Katherine Merrick

About Katherine Merrick

I am a Product Manager. I’ve been in the Internet industry for over 20 years. Half of that time in Product Management and the other half in technical roles including pre-sales/post-sales customer support and solution engineering. I specialize in Cloud Services such as CDN (Content Delivery Networks), Caching, Streaming, Encoding, Application Security (WAF, DDoS Mitigation, Bot Management, Rate Limiting), Observability and the entire Digital Media ecosystem. My journey started at Akamai and then I worked for several other CDN providers: Level 3 (aka CenturyLink, now Lumen) and Edgecast (aka Verizon Digital Media Services/Oath/Yahoo/Edgio). Also, I am very familiar with Limelight and Layer 0 CDNs, b/c they were part of Edgio.After many years in Operations, Service Delivery and Engineering, I acquired deep technical knowledge and hands-on experience with CDN, Caching, Streaming and Digital Media technologies. This allowed for a smooth transitioning into a Product Management role where I can leverage my expertise to develop new services and create better tools for customers, partners and internal users.Most recently I was the Product Owner for critical software components of Edgecast CDN network (Edge Server and Cache Manager) and focused on core feature development for the CDN platform. Prior to that I was the PO for the Rules Engine: self-service CDN configuration tool available to the customers via MCC (Media Control Center) portal. Before that I was working on internal customer provisioning systems for Service Delivery and Operations. As Certified Scrum Product Owner, I work with Scrum teams in the Agile dev environment. Together we build software and web applications for internal and external users. This includes backend systems, APIs, frontend, UI/UX. I am responsible for overall product design and architecture, end-to-end workflow, integration with other systems, as well as overseeing the implementation details. Typically, I manage one or more large multi-year projects. I handle the entire product lifecycle: starting from a concept and ideation phase to POC, to Beta and then finally to full GA, whilst also managing customer data migrations and EoL of legacy systems.I enjoy working with cross-functional teams and a lot of internal and external stakeholders. I am always happy to go beyond the traditional PM responsibilities and take care of other things, both technical and non-technical, including project, program and process management. I love solving technical challenges and making the Internet better, safer and more accessible for everyone!

Experience

1. Principal Product Manager Cdn Platform & Configuration Tools

   Verizon Media Platform

   Sep 2013 — Present · Los Angeles, CA, US

   When I joined the company it was known as Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS), then it transformed into Oath/Yahoo/Edgecast CDN, which was acquired by Limelight and rebranded as Edgio. I started as \"Sr. Consultant - Product Management/Development\" and was a part of VDMS Product organization responsible for product requirements, product roadmap, design/development and capital management. Initially, focused on Media Delivery product management, Multi-CDN interoperability and VDMS customer account provisioning/configuration.Post Edgecast acquisition became part of Verizon-Edgecast Product Design team and worked on the HTTP side (HTTP Large, HTTP Small, ADN and Transact platforms), specifically the Edge Intelligence Framework (Rules Engine, Edge Optimizer and Plug-ins) and Edge Computing/Logic at the Edge. My responsibilities included CDN customer configuration management and self-service enablement ( i.e. exposing more and more functionality to partners and customers via portals & APIs, improving their workflow and end-user experience). Later I became the Product Owner for the Cache Management (aka HTTP-Dev) team, which is the core Engineering team working on critical components of Edgecast CDN: Sailfish, Cache Manager, Purge, Lua and many others. Together, they support a wide range of products/services from Media Delivery to Applications Delivery, as well as some legacy products such as DCP Streaming. Being a Product Owner for such an important team always presents me with a lot of technical challenges, but also provides tremendous opportunities for professional growth.Also, I serve as a resource for understanding complex CDN topics, deciphering customer requirements, and general \"how do I do this\" questions. I wrote some technical blogs and authored a lot of internal and customer-facing documentation.

Skills

• Iptv
• Cloud Computing
• Digital Media
• Http
• Pre-Sales
• Vod
• Adaptive Streaming
• Ip
• Https
• Mobile Devices
• Ethernet
• Digital Video
• Co-Location
• Live Streaming
• Cdn
• Network Architecture
• Web Services
• Saas
• Streaming Media
• Encoding
• Mpeg2
• Akamai
• Dns
• Drm
• Integration
• Tcp/Ip
• Digital Tv
• Content Delivery
• Telecommunications
• Sales Engineering
• Caching
• Transcoding
• Scalability
• Solution Architecture
• Digital Asset Management
• Mpeg
• Content Distribution Networks
• Product Management