I was first headhunted by PokerStars into a marketing manager role straight after my university studies. I’d caught their eye as a successful online poker player who’d built a customer community and blogging platform, FPP Pro.com, which was used by many of the VIP players at PokerStars for help with the loyalty scheme. After this unusual hiring process, and international relocation from Virginia, USA, to the Isle of Man, I progressed through increasingly senior roles (described below).

In my onboarding role, I lead cross-functional project teams across product, development, payments, compliance and CRM. Highlights include:♦ Delivered YoY growth in new mobile customer conversation rates, a core PokerStars metric.♦ Transformed efficiency of onboarding process for new product; identified opportunity to resolve issues, secured leadership buy-in for change and increased engagement.♦ Achieved more improvement in split testing across the company; simplified and standardised approach to A/B testing, with better communication, cooperation and analytic insight.♦ Mitigated risk of fraud through proactive identification and closure of potential issues with new player deposit offers.♦ Transferred to R&D role for six months and created experimental prototypes with huge potential.♦ Mentored and coached a high-calibre direct report to take over key analytics processes.

It was during this period of product ownership that I completed two of my highest profile projects at PokerStars, ICE and Duel. As a project manager, I directed workflow of four product managers, two UX designers and two UI designers, and filled in as brand manager during the search for a permanent hire.Project ICE is a multi-million-dollar customer challenge product that became instrumental to the growth of PokerStars. Now worth tens of millions of dollars, this cross-platform, cross-licence customer engagement product uses an innovative reward system to award hundreds of millions of dollars in prizes. ICE has been so successful that it is now the foundation for all CRM and ROI spend across all verticals; at PokerStars this product set the benchmark for quality of project outcomes.As the creator of this system, I set up a cross-functional project team that completed proof of concept well ahead of a seasonal deadline and immediately delivered market-leading rates of engagement. My development of tools and continuous improvement initiatives has kept that engagement rate consistently high since the product was launched, as well as playing a central part in the success of all Poker, Sports and Casino CRM teams.Meanwhile, Duel was a mobile poker client which won some prestigious industry awards, including Best Free to Play App at the Gaming App Awards, London 2016, as well as Innovation in Poker at the EGR Operator Marketing & Innovation Awards, London 2016.The project that developed this client went well as I led a project team with >30 workstreams to meet a hard deadline, then performed a successful live demonstration to the industry press that generated immense interest.Over time, however, it became clear that there were long-term conflicts with internal corporate objectives, and I took the hard decision to recommend its shutdown, despite substantial initial success.

My first task when I joined PokerStars in 2011 was to shut down my own community platform, FPP Pro.com, which had been acquired by PokerStars after they approached me to work for them. I then spent a year developing and marketing the VIP program loyalty scheme, before promotion to set up a new PokerStars global loyalty scheme, a $100M project seen as a key driver of profit and customer insight.Providing project leadership across an international operations team, I delivered this critical project against extremely tight deadlines, navigating complex compliance issues across multiple licences.During this period, I transformed the way PokerStars attracted, converted and retained VIP players, which has had a fundamental effect on its growth since then. Major highlights included creating positive customer experiences through meticulous technical management, as well as personal problem resolution, process improvement and social media engagement.