“Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say "We have done this ourselves".” - Lao Tzu

New York Magazine & MenuPages

Consultant – Business Analysis, Product Management and Systems Integration Project Management

nymag_logomp_logo

MenuPages.com is a restaurant menu directory website,  featuring over 30,000 restaurants in eight major U.S. cities.  New York Magazine acquired MenuPages.com in August 2008.  I was hired to manage the integration of MenuPages into the New York Magazine technology infrastructure and to work with the founder to develop a comprehensive 2009 product roadmap.  Over a period of eleven months, I worked with senior executives, in-house and off-shore developers, designers, market researchers, and project managers to accomplish the following:

Re-Factor, Re-Design, & Re-Launch MenuPages.com

The original website was developed in Classic ASP/SQL and ran on the Windows platform.  The site was re-developed using open-source technologies (Python, MySQL) and re-branded with a cleaner and more advertiser-friendly format.  The original search engine was replaced with Endeca enterprise search.

Create a New Publishing Engine

I worked with the business team and developers to create specifications for a new publishing engine that dynamically generated menus in HTML, PDF and XML feeds for external partners.  The new system reduced publishing times exponentially and expanded business capabilities for content licensing.

Develop Content Efficiencies

A new system was created to share content dynamically between nymag.com and menupages.com, reducing duplication of editorial tasks and providing fresh content on regular basis for nymag.com readers.

Launch the Grub Street Food Blog Network

Over a four month period, the food & dining blogs for nymag.com and menupages.com were combined into a single national brand, GrubStreet.com and launched across the menupages.com markets – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston.  This project included a full brand redesign and upgrades to the Moveable Type platform.

In addition to business analysis and product management, I also worked with the management team to convert the organization from a waterfall development process to Agile SCRUM, improving productivity and product quality across the board.

Comments are closed.