Mike Lipman

My earliest memory of computers was around age 5 with our Commodore 128. It was fairly state-of-the-art at the time owing to its massive 128k of RAM, double that of the aptly named Commodore 64.

I already loved playing games like Touchdown Football but what really started my love for computers was a game my Dad built for me using BASIC.

It was a crude, frogger-like game based on a popular hot dog restaurant near our house named Fluky's. I was fascinated that he was able to enter in commands and get the computer to do what he wanted it to. This effectively shaped my career path as I've been playing around with programming ever since.

To prepare for a computer science focus in college, I took my first formal courses in computing during my junior and senior year of high school.

First was Structured Programming, where I learned the basics of writing code (conditionals, loops, etc.). Looking back, I appreciate the strategy taken by my instructors in using PASCAL — given its natural language syntax, it reduced the learning barrier for students getting their first exposure to a computer language.

I followed that up with AP Computer Science which was focused less on code and more on computational theory. While I didn't appreciate it at the time, learning the nuances of how a language is compiled and taking execution time into consideration was quite valuable as I moved into college.

Halfway through my MBA program, I transferred into the Marketing department at U.S. Cellular to manage the external website (www.uscellular.com). At the time there were just three associates building and maintaining pages and I was the only one with technical know-how. It was decidedly Web 1.0 with table-based layouts using HTML4, CSS2 and just a hint of javascript. Most display logic was encapsulated in the Java layer.

With the help of the two graphic designers on staff I re-designed and re-coded all pages of the buying flow from the ground up, on both the front and back-ends. Gone were the array of tables, replaced with a standards-based div layout and increased javascript responsibility for display logic. Daily orders immediately doubled and I was then given responsibility for analytics, SEO, and domain management.

As E-commerce grew in importance for the organization, I was named manager for the team responsible for all UX, graphic design, front-end coding, and interfacing with internal IT and third-party hosting vendors, who at that point managed the back-end and servers. With a team of my own, I led the addition of numerous site enhancements and several ventures into mobile-optimized sites and reponsive design.

The channel experienced double-digit growth in activations and overall transactions for over 10 consecutive years. During that time, the buy flow that my team designed was evaluated by independent analyses as more usable and intuitive than sites by Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. I'm also honored to have won two company-wide leadership awards.

Having fully transitioned from developer to the senior leadership team, my focus turned to E-commerce strategy and the customer experience across the entire digital journey. Though I was excited to take my leadership to the next level, I'll always have the expertise and passion for the technical side of making e-commerce experiences both usable and enjoyable for customers.