Matt Nicole

Product Management Leader · Little Compton, RI
matt at mattnicole dot com · LinkedIn

Zoro (Grainger Subsidiary) — Chicago, IL (Remote)

Sr Principal Technical Product Manager, 4/2026–present · Sr Director of Product Management, 10/2023–4/2026 · Director of Product Management, 3/2022–10/2023

Joined to build Search & Recommendations, grew to lead all of digital product, and now lead Zoro's AI transformation as the parent company's only Sr Principal Technical PM — a net-new role at Sr Director level on the Zoro leadership team. Scope expanded from a single domain to a 30-person org delivering experiences that help customers find, buy, and get 14 million products from 3,000+ suppliers.

Leading the AI transformation (Sr Principal Technical PM)

• Selected into a net-new, Sr Director–level role — the only one at Grainger — to lead Zoro's AI transformation.
• Speaker, Grainger leadership End-to-End program; hackathon winner.

Leading digital product (Sr Director)

• Led all digital product, user research, and experience design — a 30-person org plus interim leadership of 8 data scientists — driving $100MM+ in attributable annualized incremental revenue.
• Authored a company-wide two-page product strategy that became the foundation for enterprise OKRs across Product, Design, Engineering, Merchandising, Marketing, and Fulfillment.
• Drove 3 internal promotions; hired and coached 5 external and 2 internal leaders into product roles.
• Teams delivered ML-based Customer Expected Delivery Date across unowned inventory, a homegrown PIM at 30MM SKUs, Promotions, and more.

Building the foundation (Director)

• Built a proprietary search platform — strategy, data model, engine selection, metrics — replacing a top-tier vendor in under 12 months.
• Launched and scaled experimentation 20× (5 to 100 tests), cutting results speed from 2 weeks to real time and moving decisions from arbitrary metrics to standard guardrails.
• Defined and created the net-new Product Analytics role.

Etsy — New York, NY

Staff Product Manager, 12/2019–3/2022 · Senior Product Manager, 3/2017–12/2019

Responsible for the in-house structured data management platform and multiple end-user features built on that data. Led efforts across engineering, data science, taxonomy, and ontology to improve data structure and utility across etsy.com — search & discovery, listings, marketing, and merchandising for over 100 million SKUs from 7 million sellers.

• Directly responsible for end-user features driving over $20MM incremental annualized GMS.
• First person to launch search & category filters at a net Gross Merchandise Sales gain.
• Created two company initiatives: Category Based Shopping & Knowledge Base.
• Responsible for product prioritization of search and ML infra during Etsy's move to the cloud.
• Set product vision & approved roadmaps for 4 product managers.
• Decreased taxonomy deploy timelines from annually to daily.
• Wrote queries and visualizations unearthing the gap in recall between taxonomy and search.
• Decreased errors in releases by introducing documented QA processes; introduced taxonomy's first KPIs and reporting.

Levo — New York, NY

Director of Product, 2/2015–3/2017

Led a distributed multi-disciplinary team and pivoted product focus from blogging to a platform for millennial career development.

• Created a real-time reporting system (event pipeline / Redshift / Tableau) for all internal users.
• Launched the first personalized content feed for the user dashboard and email.
• Launched A/B testing & feature-flag frameworks for large-scale user testing.
• Increased homepage retention rate by 50% in the first 3 months of a larger relaunch.

Knewton — New York, NY

Senior Product Manager, 2/2014–2/2015

• Managed the suite of adaptive analytics products across three agile teams: analytics, insights, data science.
• Created vision and scope for a new insights product — and a new revenue stream — from partner and market research.
• Defined first KPIs for tracking ongoing health of existing products.

AHAlife — New York, NY

Senior Product Manager, 10/2012–1/2014

• Launched an entire ecommerce platform using open source and in-house software.
• Built infrastructure for the first B2B partner: API, reporting, operations.
• Designed OMS, inventory, fulfillment, and returns flows saving 2% gross revenue per order.
• Implemented payments, taxes, gift cards, store credits, promotions, refunds, and domestic & international shipping.

DailyCandy / NBCUniversal — New York, NY

Product Manager, 9/2010–10/2012

• Launched DailyCandy Deals in all 13 markets in under a year; demand sales more than doubled year over year.
• Developed analytics strategy for acquisition, engagement, and conversion.
• Coded production tools (PHP, jQuery, OAuth) including an API-driven email builder.

LimeLabs / LimeWire — New York, NY

Product Manager, 1/2010–8/2010

• Led a distributed team of nineteen on LimeDomains — free hosting, open source apps, and domain purchases.
• Homepage redesign improved new-user interaction by 30%; improved purchase rate 3%.

Mindspark / IAC — New York, NY

Assistant Product Manager, 10/2007–12/2009

• Created a UGC social profile layout editor: 1000% increase in assets, engagement up 90%.
• SEO redesign grew SEO revenue by more than 60%.

Stupid Ventures LLC — New York, NY

Co-Founder, 4/2008–present

• Two-person company building white-label products and exploring technology.
• Over 200,000 Android installs across 6 in-house apps; white-label HTML5 game for Arkadium; custom monitoring for Mobile Commons.

Skills

Product leadership, roadmap & strategy, user experience, information architecture, A/B testing & experimentation, analytics & KPI development, OKRs, agile development, team building. Hands-on full stack: JavaScript (Node, React, Vue, Angular), Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, SQL (MySQL/Postgres), MongoDB, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud.

Education

Rochester Institute of Technology, 2000–2005 — coursework toward a B.S. in Applied Arts and Science (Computer Science, Business, E-Business; Mathematics minor).