Justin Conway

Director, Web Engineering and Design | Chicago, IL
justin@conwaydev.com

Professional Summary

I manage the web team at Sprout Social. Embedded engineers and designers, sproutsocial.com plus our other go-to-market properties, and the call on what all of it should be doing for the business. Most of the job is keeping marketing, product, and revenue pointed the same direction. I came up as an engineer on this team before I ran it and hired each individual on it.

Selected Achievements

  • •Staffed the team for depth as the platform outgrew generalists, standing up dedicated front-end and infrastructure practices instead of hiring more people who could do a bit of everything. The engineers and designers doing that work have moved up into senior roles on the team, and eleven of them now carry every property this company takes to market.
  • •Have owned Sprout's web platform through every version of it, from the first content management system I built for marketing to the composable stack it runs on now. Each generation moved more publishing into marketing's hands and gave the team a smaller surface to maintain.
  • •Have been the web organization's partner to Legal and Compliance across a decade of shifting privacy regulation, from GDPR through the ePrivacy Directive to California's consumer privacy laws. I own the consent and data-collection architecture that keeps every property defensible.
  • •Manage the experimentation and conversion program jointly with Marketing, close to a thousand tests over six years including hundreds of personalization campaigns across five languages. I run intake, set the roadmap, and decide with our partners which tests are worth the team's time.

Skills

  • Leadership & Strategy: Organization design & team scaling • Roadmap and investment strategy • Executive & cross-functional alignment • Hiring, mentorship & career development
  • Governance & Risk: Privacy & regulatory compliance (GDPR, ePrivacy, CCPA) • Consent and data-collection governance • Content standards & message-map integrity
  • Growth, Conversion & Search: Experimentation & personalization programs (Optimizely, Adobe Target) • Conversion rate optimization • Technical SEO & answer-engine optimization (Botify) • Analytics & tag management (GA4, Google Tag Manager, Mixpanel) • Lead-to-revenue attribution into Salesforce
  • Web Platform & Global Presence: Composable, self-serve publishing (Contentful, WordPress) • Modern web architecture (React, Next.js, TypeScript) • Multi-locale delivery & localization governance (Smartling) • AI-native engineering workflows & content governance

Professional Experience

Sprout Social, Inc., Chicago, IL

Director, Web Engineering and Design | Mar 2025 – Present

  • •Manage the team through an engineering manager and team leads, and answer for what it delivers across Marketing, Product, Revenue, and Operations. It is responsible for every surface between a visitor's first click and a product signup, including the marketing site, careers, the Insights publication, the help centers and the status page.
  • •Took on the design discipline in 2025 and hired into it. Reworked the culture, process and workflow of the combined group so design and engineering plan together instead of trading handoffs, and work moves from idea to shipped without a round trip between functions.
  • •Own the lead-to-revenue attribution that carries into Salesforce and the message maps that stay current across every property as positioning changes.
  • •Set the direction on answer engine optimization and worked with marketing and content leadership to get it onto their roadmaps. AI systems now read more of the site than traditional search crawlers do.
  • •Made marketing self-sufficient on the web platform. Landing page build time went from three days to one, and marketing ships to production roughly five times a day with no engineer in the loop.
  • •Cut crawl errors from 3,902 to 140 and took the indexable share of the site from 41 to 65 percent, after diagnosing a failure that was hiding nearly 4,000 pages from search engines and putting the team on it.

Senior Engineering Manager | Mar 2022 – Mar 2025

  • •Grew the team through its largest expansion and specialized it, adding dedicated front-end and infrastructure roles as the number of properties we carried went up.
  • •Led the multi-year program that took the marketing presence international, and set the localization governance that keeps six languages current as the English site changes underneath them.
  • •Scaled experimentation from a few dozen tests a year into a standing program with its own roadmap, and moved it off a marketing request queue into work the two teams plan together.
  • •Took ownership of delivery quality and the release process. Merged work nearly doubled in a single year and has held there since, with review time flat throughout.
  • •Built the shared source of truth for experimentation across Growth and R&D, one definition of success and one vocabulary for results. Before it, the same test could be reported two ways depending on who ran the numbers.

Engineering Manager | Sep 2019 – Mar 2022

  • •Started the experimentation practice that became the program above, and established that changes to the site get measured before they ship.
  • •Hired and coached the engineers the team still runs on, including a senior role filled in 34 days out of 120 applicants, which our people team turned into a hiring case study.
  • •Became the web team's counterpart to Legal and Compliance during the first wave of privacy regulation, and have held that relationship at every level since.

Senior Web Engineer • Web Engineer | Jul 2015 – Sep 2019

  • •Built the first content management system that let marketing publish without a developer. Before that, every copy change was a ticket.
  • •Set the accessibility standard the team still works to. Every piece of work goes through a WCAG 2.1 AA audit starting at the design stage, not as a check before launch.

Earlier Career Experience

StageBloc, Chicago, IL

Front End Developer | Nov 2013 – Jul 2015

  • •Built custom websites and themes for touring artists including Kid Rock, Eric Church, Kenny Chesney, and Metallica.

530medialab, Long Beach, CA

Lead Front End Developer | Aug 2011 – Oct 2013

  • •Led a team of eight developers at an agency serving lifestyle and streetwear brands. Established version control workflows and mentored junior developers.

Recognition & Awards

Sprout Social Global Leadership Model Award – 2023

Sprout Social Company Value Award for Technical Innovation – 2019

Education

El Camino College, Torrance, CA

2006 – 2009