Alexa Spears

About Alexa Spears

My path to product management has been anything but conventional.I started as a professional model for nearly a decade. The most surreal gig? Being the character model for Enchantress in Warner Brothers\' Injustice 2. Getting paid to be part of a DC fighting game? 15-year-old me would\'ve lost her mind. From there, I studied mechanical engineering at UNC Charlotte, then joined Trane Technologies\' rotational leadership development program where I first fell in love with product management. There was something addictive about translating customer problems into solutions that engineering teams could build, seeing an idea go from whiteboard sketch to something thousands of people actually used. I got my MBA at Harvard Business School where I was one of two Directors of the Music, Entertainment & Media Club, interned in corporate strategy at PlayStation, and now build enterprise data and ML platforms at Capital One.What connects all of this? I\'m obsessed with understanding how systems work, whether that\'s the dynamics of a VR market ecosystem, the architecture of a customer data platform, or how contextual multi-armed bandits can optimize for long-term customer value. I love taking complex, ambiguous problems and translating them into products that scale.At Capital One, I lead platforms that serve millions of customers, from our enterprise Customer Data Platform (which I took from vendor evaluation through first business unit onboarding) to ML experimentation systems that deliver personalized experiences to 19M customers weekly. My work sits at the intersection of data, machine learning, and cross-functional stakeholder management, where I get to combine technical depth with strategic thinking.What I\'m looking for: Roles where I can apply my platform thinking to build products that matter, whether that\'s at companies shaping how people discover music and content, or at tech companies pushing the boundaries of AI and data platforms. I thrive in environments that value creativity, experimentation, and solving hard problems at scale.My superpower? Bringing a different perspective. My background means I approach product problems differently than someone who\'s only lived in tech. I understand both the creative and the analytical, the strategic and the tactical, the customer experience and the technical architecture.If you\'re working on interesting problems in platforms, AI, or building products that reach millions of people, I\'d love to connect.

Experience

1. Product Manager

   Capital One

   Aug 2023 — Present · New York, NY, US

   Led our enterprise Customer Data Platform from zero to one, designed to manage 138M unique customer profiles across all business units. Ran vendor evaluation across 34 solutions, secured executive alignment through enterprise roadshow, and made foundational platform decisions with enterprise scalability in mind. Onboarded the first business unit and launched our initial production use case enabling business card cross-sell to existing Capital One customers- Own two AI/ML decisioning and experimentation platforms delivering personalized experiences to 19M customers weekly. Led AI/ML experimentation work integrating contextual multi-armed bandit models into our marketing technology stack, accelerating business value from 30% to 50% YoY growth. Developed flexible data ingestion patterns enabling real-time attribute expansion and deployed models optimizing for long-term account value- Unblocked 2+ year effort to bring internal customer experience tool to mobile channel by coordinating design, architecture, and platform teams. Launched one-click enrollment patterns that improved completion rates from 35% to 99%, unlocking significant customer experience improvements and cost savings- Driving enterprise experimentation strategy and platform consolidation to sunset legacy systems and migrate capabilities to modern infrastructure. This involves coordinating across multiple platform teams and securing VP-level alignment on migration approach- Resolved Salesforce Marketing Cloud API governance issue by coordinating our gateway team and Salesforce to implement retry logic and traffic reconfiguration, eliminating send failures at enterprise scale.

Education

• DePaul University

  Bachelor of Science (Transferred), Physics

  2013 — 2015

• University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering

  2015 — 2018

• Harvard Business School

  MBA

  2021 — 2023