CMSWire Advisory Board
The CMSWire Advisory Board is comprised of industry leaders and practitioners in the fields of digital experience, customer experience and digital marketing. The first board served between September 2015 and December 2016, our second board served between April 2017 and June 2018 and our third board served from late 2018 through 2019 and our fourth board served from 2020 until June 2021.
Our fifth and current board supports CMSWire and its Digital Experience Summit event. Its sister advisory board supports Reworked and its Digital Workplace Experience event.
Mission Statement
The Advisory Board's mission is to support CMSWire's and the Digital Experience Summit conference’s commitment to quality content and a vibrant community of business professionals.
Vision Statement
Gain a better understanding of the trends, drivers and priorities shaping our readers’ and event attendees’ businesses so we can improve how we report, write and present news for CMSWire and how we produce content experiences for the Digital Experience Summit.
Introducing Our Advisory Board
The following thought leaders comprise our fifth board, which began in the third quarter of 2021. The board provides input, advice and feedback to the CMSWire Editorial and Digital Experience Summit Events staff on current trends and topics related to digital experience technologies and strategies.
Matthew Schaeffer
Matthew Schaeffer is the manager of the data and content operations team at REI and spends his days creating and optimizing tools, systems and processes that help content creators work more efficiently and effectively. His team is building a next-generation publishing platform to deliver integrated, relevant experiences that will provide REI customers with the content, products and information they need when and where they need it. As part of his work, he advocates employing a holistic, systems-thinking approach to problem solving and building solutions through continual, iterative improvement.
Matthew started his career journey over 20 years ago as a writer and editor for the largest English language publisher in Bucharest, Romania. He was an editor at Forbes.com the day revenue from the website surpassed that from print, and he helped Microsoft launch MSN News. He was managing editor for a startup that created webby-nominated online magazine FLYP and had the pleasure of talking to some of the world’s brightest minds as a researcher and managing editor for a futurist think tank in New York City.
When not pondering structured content, metadata, content modeling and how to architect the publishing platform of the future, Matthew spends his time snowboarding, surfing and paddle boarding with his wife and generally getting outdoors as much as he can in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Katrina Taylor
Katrina Taylor is revolutionizing the way women get dressed as head of user experience and product design at Armoire, a high tech rental startup based in Seattle. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, Katrina brings 15 years of experience in design, digital products, user experience and tech and played a key role in driving digital innovation at Men’s Health and World Vision.
Katrina has trained digital teams in design thinking methodologies across Asia, Europe and North America, and is a mentor for General Assembly’s UX Design program. She speaks nationwide about the power of leveraging human-centered design insights to drive machine learning and personalization strategies.
Mansur Khamitov
Dr. Mansur Khamitov, PhD, MBA, is an assistant professor of marketing at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University and a vice-chair of American Marketing Association's CBSIG. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario.
Mansur's research has been published in the leading marketing (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science), psychology (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Cognition) and popular press (Harvard Business Review) outlets. Mansur has been recognized as a 2020-21 Research in Practice Award Co-Winner and 2017-18 Rising Star by the American Marketing Association’s Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group.
Prior to starting his Ph.D., he spent several years working in fast-moving consumer goods and pharmaceutical industries. His industry experience is mostly in branding and marketing management, including work as a senior product manager at Polpharma and a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, where he managed such brands as Oral-B, Blend-A-Med (Crest), Camay and Safeguard. Mansur also has experience teaching Integrated Marketing Communications, Integrated Brand Promotion and Advertising, Market Intelligence/Market Research, Consumer Behavior, Principles of Marketing, and Advertising and Marketing in Emerging Economies at Indiana University, Nanyang Technological University, University of Western Ontario, and KIMEP University.
Mansur’s research and opinion pieces have been quoted or featured by Forbes, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Washington Post, CNA, Medium, TODAY, Herald-Tribune, The Business Times, WARC, and American Marketing Association among others.
Preston So
Preston So (he/him) is a product architect and strategist, digital experience futurist, innovation lead, designer/developer advocate, three-time SXSW speaker, and author of "Voice Content and Usability" (A Book Apart, 2021), "Gatsby: The Definitive Guide" (O'Reilly, 2021), and "Decoupled Drupal in Practice" (Apress, 2018). He has been a programmer since 1999, a web developer and designer since 2001, a creative professional since 2004, a CMS architect since 2007 and a voice designer since 2016.
A product leader at Oracle, Preston has led product, design, engineering and innovation teams since 2015 at Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, a columnist at CMSWire, a contributor to Smashing Magazine and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.
Michele Bartram
The U.S. Census Bureau's first customer experience officer, Michele Bartram currently leads CX and related digital transformation strategies. Prior to joining the Census Bureau, she served in senior customer experience, digital transformation and communications roles in three other federal agencies, including the Commerce Department’s BusinessUSA portal, winning the first President’s Award for Customer Service. Prior to that she served in the Government Publishing Office (GPO), overseeing the U.S. Government Online Bookstore and related marketing. Her first government role was with the United States Mint where she launched the first digital division and ecommerce site in federal government.
Michelle started her career in IBM’s National Federal Marketing Division in Maryland as a systems engineer and enterprise technology consultant for federal agencies such as HHS, SBA, and NCUA. After that, she led major digital, brand, and marketing initiatives — including Top 30 ecommerce businesses — in the US and Europe with such major brands as: Lane Bryant, Sears, Rand McNally, Kenneth Cole, Calvin Klein, iVillage.com, Reeds Jewelers, Seagram’s and Baskin Robbins International.
Fluent in Spanish from her years marketing in Spain, Bartram earned a master of science in integrated marketing communications from West Virginia University, studied abroad at the University of Seville (Spain) and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a James M. Johnston Scholar and Honors student, and the first female head of the Marching Tar Heels drumline.