Ken Judy

Ken Judy is the CEO of Stride Consulting. Ken was previously the Chief Technology and Product Officer at The Daily Beast from June 2015 to September 2017. Ken transformed The Daily Beast's product and technology organization in five phases:

• stabilized the publishing and hosting environment to eliminate daily faults and failures

• rebuilt the tech organization to reduce release periods from six months to weekly.

• fostered a collaborative, single team across design, product and tech to enable value based product iteration

• replaced the legacy publishing system with lightweight, secure cloud based services. Eliminated $1M licensing costs, contributed to 30-50% increase in ad revenue and reduced time to publish from 1 hour to minutes.

• rebranded The Daily Beast with a new logo and revised brand style guide

Site experienced daily brown outs due to poor cache strategy taxing the CMS. Introduced application performance monitoring. Removed real time elements from page cache. Offloaded resource intensive tasks from application servers.

Transitioned from an onshore team of six and offsite team of twelve dependent upon outsource to an onshore team of seven across devops, engineering and QA. Resulted in approximately 30% reduction in contractor fees and salaries.

Empowered a single design lead from within and authorized product owners to pursue their own initiatives, Instituted weekly iterations, better defined backlog, annual roadmap and clear monthly/quarterly goals.

We replaced a 5 year old Java-based CMS with a Node.js/React.js based site, services, and authoring tools using serverless feed adapters built upon open source frameworks and tools. Implemented tag management and optimized the ad call stack allowing introduction of header bidding contributing to a material increase (30-50%) in advertising revenue.

Facilitated adoption of a new brand style guide, and logos. Reduced time to publish content from draft to live from an hour to minutes. Moved to mobile first, responsive homepage. Adopted usability experiments and testing. Improved interaction in the bottom half of the homepage from 1% of clicks to ~10% of clicks.

Ken Judy has a BA in Mathematics-Physics from Whitman College. Ken also has certification from Scrum Alliance as a Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP), certification from IEEE as a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP), and certification from the International Association of Privacy Professionals as a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US).

Some direct reports include Francisco Martin - General Manager, Stephen Quaderer - COO/CFO, and Rebecca Braitling - Chief People Officer.