Olivier Dumon
Managing Director, Academic Leaders & Funders
London, United Kingdom
'We help researchers, research leaders, librarians, funding bodies and government bodies, as well as hospitals, health authorities, medical schools and health professionals…the very people that are contributing to society in ways from which we can all benefit.'
I have been working in technology for 20 years in enterprise software, online collaboration tools, online advertising, consulting and e-commerce. In total, we operate many very successful products in Research and Health on a global scale. The team I manage is composed of about 300 product managers, web analysts, program managers and data scientists. We have people in New York, Philadelphia, Dayton and Saint Louis in the US, Amsterdam and London in Europe and China. After four years in Amsterdam, I recently moved to London where we have two major locations for our digital talent in the middle of tech city.
I find that my current role is very special because of the people we serve. We help researchers, research leaders, librarians, funding bodies and government bodies, as well as hospitals, health authorities, medical schools and health professionals…the very people that are contributing to society in ways from which we can all benefit. Every time we launch a new feature or optimise an existing one, we improve their user-experience and contribute to their success. I like to think of us as the Sherpas of the 7m researchers as well as all the health professionals in the world. We help them go further and in many instances we lead the way together with them.
Since 2015, I have been part of the RELX Product Forum, bringing together every month the eight most senior product leaders across the group. What has been clear from the start is that the RELX product leaders have their own challenges, but we all share a passion for an iterative, data-driven approach to develop our products. What it means is that we want evidence and data to drive our product roadmaps. This methodology calls for assigning metrics to our products and assess them through A/B testing (assigning a fraction of our users to the new feature) and deciding whether the new feature is performing better than the old one.
To conclude, I wanted to share what’s keeping me up at night: it is the people. I view the most important part of my job as attracting and retaining top talent. Throughout my career, what has always amazed me is the difference that one person can make. One person, one vision, one idea can change the trajectory of a product, or a business. If you are a super talented product manager, please join us to help researchers make a better world.