Vince Scalabrino

My team developed and deployed the marketing technology stack used by our global and US marketing teams to drive business to over 37,000 restaurants around the globe. Our core product was a marketing automation platform built on one of the largest Adobe Campaign installations in the world, delivering over 30 million push notifications and email daily to our global customer base of over 300 million digital customers. 

Tokens & Tankards was a nostalgic, digitally-integrated restaurant, arcade bar and tabletop game pub concept that I conceived, secured funding for, and launched in Chicago’s NW suburbs. We had 4 stars on Yelp, 4.9 stars on Facebook and 4.5 stars on Google when we closed. I learned more in this single year about myself and what it takes to run a successful business than I probably would have in 3-4 years getting an MBA. 

At Razorfish and then Manifest, I led teams of project managers, developers and designers across a portfolio of consumer and retail brands. My portfolios included programs and product builds focused primarily on retail innovation, user experience, marketing, and design consultancy.

Joining the production team at Robomodo, one of my childhood dreams came true. I got paid to make video games! I wore many hats at this startup, including product owner, scrum master and localization designer. We built Tony Hawk: RIDE and Tony Hawk: Shred, the first fully-integrated, peripheral-driven skateboarding and snowboarding console games. We developed from scratch a game engine, hardware device (the Freeboard), and two games based on this platform, in less than three years. It was a wild ride, but was my first real taste of product work. And I loved it.

This was my entry into the world of marketing agency life, which I would revisit later. Here, I managed account teams delivering innovative digital marketing engagements to a variety of Fortune 500 companies that include natural search optimization (SEO), paid search, market research, creative and web development campaigns.

This was my first leap into full-time entrepreneurialism, founding a mobile DJ business while scaling an early streaming audio content network startup. For the streaming audio startup, I recorded and edited 10 live-streamed talk radio shows/podcasts that broadcast 3-5x weekly. While doing the above, I created, wrote, co-hosted, recorded and edited Play or Die, a gaming/pop culture podcast. 

After asking my manager "why am I building this?" a few too many times, he told me to figure it out for myself and take on a leadership role.

We didn't have software product managers back then, so I joined the Program Management team. My charter was ensuring that the IT projects I was assigned to were delivered on time, within budget and met or exceeded our business stakeholders’ expectations and needs. 

I began my career as backend developer, working mostly in Oracle PL/SQL, ASP.NET and VB. My crowning achievement was an enterprise 2-way radio part configurator app that I built the front and back-end for. I conceived its feature set based on user interviews with sales engineers and support staff. 

This was a detailed 3 month immersive focused on JavaScript, Node.js and Express, with an introduction to unit testing with Mocha and Chai. As part of the course, I created the backend for 3 web apps, which can be found on my Github profile.

I completed General Assembly's rigorous and pragmatic Product Management curriculum, under the tutelage of Chika Umeadi. The course covered a range of Product skills, and put each of them into practice via development of a new product. For more information on the product I conceived, completed discovery around and created a prototype for, see my Portfolio.