Melanie Butcher

Professional Experience

Camunda                                                                                    

Head of Product Design 2021–PRESENT

• Recruited to increase market share and provide competitive product differentiation in the fiercely competitive (and consolidating) industry of process automation

• Evolved product suite from niche to “visionary” to heavyweight market leader (Gartner, Forrester) to grow product revenue over 200% in 4 years

• Transformed the organization’s view of design and user experience to become a design-led company to reduce R&D costs by over 40% through implementing a corporate-wide design system 

• Incorporated quantitative and qualitative analysis into R&D process, steadily raising usability scores

• Designed nimble, non-deterministic Agentic AI solution that easily integrates into any automation solution

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DraftKings                                                                                                    

Vice President of Product Design & User Research 2019–2021

• Recruited to lead Product Design through a public offering for $1.6 billion, several acquisitions and massive product expansion while sports completely halted due to the pandemic in a rapidly changing and heavily regulated industry

• Introduced product designs for eSports ($577million 2024 TAM) and expanded casino product offerings that offset loss of revenue and loss of engagement due to sports not being played during the pandemic

• Guided a highly engaged team through a potentially disruptive 10x revenue and organization size expansion over 2 years, including integration of newly acquired products, and constant process overhauls 

IBM                                                                                                                 

Vice President, User Experience & User Research 2017–2019

• Promoted to expand a product portfolio within IBM from $1bil to $1.9bil with a global team of 150+ product designers, user researchers, front-end developers, and technical writers

• Evangelized the IBM Design Thinking revolution both inside and outside of IBM to center on end-user needs and radically improve the product development process 

• Expanded the IBM Carbon design system to be used by all IBM business units, and for use as an open-source library, becoming a top 5 design system by number of users and decreasing R&D costs across IBM by 47%

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IBM                                                                                                                 

Director of User Experience, Watson Customer Engagement 2013–2017

• Promoted to lead user experience for a $1 billion business unit known as Watson Customer Engagement, including a team of 72 designers and user researchers

• Created a large-scale design revolution within IBM known as Design Thinking to emphasize empathy, ideation and iteration

• Conducted 30+ week long Design Thinking cross-team sessions with various product teams to identify product gaps and lead usability improvements 

• Created the award-winning design system known as Carbon to provide visual consistency across 27 platforms and product suites, creating internationalized and accessible products, resulting in reduced costs by 47%

• Improved usability by incorporating Watson AI into the product offerings in 2016, creating meaningful competitive differentiation during a rapid consolidation of the marketing software industry

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IBM (formerly Unica)                                                                                       

Director of Product Management 2009–2013

• Hired to lead strategy and development of a $90million B2B marketing platform, resulting in a successful company acquisition

• Integrated user experience and design into development process, resulting in an award-winning, highly usable product 

• Integrated user research and usability metrics into the R&D process to clearly identify product gaps and quickly address usability problems 

• Guided product team through a successful $480 million acquisition by IBM in 2010, which became the fastest acquisition in IBM history to meet its business case to profitability

PeopleCube (now Asure Software)                                                                      

Product Manager 2006–2009

• Hired to turn around a lagging B2B resource scheduling product

• Transitioned from a US-based engineering & QA team to an India-based engineering & QA team, resulting in a 36% cost reduction

• Identified product gaps, refocused the product and improved usability

• Guided product through a successful VC funding round during the 2008 recession, paving the way for an eventual acquisition in 2011 ​​

Education