Leland Char Email & Phone Number

California, United States

Seoul, Seoul, Kr

At Coupang, I'm enhancing the shopping journey for tens of millions of Korean customers starting right when a user enters a query and lands on the search results page. I lead a cross functional product team with a talented group of back-end, iOS, and Android engineers, designers, data scientists and product analysts. Our mission is clear: to be the industry leading search results page, providing a personalized experience that caters to the nuanced needs of each customer and product area.On our team we invest in both long term bets e.g. internally built platforms, machine learning and large language models (LLMs); and short term bets e.g. rapid experimentation cycles that deliver quick wins and continuous enhancements to our search functionality. Our team historically has touched areas such as the search filters, search result layout and product cards, search modules, and manages the overall search design system.My product approach is shaped by my time at Meta in ML driven ad formats and Walmart in ads e-commerce, and my leadership is influenced by my time at AMM Fencing, where leading hispanic teams prepared me for managing the multifaceted, bilingual team at Coupang. With a personal interest in Korean culture, I'm developing a beginners understanding of the language (e.g. the differences between korean character lengths and english words in the UI) and understanding the nuances that make our Korean customers unique (e.g. their preference for domestic products). This cultural appreciation informs my leadership style and helps in bridging the communication gap between our teams in the US and Korea.My vision for Coupang's search is to offer a uniquely tailored experience for each user. Whether they're in the market for the latest electronics or everyday groceries, I aim to present a search experience that feels like a personal store, anticipating needs and simplifying the information needed to make a purchase decision.

At AMM Fencing, I led a team of 30+ during a challenging industry period, overcoming a 30% industry contraction and propelling double-digit top-line revenue growth. This was achieved through strategic increases in lead volume and sales capacity.As the product visionary, I broadened our product offerings into offerings such as composite decking, wrought iron, and custom welded gates. I established the requisite internal tech workflows & processes, nurtured new supplier relationships, and up-skilled our builders, enabling us to support this revenue diversification effectively.My role also entailed orchestrating an operational shift. I restructured the company around three key organizational units - the builder team, warehouse team, and front office. These mirrored our three core value propositions: unmatched craftsmanship, directly sourced materials, and a streamlined customer experience.This operational shift, coupled with my commitment to service excellence, led to a customer review surge within six months - Google reviews jumped from 30 to 140+ (4.8 stars), and Yelp reviews rose from 170 to 250+ (4.5 stars).To maintain this momentum and drive operational consistency, I established a suite of best practice habits. These included weekly KPI reviews, monthly all-hands meetings with team and individual incentive structures, and the integration of a specialized cloud-based CRM system.On the people front, in a first for the industry, I created a defined career path for fence builders, complete with comprehensive compensation levels. This not only motivated our workforce but also created a platform for recognizing and rewarding talent, skill, and commitment.My most notable achievement, however, was the cultivation of an autonomous leadership team that expertly managed day-to-day operations across sales, customer relations, supply chain, and crew organizations. This empowered team established the strong, customer-oriented culture I worked to promote at AMM.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

At Walmart Connect, I was part of the ad innovation product team that developed ad experiences within Walmart's online properties to drive sales for advertisers. My role was to analyze a shopper’s in-store and online purchases to optimize the use of the most appropriate ads and track ad-driven online and offline purchases.During my time at Walmart Connect, we focused on the future of purchasing behavior that lay ahead. We saw that one-day Walmart customers would demand a single omnichannel experience, where users could purchase from in-store or fulfillment center assortments, arrange pick up or home delivery (or transfer directly into their fridge!). Walmart Connect knew that the online shopping experience needed an upgrade. My team’s job was to make that happen.As Senior Product Manager, I was accountable for all ad supply on Walmart.com. I led UX, engineering, business, and analytics teams to define the vision, design the prototype, and engineer an overhaul of all online ad experiences. Tapping into my relationship management skills, I aligned five product organizations with conflicting goals to dramatically increase revenue. Further, I drove yearlong project delivery among a pod of five IC PMs, a program manager, a product marketer, and two TPMs. I ultimately oversaw a 300+ workstream go-to-market plan coordinating fifty XFN members from operations, marketing, sales, and creative departments. I spent my days at Walmart Connect pushing my teams to think about how we could better understand the customer shopping journey, meld it with the industry trends and innovation, and ultimately delight customer, business, and advertiser stakeholders.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

As a product manager within Walmart Connect, I worked across all platforms - app, mobile web, and desktop - with front-end and back-end teams to develop and improve our ads experiences.On the front end, I created novel scope through advocating investments into format optimization. My team's close collaboration between design, user research, and engineering led to repeated successful improvements in ads designs, which saw 64%, 39%, 22%, 12%, and 6% lift in click-through rates (translating to tens of millions of incremental revenue).On the back end, I worked with product leadership to build the business case for funding for six engineering and one product manager FTE counterpart in the search organization, then directed a team of four product managers to drive $100m in committed revenue gains through ranking and relevance experiments. I championed a new product pillar to develop foundational tools for measuring ads and customer experience interaction through ads metrics integrations to A/B testing platforms. On the personnel front, I participated in final round interviewing for strategy, business ops, analytics, and design hires and mentored PMs and engineering managers.

I lead multiple cross-functional teams on market research, planning, testing, and launching products on the Facebook Feed, Video and Stories ads touching billions/yr in revenue. Let's dive deep into Facebook Stories ads, one of my major areas of impact and a top strategic priority for the company.Like the rapid shift from desktop to mobile, Stories is the next big consumer behavior. It's full-screen, ephemeral, and the way users prefer to share everyday experiences. Today, 300M people use Stories on Facebook & Messenger daily.But the swift shift in consumer behavior to stories presents a challenge to Facebook's ads business. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on a 2018 earnings calls admitted that “The question is, will [stories] monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don't know.”I'm on the team leading the charge to meet this challenge. To do that, our team built and innovated on Facebook Stories from the ground up, launching eleven major product features sets. This was two quarters faster than Instagram Stories ads for the same features and functionality. To scope our product, I completed six significant customer feedback and market research projects with Facebook's largest advertisers and partners around the world to shape the product roadmap for a team of 12 engineers. I've lead $500k alpha tests to measure performance and user engagement tradeoffs of product variations and quarterbacked the functionality pre-launch beta of FB Stories Ads with 100+ advertisers.Our product was well received in market. We exceeded our top line monetiziation goal by 150% and beat finance forecasts for product adoption by 3x among FB’s 6M advertisers through my innovative ad interfaces and GTM work. A pillar of the GTM effort was a coordinated launch event where we gained press coverage in 150+ publications in 20 countries. And similarly, I was recognized for the #1 rated session at FB Global Partner Summit and by our VP of Sales as a top Partner Center speaker.

Us

As a Senior Associate, I spend the vast majority of my time serving clients in our Technology, Media, and Telecom practice (TMT). My work spans both B2B and B2C.I bring to my clients a practical understanding of “what works and what doesn’t work” gained from my operational experience established before joining McKinsey, building and running inside sales teams, managing call center operations, and designing customer experiences from end-to-end. My clients continue to benefit well beyond the formal end of a study. Some impact that I've had:Go-To-Market Sales Transformation in Tech✓ Created plan and drove implementation to achieve >$100m/yr in savings through decentralization and reorganization of corporate sales organization. Facilitated cross-function decision making among SVPs, CEO, COO, Head of Sales, finance, and HR in an environment with competing stakeholders✓ Shifted frontline sales footprint and account coverage globally by implementing Retain-Acquire-Develop (RAD) segmentation model for all 5,000 enterprise accountsIoT New Product Launch Business Plan for Industrial Tools Manufacturer ✓ Developed 2017-2018 business plan for a IoT HW/SW solution for construction sites; components of the business plan included refining product roadmap, evaluating distributor versus direct economics, value based pricing model, role-by-role HC hiring plan, and an investment plan for scaling with milestonesCustomer Care Digital Transformation to Omni-Channel for US Telco✓ Drove kick off, MVP, and phase 1 implementation of outbound calling initiative to handle 430k calls per month ($7m/yr in savings) to position client to be a leader when compared across industries✓ Coached client program managers to run series technical workshops to implement omnichannel customer support into the organization with full support from IT, customer care, workforce planning, and VP level decision makers

Scottsdale, Az, Us

I came to BuildZoom pre-series A funding. At that time we had impressive growth with over 1m unique visits/mo and 200 leads/day from homeowners looking for contractors for their ~$30k remodeling projects. Unfortunately, we had historically struggled to monetize those leads; similar to other competitors we were selling our leads under “all you can eat” subscriptionsWithin my first weeks, I worked with our co-founders to craft a new revenue model where contractors would pay a 2.5% commission for each project won through BuildZoom. This allowed us to serve customers further down the value chain and in 6 months commissions became the supermajority of our revenue driving a 2x run-rate revenue increase. This took deep understanding of our multiple customer journeys, designing a series of touchpoints to create customer delight, and then building lasting operational capabilities through 1) people, 2) processes, and 3) tools.My priority was putting the right hires in the right geographies within clearly defined roles and org structures. When I arrived we had 6 FTEs in Oklahoma and 4 in the Philippines. Six months later I had hired 35 employees to grow to 15 and 25 FTEs respectively and made 4 internal promotions. To scale our talent I lead 4 full-time recruiters and complemented this with programs in performance management, pay incentives, learning, and all hands communication.Another significant achievement was shifting a majority of processes from Oklahoma to Manila at a 75% cost savings. At peak capacity Manila ran 25 processes such as multi-channel customer communications. I also established a culture of continuous improvement through defining and tracking our KPIs and funnel metrics on a visual dashboard. As a third lever, I sat with our agents - Project Managers and Sales Reps - on the front-line to understand existing processes and perform a buy vs build evaluation of the tools. Internally I product managed numerous feature changes to our custom CRM system.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Francisco Partners (FP) is a $10Bn tech-focused private equity firm with a history of top quartile performance among its peer group. As an associate I worked with incredibly talented professionals to understand the replicable success model that our firm applied end-to-end to achieve our high rate of return.On the deal side, I closed the takeover of Vendavo, a leading software solution in the B2B pricing optimization space. The deal team’s work centered on presenting a series of three objective reports on the team’s thesis and recommendations to the investment committee. As a basis for those conversations I lead work in three areas: 1) structuring management meetings and conducting customer interviews, 2) managing teams of external consultants, lawyers, accountants, and bankers and 3) conducting quantitative analysis through a leveraged buyout model.This work provided us with the confidence to set a purchase price range, arranged the documents and funds to close the deal, and outlined of our post acquisition strategy. After the deal closed my involvement continued around our strategic planning sessions, CEO search, and quarterly board meetings.On the operating side I was also a member of FP Consulting. I supported this internal team of 10 ex-CxOs on value creating centralized programs in human capital, sales, procurement, and KPI monitoring which impacted our entire portfolio of 20+ companies.One deep dive I took was in talent. Historically, FP excelled at placing the right C-level executives but struggled across the board with mid and lower level employees. VPs of HR were broadly frustrated with a lack of resources and felt unequipped in the war for tech talent. To address this I worked to create the Talent Optimization Program (TOP). TOP was implemented over a year with the VPs of HR at 13 companies and lead to $6m/year in savings, improved recruiting and retention, and the selection of a recruiting process outsourcing solution to cover 1000+ annual hires.

Us

I was a top performer at McKinsey. I drove impact and lead teams at a multitude of clients. As a true generalist, my work touched multiple functional topics and industries from US yogurt production to Australian coal mining.Upon completing two years as a Business Analyst I received an offer to return in a post MBA role as a Senior Associate.Representative client work includes:✓ Growth Strategy 2.0 for a Legal Services Provider✓ Billion Dollar Transformation of an Australian Coal Miner✓ Post-Merger Corporate Strategy in Aesthetic Medicine✓ Workshop Series to Find an Adjacent Business for a Networking Hardware Maker✓ Product Market Fit Validation for an Automotive Claims Software Provider✓ Pre-Close Integration Planning for a Large Technology Company✓ Worldwide Company Offsite for a Supply Chain Software Maker ✓ Private Equity Due Diligence of a Major Yogurt Manufacturer ✓ Private Equity Due Diligence in Limited Service Restaurant Food Production✓ Private Equity Due Diligence of a Payment Processing Company Achievements:✓ Developed and implemented a new pricing and product structure for the entire $1B revenue company including running an N=1,000 pricing conjoint. Prior to the change, the company had not altered its product pricing for 30 years✓ Ran bi-weekly meetings with 4 client teams and the COO as a mechanism to achieve stakeholder buy-in✓ Drove senior engineering and procurement teams in five cost areas to develop initiatives for ~$230m in annual savings✓ Templatized best practices for completing workstreams, which allowed our team to expedite progress by half a month✓ Cleaned and merged a 2M row business/consumer database to feed a rewards program simulation model; then drove a 7-person client team to expand a $1B+ rewards program, the results of which were presented at a 300 person conference✓ Developed and trained 100+ territory managers on an automated SKU level forecasting tool

Master Of Science (M.S.), Petroleum Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Chemical Engineering

Bachelor Of Science, Business Administration

High School Diploma