MARIYA GENZEL Mountain View, CA
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Creating great products online since 1995. Providing product management, operations, and technology strategy leadership with an enthusiastic customer focus. Dedicated to shaping the corporate culture, organization, and physical space to facilitate the creation of innovative products.
EXPERIENCE

SayHired (Mountain View, CA) - 2009-present
Technology platform for automating phone conversations and analysis
  • As Co-Founder & CTO, built the product from scratch, juggling every product-related responsibility.
YourTourBook (Sunnyvale, CA) - 2008-2009
Online travel planning startup
  • As Founder, performed market research, strategy planning, recruiting, and product design & development.
Trovix (Mountain View, CA) - 2006-2007
Job search startup
  • As Senior Product Manager, led the creation of the consumer product within a company formerly focused exclusively on enterprise.
  • Worked with cross-functional teams and prospective end users to iterate through and improve upon various strategic, operational, and design decisions. Articulated and defended product vision, and continued to align and develop product features through to the beta launch.
  • To ensure a relevant, timely, and on-budget launch, performed competitive analysis, held usability studies, investigated third party vendors, and consulted on customer acquisition strategies.
  • Helped to build and inspire the team by bringing in a unique consumer world perspective, increasing inter-departmental communication, recruiting and mentoring, as well as setting appropriate goals, schedules, and incentives.
Chaoticom.com (now Groove Mobile; Andover, MA) - 2004
Mobile digital music platform startup
  • As Director of Operations, ensured uninterrupted supply of content to the customers by negotiating with music labels and other third parties, instituting process optimization, hiring and motivating employees.
  • Brought in a customer focus by running several international market and usability studies.
  • Quadrupled the output of my department and cut the cost in half.
  • As part of senior management team, made strategic and tactical recommendations.
Online Business and Technology - 1995-2003

Independent (Philadelphia, PA; Providence, RI)
Independent consulting
  • Launched, managed and contributed to projects in over 40 e-commerce and non-profit web sites.
  • Participated in the development of the first Russian online advertising network.
  • Award-winning work was featured in the Russian and Ukrainian media; selected into "Top 50 Who's Who in the Russian Internet".
Amazon.com (Seattle, WA) 2002
Leading e-commerce company
  • Evaluated strategies to measure and optimize the performance of the cross-departmental project.
  • Took initiative to streamline the peer review process.
RI.gov (Providence, RI) 2001
E-government startup
  • Led all front-end collaborative efforts to create RI state government portal, including formulation of strategy, information and user interface design, web design, programming, database design, and copy editing.
  • Defined and developed customer-facing features to appeal to various segments of the site's visitors.
  • Reported progress and prospects to state officials.
  • Created several support systems for the staff to increase efficiency.
Aces Technologies (Providence, RI) 2000
Insurance claim adjustment ASP
  • Persuaded management to develop a self-administration and reporting system to decrease customer service requests by 30%.
  • Mentored other developers to foster stronger customer focus.
  • Developed scalable features to increase product's appeal to major clients.
Half.com (now by eBay; Philadelphia, PA) - 1999-2000
E-commerce startup then
  • As part of the initial team under aggressive schedule, played a key role in defining, designing, and implementing site architecture, user interface, and graphical and technological solutions. As a result, Half.com became fastest growing e-commerce company, later acquired by eBay.
  • Took initiative to oversee the user-centric web development, emphasizing brand consistency in design and interactions; the resulting interface became a significant factor in customer retention.
  • Advised and motivated employees.
  • Actively contributed solutions to urgent business, marketing, operational, and personnel problems. Top performance was rewarded by two salary raises and bonus stock option grants.
  • Initiated code stabilization processes that resulted in up to 70% performance increase.
CDnow.com (Philadelphia, PA) - 1998-1999
Leading online music company then
  • Managed the website internationalization initiative.
  • As part of a team, launched large-scale projects, such as the gift center, music newsletter, and MTV awards section.

EDUCATION

MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge, MA)
  • MBA, June 2005 (focus: New Product Development and Marketing)
  • Elected Director on The Coop Board of Directors for 2004-05 (6 stores, $50 million revenue)
  • Vice President, Sloan Leadership Club
  • Rice Marketing Case Competition, 3rd place, January 2004
  • Spring 2004 project: developing customer satisfaction system and creating a marketing plan for Logan Express (Boston airport)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI)
  • Courses toward Ph.D. in Computer Science
  • Focus: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing
Goucher College (Baltimore, MD)
  • Bachelor of Arts in two majors: Computer Science and Mathematics
  • Recognized and awarded as top graduating senior in mathematics

EARLY COMPUTER & RESEARCH WORK

Space Telescope Science Institute - Fall 1996
Built a model to find retrieval patterns in order to ease access to the Hubble Telescope images.

Roadnet Technologies (UPS subsidiary) - Summer 1996
Performed quality testing for a software package for routing UPS trucks.

Independent Study in Speech & Language Processing - Spring 1996
Demonstrated that the relative frequency of positive and negative words is a meaningful statistic in distinguishing between comedy and tragedy texts. Paper accepted to an IASTED conference.

Computing Research Association Program, U. of Utah - Summer 1995
Received a grant for research in text classification with Professor Riloff. Developed, implemented and analyzed text classification algorithms.


MISCELLANEOUS

Languages
Bilingual (Russian/English), some knowledge of French

Personal interests
Russian literary and musical heritage projects; Acoustic guitar; Interior design on a shoestring; Cooking; Wikipedia

TECH SKILLS

  • Expertise: technical design, implementation, and maintenance; user interface design; programming; usability and accessibility; database design; information architecture, navigation and flow; HTML programming; copy editing for the Web; graphic design; e-commerce and informational/non-profit issues.
  • Languages/Scripting: Perl, Java, C/C++, LISP, Ada 95, Pascal; (c)sh, SQL, JavaScript.
  • Web authoring: HTML, XML (incl. XSLT, RSS, WAP), CGI, JSP, PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails.
  • Database: MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, MS-Access; ODBC with C, Perl DBI module; Erwin.

Last updated on April 15, 2008