce tailored for chemicals: quoting, checkout, shipping, payment, & order management.
  • Knowledge Vault: Knowledge sharing, user-generated content & collaboration built into the world's wikipedia for chemicals
  • Alchemy Design System: Worked with crackshot team to build a beautiful, evolved, and comprehensive design system for desktop, tablet and mobile
  • Premium Analytics: Redesign of a bespoke premium analytics offering for Suppliers, selling on Knowde
2019 — 2020
Bentonville, AR

Led a team in the Digital Transformation initiative in product management, product requirements, UX design & research, mobile app development, product vision, business insights, and user interviews.

2018 — 2019
Sr. Product Manager at NBCUniversal Media
New York, NY

• Product owner for 14 TV Everywhere video streaming apps across across eight network brands on mobile, tablet, and connected TV devices, resulting double-digit YoY growth in video starts.
• Evangelized UX, worked through product discovery, requirement gathering, backlog grooming, and release planning.
• Leveraged partnership with Amazon Alexa team to be a launch partner for voice-controlled UI on Fire TV
• Shipped special projects on AuthZ + AuthN + identity management for Peacock, gaming consoles, and other 10-foot platforms
• Shipped redesigns of Fire TV apps in close partnership with engineering, design, legal, marketing, and research teams.

2015 — 2017
NYC & LA

• Built & led a team of 20+ designers, developers, and product managers to help FC scale in ecom, brick & mortar, and infrastructure to support >700% growth.
• Established & implemented Agile best practices to manage data, hardware & infrastructure, technical debt & documentation.
• Partnered with CEO & company leadership to define strategy & multi-year roadmap to replatform FlightClub.com on Magento Enterprise, including managing multiple iterations, selecting SaaS vendors, recruiting staff, and managing other components of enterprise initiative.
• Stabilized legacy systems housing all ecommerce and retail data. Managed replatform of all legacy data to cloud-native Rails app.
• Provided subject matter expertise into product, technology, and market trends while collaborating with developers on product development. Validated all designs against product requirements.
• Stakeholder & key contributor to tech projects which included apps, WMS, networks, and security technologies from the design through development, testing, and stabilization phases.

2013 — 2015
NYC & LA

Sole stakeholder of front & back-end site re-platform projects. Managed 8 reports and partnered with team leads to transform business needs into functional requirements and use cases. Managed project timelines and priorities, viability, and communication to leadership.

• Produced polished UX deliverables in every phase of product lifecycle (strategy, research, requirements, architectures, flows, ERDs, maps, wires).
• Translated product requirements and technical designs into low-defect, robust code with 3rd party systems.
• Defined new features to be built, wrote user stories and acceptance criteria and groomed stories with developers and designers.
• Built custom reporting solutions via deep SQL queries to get at critical operation data in various company data sources.
• Built a white-glove retail iOS app and mobile inventory picking / warehouse management system.
• Built image automation and workflows for ecommerce.
• Co-Developed and maintained the eCommerce modules for syncing all relevant inventory data & product data.
• Managed re-platforming of brick & mortar IT infrastructure including vendor relationships.

2011 — 2013
NYC

Hybrid product management + engineering role, working to improve the core consumer retail and web experiences.
• I rescued a legacy system, then designed and implemented new systems that bridged the gap between traditional brick-and-mortar problems in inventory management, point-of-sale, and ecom with modern, context-centric solutions using LAMP, FileMaker, Node.js, and AWS Aurora.
• I managed the product catalog roadmap and prioritized features related to data ingestion, item matching, and data quality management.
• Managed DevOps & infrastructure as part of transition from on-premise systems to cloud-native
• Orchestrated the product design, development and launch of sell.FlightClub.com vendor portal. Defined preliminary metrics with quantitative and qualitative user research methods and performed usability testing, user journey mapping, persona development, in-depth interviews, and card sorting.

2016
Flight Club Flagship NYC Store 2.0 Launch at Flight Club

Side Projects

2006

Built a complete suite of tools for companies running consignment-based businesses: Inventory, Order Management, CRM, Point Of Sale, Financials, Reporting, and more.

400+ stores, with companies still using InBloom 15 years later

Writing

2020

The stupidly simple POGO framework for building amazing UX & products.

Education

1997 — 1999

Economics. Minor in Comp. Sci.

Contact