Ben Garves
Leader in Digital and Growth Product Management
15+ years of experience as a Product Manager overseeing roadmaps for digital products, including websites, mobile apps, and enterprise SaaS applications. Career focus on CMS development, the AI transition, product-led audience growth, A/B testing, and the changing SEO/AIO landscape. Certified full-stack engineer (bootcamp, 2025).
JUMP TO: Experience | Startups | Portfolio | Companies | Skills
Work experience
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Udemy/Coursera | December 2025 – Present
Fully-mitigated 57% YoY organic search traffic loss.
Redesigned top-of-funnel content aggregation pages to align with user intent.
Founded and led the new user acquisition vertical.
Standardized KPIs and reporting, set and tracked quarterly and annual SMART goals.
Scoped and stack-ranked initiatives using RICE, SWOT and weighted decision matrices.
Increased crawl efficiency by 61%, resulting in a 63% lift in indexed pages.
Ecosystem of 15.78M pages with $261M annualized GMV and 283M annual visitors.
Stabilized Core Web Vitals, with global CLS and LCP wins.
Built LLM pipelines to summarize UGC into high-authority content across the platform.
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Gannett USAToday | May 2023 – December 2025
Led a team of 10, including Product Managers, SEO analysts, and Marketing ICs.
Set KPIs and OKRs, hired and coached team members to achieve their aligned goals.
Achieved leadership’s goals for revenue growth and budget adherence.
Product team ran a 7M+ MAU content ecosystem.
Marketing team’s purview included social (+1M followers) and email (+2M subscribers).
Conducted user research and market analysis to set product strategy.
Advocated for and moved the engineering team from ad-hoc to Agile Scrum.
My A/B tests raised subscription rates (+17%), CTR (+38%), and pages per session (+19%).
Completed MVPs and proof-of-concepts to test new technologies, like CMS and CRM platforms, MarTech tools, and AI utilization.
Oversaw replatform and data migration (proprietary CMS to WordPress Enterprise).
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Bloomberg LP | February 2020 – May 2023
Designed, produced, and launched 32 marketing-focused websites (3M+ MAU).
Managed mobile-first design systems.
A/B and multivariate tested for landing page conversion rate optimization (+37%).
Architected and used features that personalized landing pages, increasing CTR by 61%.
Operated as Scrum Master, running Agile Scrum ceremonies with 15 engineers and 6 PMs.
Worked with governance and legal teams on data privacy law compliance features.
Data-driven decision-making through Google Analytics, Looker dashboards, and A/B tests.
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SolarWinds | August 2014 – February 2020
Launched a gamified forum for support case deferral (CMS) and customer education (LMS).
Evangelized products within the community and communicated new features.
Practiced product storytelling through feature explainers, customer education sessions, industry events, podcasts, public speaking, and webinars.
Managed and iterated a public-facing product roadmap.
Collaborated with business leaders, developers, support, sales, and internal stakeholders.
Generated buy-in for ideas and delivered on-time and on-budget features.
Allocated team budget, ran vendor contract negotiations, and day-to-day vendor operations.
Used technical writing skills to create documentation and playbooks for feature adoption.
Managed QA process and user acceptance testing (UAT) program.
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Benefitfocus | July 2012 – August 2014
Oversaw product strategy and positioning, aligning market demand and differentiators.
Championed process improvement to gain efficiencies, from the go-to-market strategy to the feature delivery pipeline.
Managed QA process and user acceptance testing (UAT) program.
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Appen Butler Hill PMO | February 2010 – July 2012
Ran end-to-end localization and data validation projects spanning 52 global markets.
Developed proprietary AI and ML data analysis tool offerings for companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and eBay.
Wrote project plans and Gantt charts with thousands of dependencies across multiple teams, then implemented and ran those projects.
Headed our special projects division, providing customized beta services and pilot projects for new clients and existing partners looking to test innovative approaches.
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Destination Hotels and Resorts | January 2006 – February 2010
Portfolio
Corporate Brand, Recruiting, and HCM
Fintech and Financial Products
AI, LLM, and ML
NGOs and Social Causes
Publishing and Legacy Media
eCommerce and Apps
Gamification and Community
Localization
OTT Streaming and Live Events
SaaS Tools and Marketplaces
Who I’ve Helped
Skills and Tools
Project and Product Management
Airtable, Asana, Confluence, GTM strategy, Jira, Miro, Monday, MS Project, MVP planning, POCs, Sharepoint, Smartsheet, Trello, Visio, Zendesk.
Code and Dev Tools
Algolia, Algorithm Development, API Integrations, AWS S3, AWS SES, C, DevOps, Elasticsearch, Express.js, Git, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Open API, PostgreSQL, Pyton, React.js, Responsive Design, REST APIs, SQL, SSO, Swagger, Typescript, Web Security, Zapier.
UX/UI and Design
Adobe Xd, Balsamiq, Canva, Figma, InVision, Zeplin.
OTT and Streaming
OTT: Kaltura, OBS Studio, Streamlabs, Vidyard, Vimeo OTT, Wistia.
Streaming: Facebook Live, Instagram live, Rumble, TikTok Live, Twitch, Twitter #GoLive, YouTube Live.
Administrative
Both the Microsoft and Google administrative ecosystems, including Outlook/Gmail, Slides/PowerPoint, Excel/Sheets (with advanced functions), and Word/Docs.
CMS and Enterprise Tools
Adobe Experience Manager, ADP, Drupal, Contentful, FluentCRM, Hubspot, iCIMS, Mailchimp, MailerLite, NetSuite, Salesforce, Shopify, Sitecore, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, WordPress, Workday, Zoho.
Experimentation and Testing
A/B and Multivariate Testing, AB Tasty, Adobe Target, Amplitude, Clarity, Crazy Egg, Hotjar, Kameleoon, Optimizely, Tapen.
App Development
Appsmith, Bubble, FlutterFlow, Glide.
Ads, Affiliate, and Monetization
AdSense, Amazon Associates, Awin, CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, Impact, MaxBounty, Media.net, Outbrain, Rakuten, Skimlinks, Taboola.
Analytics, Tracking, and Dashboards
Ahrefs, Brightedge, Firebase, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Looker Studio, Power BI, Qattr, Qlik Sense, SEMRush, Tableau.
AI, ML, and LLM
ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Copilot, Custom GPTs, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity, Toqan, Delphina.
Marketing Channels
Amazon SNS, Gleam, Hootsuite, Klaviyo, Later, Mailchimp (+SMS), Pushly, Sprinklr, Sprout, Substack, Twilio, Zoho.
Community Engagement and Gamification
BuddyBoss, BuddyPress, Bunchball Nitro, FluentCommunity, GamiPress, Gleam, JiveX, Khoros, SurveyGizmo, SurveyMonkey, Youzify.