Chris Johnson Email & Phone Number

New York, New York, United States

My journey with what started conceptually as a new path forward for social media commerce morphed into a focus on 3D live social spatial computing (aka metaverse) experiences. As with any startup, I wore many hats, with a primary focus on providing product and design leadership laying the groundwork for payments, social commerce, group chat and messaging as well as discovery. I also provided clearer definition and streamlining for our development process, design process and asset delivery. Later as our company grew and acquired two other companies, my role grew from Head of Product into the inclusion of an increasingly creative path, I provided creative direction with a world-class designer to create an iconic brand logo and system for our new combined venture into the world of entertainment and spatial computing, XR-based experiences. During my tenure we successfully grew the company from a $250MM to a $1.85B valuation with a successful target rev of $100MM by Q1’23.

New York, New York, United States

During my Product Leadership tenure before our M&A we successfully grew our company valuation from $50MM to $1 Billion.Display acquires Infinite Reality & Thunder Studios and renames our parent company to Infinite Reality

New York, New York

The Shed was, in essence, a half a billion dollar cultural startup where the majority of our funding allocation was dedicated to the development of the architecturally revolutionary building (designed by the famed Diller Scofidio + Renfro) and support facilities required to create a new world class performing arts and gallery center in the heart of NYC’s Hudson Yards. My principal focus was in researching, defining and resourcing the necessary vendors and digital technologies to support the opening such as providing a context aware website with CMS, contextual digital signage, digital ticketing & sales solutions, in-house CRM capabilities as well as artist production needs starting with the glowingly reviewed and immediately sold-out world premiere showing of Björk’s Cornucopia in the summer of 2019. Secondary focuses that our teams collaborated on were around facility traffic flow (aka how people can get from here to there or can I get to a bathroom in a reasonable timeframe) and insuring WiFi coverage for the entire facility including the performance and gallery spaces.

Greater New York City Area

Head of Product & Technology for Dow Jones Media Group, a portfolio of properties that include Barron’s, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, FN London and others. Reporting to both the CTO for Consumer Technology and EVP and Publisher for DJMG.Defined product and technology strategy and roadmap for the group.Aligned the needs of editorial, business, design & technology. Responsible for multi-million dollar technology capital budget. Reduced development time & costs by 20% while increasing cross-team collaboration. Areas of focus and evangelism include brand strategy; design and user experience; web and mobile platform strategy; cost management; operational security, stability, and infrastructure; applied analytics and data science; agile methodology & project management; quality assurance; diversity & organizational culture.

Greater New York City Area

Product Lead for the Mobile App & Content Platform at Dow Jones. Since the 2008 launch of the iPhone, Dow Jones has been a leader in the mobile application space. With an industry-leading approach to layout, incredible tools and a flexible content system, our mobile team was instrumental for how Dow Jones & News Corp carried the company’s mobile initiatives into the future.Reprioritized & realigned strategy to accommodate current and future market & business needs.Leveraged existing tooling & content systems (WSJ) and expanded cross-team & brands.Relaunched the rebranded Barron’s app in a six week timeframe in Nov 2016 while reducing both cost & time to market.Proved scalability via increases in new subscriptions, retention & engagement within our app.Laid the strategic groundwork for global News Corp mobile application strategy.

Greater New York City Area

Integrated Team Director working across Editorial, Product, UX, Design & Technology for the WSJ.com Redesign launched in April 2015. Leveraging Nodejs, React, Flux application architecture, MongoDB, NewRelic among other technologies. Team Director of five agile teams supporting further migration of the WSJ.com website to the React and Flux platform architecture and creating a unified front-end that we can leverage to create truly fluid web-application user experiences for our readers. Team Lead for the architectural organization and personnel responsibilities of our WSJ.com GitHub code bases and consultant for new deployment systems using AWS load-balancing to improve the flexibility of, and pipeline to, our QA and production environments. Was a part of leading the effort of an API service to be consumed by the front-end for market data points coordinated with editorial to insure parity across the Wall Street Journal Digital Network.Team Director and Producer of a proof of concept immersive, virtual reality experience that was able to be shown on the Oculus DK2, Samsung GearVR, and Google Cardboard mediums to the executive leadership team for CES 2015. This effort 'kickstarted' the VR efforts at Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal by showing our organization the viability of using 3D environments and 360º VR-enabled video in our real estate products as well as using 3D experiences for our Wall Street Journal editorial experiences. I’ve continued to assist in honing these efforts by guiding Jarrad Cole at the WSJ video department, as well as our mobile app and Innovation teams to produce refined, immersive experiences and defining the MVP and platform requirements needed to accomplish our goals.

Greater New York City Area

Head of the Consumer Technology R&D User-Experience Development Group, an integrated design, ux, and front-end technology team at Wall Street Journal, working with the Dow Jones R&D, focused on building communications and Amazon Web cloud-based collaboration technology. Key points included DJHub, web-based IM/Video chat application powered by ejabberd (server), strophejs (XMPP client) and the Backbonejs front-end framework; and Briefcase, a cloud-based document collaboration environment powered by Crocodoc (now owned by Box.com). Promoted and evangelized the importance of branded-interaction models, the ability to communicate emotion within textual communication environments, better HTML DOM structures within our Hogan templates to increase the flexibility of the front-end UI, and how identity relates to and engages the end user. Researched and prototyped a streams-based, breaking-news iOS application, better exposing user-generated content, that also offered an alternative to traditional commenting systems.

New York, New York, United States

Led the initiative put the The Wall Street Journal's video reporting product - WSJLive - on the Xbox 360 as a Kinect-enabled application, providing a living-room viewing experience that leverages the power of gesture, and more importantly, voice control for our viewers. Represented The Wall Street Journal for the Xbox Lakeview Summit at Microsoft's Redmond campus in Washington.Collaborated with the Design & IA teams to solidify a best-in-class user experience with the front-end iOS application template structure for the first Barrons.com iPad application. Lead Design Technologist on an internal design asset management application built with Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

New York, New York, United States

Senior Design Technologist on on a delectable smorgasbord of WSJ Digital Network properties including, a Facebook WSJ news application, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, and last but not least, WSJ.com for the original 2007-2008 Renovation project.

Greater Chicago Area

Engineering, sound design, and production for various Grammy Nominated artists, television & radio commercials.Trained under Anthony Kilhoffer, 4xGrammy Award winning engineer, who as worked with artists such as Common, Kanye West, Lorde, Talib Kweli, Travis Scott, Zayn, A$AP Rocky, among many others.

Greater Chicago Area

Co-Founded web-based digital design company. Worked with clients on branding and website design and production. No longer active.