Penguin Random House

Underlined

Underlined is a community of teen book lovers and aspiring writers sharing YA book recommendations, videos, quizzes, writing advice, and more, all on one online platform where users can connect with authors, discover new books, write their own stories, and win prizes. It is managed by the Random House Children’s Books division of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest publisher.

what i did

To launch Underlined, I worked with an internal team of marketing, sales, and editorial colleagues to define Underlined’s mission, and I managed an external team of product, design, and development colleagues to bring Underlined to life. I then regularly used analytics, user surveys, and brainstorming sessions with cross-departmental teams to define a product roadmap. I designed and developed enhancements and new features as an individual contributor and as a manager of internal and external designers and developers. Some of the updates I worked on include reducing the steps in the path to purchase, creating a dashboard that showed users activity on their writing, replies to their comments, and content aligned with their interests, and incorporating author events into the site.

I hired a full time associate email marketing manager and worked directly with her on recommending strategy to content creators. We partnered on a large initiative to acquire genre preferences from subscribers, update the monthly newsletter to be fully dynamic based on said preferences, and develop blast content to send directly to selected preference lists. I presented website updates and analytics to the division of 300+ employees.