As I blogged earlier today, we believe one of the keys to success in building a new company (or any great product or service) is to build an A-Team.
We are thrilled to welcome the addition of two new A-Players to the OrganizedWisdom A-Team. Emily Lapkin joins us as our VP of User Experience and Editorial Director and Zach Mayberry is our new full time Web Designer.
Emily has a tremendous background in online health and as we have already seen in her first few weeks is an extraordinary talent: full of passion, drive and dedication to our mission to make OrganizedWisdom the most useful search service for health information. She's been busy for the past couple of weeks on several exciting innovations that will help us take the OrganizedWisdom and our WisdomCards to the next level. Emily has more than 13 years of media experience, and most recently worked as Editor-in-Chief of BabyZone.com. While there she rearchitected and redesigned the site, introduced the most popular content in its history, and brought about a dramatic increase in audience engagement. She helped BabyZone sell to Kaboose Inc. for $22 million in 2006, and nab the distinction of Webby Honoree in 2007. Before BabyZone, she was Director of Health & Wellness for iVillage.com. While at iVillage, she produced more than a dozen successful Community Challenges, launched the popular Symptom Solver tool, and helped her channels earn Forbes "Best of Web" recognition. Prior to iVillage, she worked with two web start-ups, served as the Editor-in-Chief of Health for Women, a Woman's Day Special Interest Publication, and was on the editorial staff of Living Fit and Buzz magazines. Her writing has been published in Glamour, Self, Shape, Fitness, Seventeen, Ladies Home Journal, and The Boston Globe Magazine. She is a co-author of 6 Weeks to Losing It for Good: An iVillage Solutions Book. Emily has a BSJ from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives in Boston with her husband and daughter.
Zach is an extraordinary Web designer who embodies the Getting Real philosophy to design (see his portfolio here) and we are so happy to have him on the team. We are quite proud of our design, but the reality is each day we have dozens of design improvements that we know will dramatically improve what we do. Having Zach as a full time resource enables our exceptional product team to innovate faster and improve the user experience in practical ways each day.
It can be a challenge to find a great Web designer who is dependable, passionate, and believes in your mission the way Zach does. Zach is from the Mid-West and is based near St. Louis Missouri, where he also went to school at Webster University, and so that's a bonus in itself. (I too grew up in the Mid-West where all the women are strong, the men are good looking and the children above average:-). We found Zach from the 37Signals.com job board and realized we shared a similar vision about design, results-based work, and passion for helping people through our work.
We welcome Emily and Zach to the OrganizedWisdom team and look forward to doing great things together.
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