Wade Whatley - Senior Product Manager
Atlanta,GA
Summary
A passionate professional focused on driving business results through cross- functional partnerships, effective relationship management, and data driven decisions.
- linkedin.com/in/wade-whatley
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Product Manager; Customer Identity
The Home Depot Inc
Atlanta, Georgia
10.2025 - Current
- Own the multi-year product vision, strategy, and execution for Home Depot’s enterprise Customer Identity platform supporting tens of millions of customer profiles across omnichannel retail experiences
- Provide a unified, trusted customer profile across transactions, loyalty, digital, and activation channels.
- Enable consistent identification and personalization across web, mobile, in-store, marketing, analytics, and campaign activation platforms.
- Drive identity resolution strategy across deterministic and probabilistic matching.
- Increased reliability of Customer 360 identity data by reducing data quality escalations and improving consistency of identity resolution across digital, transactional, and activation channels
- Defined and owned platform-level KPIs and OKRs, reducing monthly Vertex AI costs from ~$9,000 to ~$1,195 while improving identity prediction processing time from ~1.5 hours to ~40 minutes.
- Define and track identity accuracy and data integrity proactively addressing match degradation, and attribute drift.
- Ensure data latency, SLAs, and reliability, owning on-time refresh and delivery of identity datasets to the enterprise data warehouse and activation destinations.
- Shape and manage vendor strategy and build-vs-buy decisions for identity and enrichment, including Amperity (PII-based profile creation and stitching), TransUnion/Neustar enrichment, and second-party data integrations.
- Enable Retail Media, loyalty, and personalization activation at scale by delivering consistent, activation-ready customer profiles to marketing, paid media, and analytics platforms, improving campaign performance and conversion lift.
- Ensure compliance with data privacy, governance, and risk requirements, prioritizing tech debt and platform hardening initiatives to support long-term scalability and regulatory readiness.
Product Manager; Data Strategy
The Home Depot Inc
Atlanta, GA
09.2023 - 10.2025
- Develop product roadmaps to guide the growth and partnership of the data dictionary
- Increased data cube metric definition coverage in the data dictionary from 20% to 100%
- Conduct road shows to different user groups and produce newsletters to socialize and bring awareness and engagement to the data dictionary
- Identify customer needs through user interviews, surveys, focus groups, and other feedback mechanisms
- Work closely with engineering teams to ensure feature specifications are understood and implemented correctly
- Establish the Data Domain Product Manager as a role within the Home Depot enterprise
- Establish data domain owners across the enterprise to initiate the overall data strategy goals
- Help to establish standards with which to create data metric definitions
- Drive partnership across the enterprise to define long term roadmap for each data domain
- Drive population of metadata amongst partner teams for data assets across each data domain
- Establishes communication channels, standards and cadences for data changes
- Creates training materials for Data Scientists & Analysts
- Defines data quality management capabilities and best practices
- Analyzed data from various sources such as customer feedback, usage metrics, A and B testing results to inform product decisions
Product Manager Advertising Technologies
The Home Depot Inc
Atlanta, GA
09.2020 - 09.2023
- Optimization and expansion of user/customer facing banner and PLA advertisements
- Drive ad server transition
- Banner and PLA inventory netting over $10M annually in brand/vendor ad spend
- Monitor user traffic to specific pages/categories on the desktop & mobile web to better inform business decisions
- Facilitate A/B test to determine engagement with user facing product pods
- Define and analyze product metrics to facilitate growth of product.
- Deliver marketing strategy updates to upper-level management.
- Develop marketing strategies based on corporate objectives and market trends.
- Cultivate business partnerships to build lasting relationships with internal and external parties.
- Collaborate with other departments to coordinate strategic marketing activities.
- Plan and facilitate meetings to share marketing plans and explain future business goals.
- Manage product demonstrations, testimonials and benchmarks for performance evaluation.
- Define and implement cost reduction strategies throughout product development lifecycle to maximize profitability.
- Collaborate with marketing team and functional management to achieve business and marketing strategy objectives.
- Leverage technical knowledge to navigate functional requirements.
- Help coordinate testing to verify quality and usability of new product features.
- Work with engineers to improve user experience and confirm builds meet user specifications.
Sr. Analyst Change Management
The Home Depot Inc
Atlanta, GA
12.2017 - 09.2020
- Supported assortment maintenance processes and systems through effective product development
- Partnered with UX and software development teams to enhance merchandising systems through evaluating business processes, defining requirements, developing process roadmaps, and creating functional designs
- Conducted user interviews and research to identify and address gaps in system functionality
- Assisted in setting and communicating the long-term vision and strategy for integration of myAssortment and AMT 2.0
- Led initiative to improve communication between IPR and merchandising resulting in reduction in out of stocks and direct to store shipping cost/occurrences
- Developed several training guides for users to troubleshoot and solve issues independent of support team
- Assisted with development of automatic push notification email to support single source initiative.
Vendor Forensics and Supplier Onboarding Analyst
The Home Depot Inc
Atlanta, GA
06.2016 - 12.2017
- Served as primary liaison for merchants/suppliers and THD during the onboarding, through project managing
- Partnered with Brand Advocates, Digital Content and Hazmat teams to drive product growth/onboarding
- Developed strategies to improve process and drive efficiency in supplier onboarding based on data analysis
- Exceeded supplier launch goal metrics by 150% a total of 5 times in FY2016
- Effectively trained and transitioned overseas merchandising support team to increase U.S
- Supported team bandwidth and productivity
Resolution Expeditor
Home Depot
Atlanta, GA
09.2014 - 06.2016
- Took inbound communication from internal and external customers via e-mail while identifying, categorizing and resolving root causes of customer issues, including technical support on installations and parts inquiries.
Customer Care Associate
Home Depot
Atlanta, GA
07.2014 - 09.2014
- Took inbound communication from both internal and external customers to capture and address customers service needs or issues
- Escalated service issues as needed to ensure proper resolution and prevention of future customer service issues
- Provided excellent customer service through active listening, a positive attitude, and professional and personalized communication.
Site Manager
Tom Brown for U.S. Congress
Tucker, GA
02.2014 - 05.2014
- Managed team of campaign staffers and volunteers to increase public awareness of candidate’s platform and to improve voter turnout
- Coordinated neighborhood canvasing, phone banking, and voter transportation
- Responsible for editing and distributing written communications to local news outlets.
Project Manager
Turkic American Federation Of Southeast
Atlanta, GA
12.2013 - 03.2014
- Facilitated events and communication of the organizations platform and goals
- Organized yearly fact-finding mission to Istanbul, Turkey and surrounding provinces
- Established relationships with state senators and other members of the Georgia State House of Representatives to further the vision of the organization
Education
Bachelor of Arts - Psychology
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OHSome College (No Degree) - Completion of Spanish Minor
Universidad De Cardinal Cisneros
Alcala De HenaresSkills
Technical
- Jira
- Jira Align
- CSS
- HTML
- Javascript
- JQuery
- Google Big Query
- SQL Server
Non-Technical
- Relationship Management
- Collaboration
- Requirements Building
- Product Development
- Project Planning
- Interpersonal Communication
- Agile Software Development
- Customer Advocacy
Training & Certifications
Via General Assembly of Atlanta
- Intro to Product Management
- Intro to Coding: HTML & CSS,
- SQL Bootcamp
Via Skillsoft Percipio
- Peak Product Management Training Certificate Level 1: Discover, Define, Design, Develop, Deliver
Accomplishments
- Merch. Solutions Excellence Award; Collaboration Q3 2019
- 6 Home Depot Homer Awards (Sliver Level)
- Entrepreneurial Spirit
- Taking Care of Our People
- Excellent Customer Service
- Doing the Right Thing
- Building Strong Relationships (2)
Additional Information
- Volunteer: Helping Hand Atlanta (2016 – Present)
- Student Teacher: Toledo Public Schools; Children with Developmental Disorders (2008, 2012, 2013)
Timeline
Senior Product Manager; Customer Identity
The Home Depot Inc
10.2025 - Current
Product Manager; Data Strategy
The Home Depot Inc
09.2023 - 10.2025
Product Manager Advertising Technologies
The Home Depot Inc
09.2020 - 09.2023
Sr. Analyst Change Management
The Home Depot Inc
12.2017 - 09.2020
Vendor Forensics and Supplier Onboarding Analyst
The Home Depot Inc
06.2016 - 12.2017
Resolution Expeditor
Home Depot
09.2014 - 06.2016
Customer Care Associate
Home Depot
07.2014 - 09.2014
Site Manager
Tom Brown for U.S. Congress
02.2014 - 05.2014
Project Manager
Turkic American Federation Of Southeast
12.2013 - 03.2014
Bachelor of Arts - Psychology
Bowling Green State University
Some College (No Degree) - Completion of Spanish Minor
Universidad De Cardinal Cisneros