Edward Yelonek
New York,USA
Summary
Seasoned in leading strategic operations and business growth, notably at Walmart, I excel in agile project management and disruptive strategy, achieving a 10% DAU increase within months. Expertise in data analytics and a knack for process improvement underscore my ability to drive significant, measurable success in fast-paced environments.
Overview
8
8
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Manager / Director – Strategy and Business Operations
Walmart
NYC, USA
01.2022 - Current
- Execute end-to-end business operations needs for the internal AI conversational commerce startup (speak to buy) within Walmart’s incubation portfolio – defining and measuring data-led validation and growth KPIs, strategic customer acquisition, retention, and conversion testing roadmap and execution, and market intel landscaping to achieve acquisition rationale from Walmart.
- Defined and led the Annual Operating Process to establish OKRs that guided the organization towards holistic budget and goal alignment against developed strategic KPIs to operationalize 10% DAU growth within 4 months.
- Proactively conduct root cause and other strategic analyses to define data-driven unlocks for strategic go-to-market beta testing, which fed into the creation of a team-wide go-to-market strategy for secondary markets and sales teams.
- Project manager across six simultaneous strategic initiatives around product market fit, target market, and secondary expansion markets, technical feasibility, and ROI during the first year of validation, managing staffing allocation, learning plan, KPIs, etc.
- Improving our sprint cycle process and learning times from 120-day sprints to 90-day sprints, with secondary testing market entered 3 months early.
- Conducted ad-hoc business intelligence and consumer/market research, leveraging deep data dives (SQL) and interviews to understand the needs of target users, delivering detailed segmentation and psychographic reports to GMs to refine our problem statement and product definition.
- Created FP&A documents in conjunction with finance leads to track budgets and make a case for additional seed investment asks when needed.
- Internal AI conversational commerce startup (speak to buy) within Walmart’s incubation portfolio.
Senior Manager– Business Operations and Strategy
PepsiCo Hive Startups
New York, USA
01.2019 - 01.2022
- Internal SWAT team consultant for PepsiCo’s internal startups, conducting ad-hoc business intelligence, and strategic initiatives for a nascent B2B platform proposition.
- Developed and implemented strategies to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
- Oversaw a strategic customer acquisition initiative, diving into deep data sets to understand inefficiencies in our marketing efforts, decreasing marketing spend by 5%, and increasing target MAU by 8%.
- Proactively established KPIs and measurement techniques for product validation with our product and commercialization teams to keep testing in order to define 'good enough' benchmarks to inform the next steps of the development cycle.
- Worked closely with GM to define the quarterly strategic project pipeline, leveraging our performance, budget, and growth needs to define the most important roadmap steps.
Global Manager – Business Operations and Strategy
ZxVentures
New York, USA
01.2017 - 01.2019
- Led cross-functional global business operations and strategy for ZxVentures startup portfolio companies, Ab-InBev's disruptive incubator, defining the pipeline, strategic markets, and strategic opportunity areas that were shared and aligned with the global C-suite for investment visibility and opportunity assessment.
- Worked with the GM of the Beer Hawk D2C platform to define expansion KPIs and develop and manage the testing project roadmap with cross-functional teams.
- Led the 1/3/5-year ZBB Annual Operating Planning process, aligning with cross-functional stakeholders to define cross-functional goals, and identify KPIs to measure success against.
- Oversaw project management for go-to-market testing and rollout for Beer Hawk, contributing to a 450% UK ROI in year one, leveraging an agile testing method for product proposition and category offering with key consumer cohorts before expansion nationally in UK target markets.
- Led Beer Hawk's internal process improvement for testing in general, establishing a robust Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility business process framework by adapting KPIs and creating and socializing a deck with senior leaders and cross-functional team members.
- Conducted big data deep dives and queries to feed into real-time Power BI interfaces, giving visibility to product and marketing teams, unlocking efficiencies in growth and testing timelines.
- Created detailed financial models to develop and track the business case for the socialization of funding needs based on real-time KPI benchmarks and actuals.
Project Manager
Arup
New York, USA
- Led complex project management works for commercial architecture projects in 17 countries, managing a budget of $3-25M and 5 junior architects, external consultants, and client developers with 1-6 year build timelines.
Education
MBA -
Duke University
Durham, NCMFA - Architecture
Parsons School of Design
NYC, NYBA - Architecture & Economics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MICertificate - Data Analytics
University of Chicago
Skills
- Agile project management
- Business/enterprise strategy
- Data analytics and querying
- Disruption strategy
- FP&A
- GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY
- Growth and scaling strategy
- Process Improvement
- Project management
- STRATEGIC PROJECTS AND PROBLEM SOLVING
- Vendor Management
Timeline
Senior Manager / Director – Strategy and Business Operations
Walmart
01.2022 - Current
Senior Manager– Business Operations and Strategy
PepsiCo Hive Startups
01.2019 - 01.2022
Global Manager – Business Operations and Strategy
ZxVentures
01.2017 - 01.2019
Project Manager
Arup
MBA -
Duke University
MFA - Architecture
Parsons School of Design
BA - Architecture & Economics
University of Michigan
Certificate - Data Analytics
University of Chicago
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