Shawn Bolan

Current

• Director of Product Management at MyWire

Past

• Senior Product Manager at Yahoo! Inc.
• Senior Product Management & User Interface Design at Independent Consulting (Self-employed)
• Senior Product Manager at MetroWize

• Senior Front-end Software Engineer, User Interface Team Lead at Cacheon
• Java Software Engineer at Aquent
• Software Engineer at Autodesk - Developer Consulting Group

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Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Recommended

14 people have recommended Shawn

Connections

213 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Company

Shawn Bolan’s Summary

I am a seasoned product manager with firsthand user interface design and software engineering experience. I have managed many product life cycles (SDLC) from ideation, gathering requirements, defining customer experience and user interface, all the way through implementation by cross-functional, Agile scrum teams.

I earned a Computer Science & Electrical Engineering degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I also acquired management and marketing education through courses taken at M.I.T. Sloan Business School (w/ a minor degree in business economics) and through Berkeley's MBA Foundation in Business Administration.

Shawn Bolan’s Specialties:

product management, Agile, Scrumworks, user interface, product requirements and design, Web 2.0, SEO, building user community & UGC, Visio, Java, Javascript, AJAX, C++, Photoshop Swing, PHP, XML, HTML, CSS, mySQL, Wordpress, Excel, Powerpoint, Bugzilla, wiki

Shawn Bolan’s Experience

• Director of Product Management

  MyWire

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

  May 2008 — Present (3 months)

• Senior Product Manager

  Yahoo! Inc.

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)

  April 2007 — May 2008 (1 year 2 months)

  Senior Product Manager of Front-end team and User Community for Yahoo Local search service ( http://local.yahoo.com ). Prioritized, iterated, and measured impact of new website features. Enhanced usability of Local site to foster community & connections among users.
  
  * Leading cross-functional Local product team (user interaction, graphical design, web developers, QA) through successive Agile development sprints. Results: significantly increased review and conversational UGC through feature enhancements and enlarged first-time and repeat submitters in user community, particularly (1)grew coverage (businesses bearing at least one user review) by 81% and (2)increased engagement (users with over two reviews) by 42% during last half of '07; (3)increased business owner sign-ups for paid listings by 30%
  
  * Increased referral traffic to property via SEO enhancements and a hyper-local editorial program featured on Yahoo's main Front Page portal

• Senior Product Management & User Interface Design

  Independent Consulting (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Information Technology and Services industry)

  2005 — 2007 (2 years)

  Website user interface design and product manager building social user communities with user-centered design. Technical strong points: information architecture, wireframing, storyboarding, sitemapping, usability testing, functional specification and requirements gathering, new media, website creation and messaging. Utilizing technical proficiencies in PHP, mySQL, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, AJAX, Mambo/Joomla, blogging customization.
  
  Longer-term projects:
  Mozes: http://www.mozes.com
  Metrowize: http://www.metrowize.com

• Senior Product Manager

  MetroWize

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  2006 — 2006 (less than a year)

  Product manager defining and designing the customer-facing aspects of the MetroWize web application. Responsible for identifying and specifying features and user interfaces to improve the experience of users. Drove priorities and requirements through the product development lifecycle. Worked closely with engineering to plan feature priorities and defect workarounds. Worked closely with executives to improve product positioning and plot go-to-market promotional activities. Advised on applicable technology standards (blogs, RSS, usability & user experience standards).

• Senior Front-end Software Engineer, User Interface Team Lead

  Cacheon

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

  2001 — 2003 (2 years)

  * Engineered graphical user interface front-ends from start to finish for company’s main product line, Cacheon Migrator. Product management and requirements, design/architecture of client-side applications, rapid prototyping, implementation in Java Swing & Eclipse, usability analysis.
  
  *Undertook chief responsibility for design and construction of front-end for company’s flagship application, a J2EE application code “Migrator”. Achieved third-party integration of Migrator into IDEs such as JDeveloper & Eclipse. Performed backend integration and enhancement of data models.
  
  * Team lead for the UI team through complete project iterations: managed scheduling and requirements
  
  * Cemented a major company deal with Oracle by integrating product into the Oracle JDeveloper environment in time for major JavaOne conference debut. Oracle subsequently launched a campaign and consulting practice centered on the Cacheon Migrator.

• Java Software Engineer

  Aquent

  (Public Company; Myself Only; Computer Software industry)

  2000 — 2001 (1 year)

  Developed Java (JDK, Swing), and J2EE applications. Largest Client: Ednet - developed a GUI front-end controller interface for video hardware. Built multi-step Java Swing wizard, reconciled multi-threading issues, and established authentication between video hardware boxes.

• Software Engineer

  Autodesk - Developer Consulting Group

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  1998 — 2000 (2 years)

  *Developed customized applications for products AutoCAD and Mapguide GIS. Wrote C/C++ code for AutoCAD modules. Employed technologies: Java, C++, C, Win32, MFC, COM, VB, VBA, ASP, JavaScript.
  
  *Extensive client management in providing professional services to premier developer support network. Supported and trained 3rd-party developers in their commercial programming projects. Generated well-documented prototype applications. Debugged and engineered workarounds for product defects. Extensive travel and experience delivering effective presentations

Shawn Bolan’s Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  B.S., Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, minor in Economics

  Activities and Societies:

  Society of Women Engineers

Additional Information

Shawn Bolan’s Websites:

• My Company

Shawn Bolan’s Interests:

travel, Europe, French, music, dance, hiking

Shawn Bolan’s Groups:

SVPMA, SDForum, Women 2.0

•    VLAB member
•    LinkedSEO member
•    Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Meetup Group member
•    Yahoo Employees member
•    User Experience member

Shawn Bolan’s Honors:

National Merit Scholar

Shawn Bolan’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch