Irene Shen
International Relations and Economics graduate from Claremont McKenna College, currently working as Director, Product Development at ZipRealty, Inc.
| Headline: | Entrepreneur |
| Work status: | Employed Full-Time |
| Website: | http://www.ireneshen.com |
| Skills: | Business, Chinese, Design, English, Human-Computer Interaction, Languages, Management, Marketing, Product design, Web design |
| Groups: | Girls In Tech (GIT) |
| Interested in: | Helping friends, Meeting new people, Professional opportunities |
| Schools: | Claremont Consortium of Colleges - Claremont McKenna College |
WORK EXPERIENCE
| Employer: | ZipRealty, Inc. |
| Position: | Director, Product Development |
| Time period: | April 2007 - Present |
| Description: | Lead across the full product lifecycle of website applications, including concept, specification, design, launch and maintenance phases.
Identify and analyze new opportunities to improve and enhance ZipRealty.com website user experience and improve metrics. Collaborate in a cross-functional team with marketers, interaction designers, and engineers to define and gather requirements, and implementing projects with a focus on business priorities; Work with the senior management to develop and prioritize product roadmap and create design and functional specifications. Make tradeoff decisions between functionality and resources/timeframes to ensure timely delivery, good team morale, and efficient use of resources. Conceive, develop, and implement product requirements for new products based on active research of competitive offerings and new industry trends and sharing findings. Evangelize collaboration tools such as wiki and administer project management applications and improved project documentation and communication. Work with tools such as Omniture, design and A/B and conduct multivariate testing to improve ROI and conversion. • Instrumental in raising ZipRealty's Hitwise ranking from 11th to 3rd overall in the Real Estate Vertical; reaching #1 for brokerage in terms of traffic. |
| Employer: | IGN Entertainment, Fox Interactive Media |
| Position: | Project Manager |
| Time period: | April 2005 - February 2007 |
| Description: | Create daily reports to Directors, VP's, and CTO, create requirements documents, facilitate meetings, document web applications, and create organized project process between Engineering, User Experience, Web Development, and Product Management. Manage web project stages from conception to launch, including project support, usage reporting, project compliance and conflict resolution. Participate in project definition activities with all business stakeholders and help maintain all appropriate tools that impact project tracking, i.e. bug tracking system, online collaboration tools, etc. Help develop procedures and monitor project effectiveness to ensure effective post launch. |
| Employer: | IGN Entertainment |
| Position: | Versatile Producer |
| Time period: | April 2005 - February 2006 |
| Description: | Create design mockups, UI designs, web programming, facilitate meetings, draft functional requirement, test and document web applications, drive review and approval process, technical implementation, and manage projects from inception to completion. Chosen to manage, track, coordinate and report daily to CTO all project status and site usage summary for Engineering and Production.
• Developed and implemented new site search engine with Lucene technology, on IGN.com, GameSpy.com, Cheatscodesguides.com, and Gamestats.com which is still in use for site searches. |
| Employer: | Wine.com |
| Position: | Web Producer |
| Time period: | August 2004 - January 2005 |
| Description: | Facilitate the technical and content objectives for all website related programs for the E-tailer. Responsible for scoping projects, gathering requirements, and communicating with idea originators and the development team, and managing these projects from inception through completion. Developed documentation for operations and processes, as well as recommendations for future strategy and best practices. |
| Employer: | PestPatrol, Inc. |
| Position: | Web Producer |
| Time period: | February 2004 - August 2004 |
| Description: | Brought in to oversee projects for all website related initiatives under CMO. Responsibilities entailed overseeing website launches and redesigns, managing project teams, creating product requirements for the content management system for 3rd party vendors, evaluating and managing relationships with external vendors, training content owners on web production concepts, implementing new processes and content management policies and handling support issues. Worked closely with executive owners regularly on website redesign and information architecture.
• Instrumental in increasing monthly sales by 300% through effective management of Internet redesign projects and improving website layout and navigation. |
| Employer: | Oracle Corporation |
| Position: | Senior Project Manager/Senior Web Producer |
| Time period: | November 2000 - November 2003 |
| Description: | Position encompassed coordinating international websites for Oracle Worldwide Marketing, managing support tickets and webmaster correspondence, handling website migrations, creating schedules and website requirements for globalization with field offices around the world, supervising promotional web campaigns, conducting usability and accessibility training, performing user acceptance testing, coordinating tradeshow schedules, identifying and troubleshooting software defects and writing a column for Oracle magazine.
Developed innovative HTML templates in foreign languages, applying Unicode standard and utilizing multi-byte character sets. Created, documented, and managed production processes and user guidelines for Oracle proprietary content management system. Led large-scale globalization project which centralized 57 international websites, facilitating maintenance and administration. • Advanced to assume responsibility for managing production of Oracle homepage and site redesigns. |
| Employer: | Petopia |
| Position: | Producer, Strategic Partnerships |
| Time period: | May 2000 - November 2000 |
| Description: | Chosen to manage production release projects for a creative Internet company. Duties involved defining projects scope, timeline and required resources; participating in functional and creative design review; improving and enhancing development process; researching and implementing e-commerce standards and best practices; and interacting with internal departments, vendors and partners.
Implemented innovative marketing tools including subscription service for e-commerce engine and third-party promotions, increasing number of orders and revenue. |
| Employer: | CNET |
| Position: | Associate Producer, Download.com |
| Time period: | February 1999 - May 2000 |
| Description: | Recruited to coordinate software products development throughout the lifecycle for Download.com. Scope of responsibility included developing product positioning, packaging and pricing strategies; maintaining software library; responding to user issues; interacting with developers; producing and managing desktop enhancements, drivers and website features; and contributing to weekly newsletter distributed to millions of subscribers.
• Increased website traffic by 20% through launching new channels, implementing promotions and implementing strategies based on analysis of tracked performance statistics. |
EDUCATION
| University: | Claremont Consortium of Colleges - Claremont McKenna College |
| Degree: | International Relations and Economics, BA |
INFORMATION
| Memberships: | IEEE, PMI, BayChi, SF-WoW, UX Pro |
