Thom Craver is a builder. Always has been.
Some people can envision a product. Others can build it. A smaller group can explain it to a room full of engineers and then turn around and explain it again to a room full of executives. Fewer still can measure whether it actually worked, and know what to do next. Thom does all of it, and has been doing it since before most of his peers knew the internet was going to matter.
That rare combination of technical depth, strategic thinking, communication instinct, and data fluency is not something you assemble from certifications. It compounds over a career spent building real things, shipping them, watching what happens, and iterating. From hand-coded web applications running on dial-up lines to AI-assisted product development at scale today, the tools have changed beyond recognition. The instinct has not.
Product Leader. Platform Builder. Data Nerd.
Thom’s product instincts are grounded in real technical depth. He’s been writing SQL longer than most analytics platforms have existed. He’s certified in both Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. He’s built LAMP stacks from scratch, architected data pipelines, and personally evaluated and deployed ML recommendation engines that moved the needle on revenue.
As Chief Technology Officer at Internet Marketing Ninjas, he led a 16-person cross-functional team, owned P&L responsibility, and restructured infrastructure that cut operational costs by more than $1.1 million annually. He didn’t just manage the work. He understood it at every layer.
Currently at Paramount Skydance, Thom serves as Director of Consumer Products at CBS News, where he leads web and app product strategy, roadmap execution, and cross-functional teams spanning engineering, design, QA, and editorial. He’s driven 40%+ revenue growth through machine learning implementation and data-driven product decisions, and he’s done it by obsessing over the metrics that actually matter.
That combination of technical fluency and business acumen is what makes him effective: he can challenge an engineering assumption, justify a roadmap priority to a CFO, and write the query to validate both.
Serial Entrepreneur
Thom has founded and operated two businesses and built digital products inside both of them that were, in retrospect, ahead of their time.
New York Web Works started as a web development shop and quickly grew into something more ambitious: custom applications, hosted email, DNS management, colocation services, and self-service control panels that let clients update their own content long before tools like that existed off the shelf. Thom built the infrastructure, grew the client base, managed subcontractor teams, and led a successful acquisition.
Highlights inclucded time-lapse webcams for the New York Power Authority when streaming anything over the internet was still a genuine engineering challenge. That project ran off a dial-up connection. Additionally, Thom developed e-commerce solutions from scratch for the Rochester Americans hockey team, and multiple back-end interfaces to updating content long before modern content management systems existed.
Crocodile Rock Entertainment was a mobile DJ and corporate events business. But leave it to Thom to turn a DJ gig into a product development opportunity. He built a live interactive trivia system from the ground up: contestants registered their teams via a custom-built web portal, Thom ran live Q&A with physical buzzers, and when the audience got a shot at bonus points, they texted their answers to a system Thom had architected himself. It parsed incoming messages, validated responses against his own database, and fired confirmation texts back in real time. This was years before apps existed. Thom had already built a consumer-facing, database-driven, interactive mobile product.
That’s the builder instinct in action.
SEO Thought Leader and Digital Strategist
Long before “growth hacking” became a buzzword, Thom was doing the work. He’s spent years as a recognized voice in search engine optimization, digital analytics, and audience development. And not as a theorist, but as a practitioner who could implement technical SEO changes in the morning and present the results to a boardroom in the afternoon.
He’s contributed to Search Engine Watch, the SEMrush Blog, and ClickZ Academy. He developed web analytics curricula for the Online Marketing Institute. He’s advised Fortune 500 brands on analytics implementations and has the Adobe and Google certifications to back it up.
At CBS News, he grew organic search traffic 300% in his first year.
Speaker, Educator and Published Author
Thom has delivered keynotes, masterclasses, training seminars, and conference sessions to audiences across the country for well over a decade at events like Search Engine Strategies, ClickZ Live, Digital Summit, SMX Advanced, Advanced Search Summit, and UnGagged, among others. In 2013, he delivered a TEDx talk at TEDx Flour City on how search and social media intersect with civic behavior.
He’s taught at five accredited colleges and universities, Monroe Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, Quinnipiac University, Bryan University, and Bryant and Stratton College, across disciplines including Python programming, web development, social media analytics, and business information systems. He has built curriculum from scratch, mentored student developers, and brought real-world product experience into every classroom.
Thom is a published author with 14 ghost-authored computer software training manuals to his name across multiple publishers. One of his early titles, published by SVI Training Products, covered Netscape Navigator at a time when teaching people to navigate the web was genuinely pioneering work.
Beyond the manuals, Thom has contributed to Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, and the SEMrush Blog, and has bylines across numerous digital publications including ComicBook.com and PopCulture.com, where he stepped in to cover trending tech and digital stories when the moment called for it.
Game Developer
In his own time, Thom builds games. He’s shipped four titles as sole product manager, designer, and developer and picked up some hardware along the way. His educational game Morse Mania won both the Historically Accurate Game Jam 6 and the Game Jam Category Fan Choice award at the 2022 Game Development World Championships. He’s also served as product manager for Aquatic Invaders, an environmental education game developed in partnership with the Adirondack Watershed Institute.
Game development isn’t a hobby that exists in a silo. It’s where product instincts, technical skills, user experience thinking, and a genuine love of building things all come together in their purest form. Every title Thom ships requires the same discipline as any professional product: discovery, prototyping, user testing, iteration, and launch.
The difference is he owns every single layer of it. No handoffs. No committees. Just a problem, a vision, and the technical chops to close the gap between them. That kind of end-to-end ownership sharpens skills that corporate environments rarely get to test all at once, and it keeps the creative and technical muscles working in ways that feed directly back into everything else he does.
The Voice Behind the Mic
Before product management and SEO conferences, Thom had a different kind of stage. He’s held on-air positions at 98PXY-FM and WYSL 1040-AM, and hosted pre-game and live call-in post-game radio programs for the Rochester Rhinos professional soccer club. He also hosted the SEW Weekly podcast.
The ability to think on your feet, speak clearly under pressure, and hold an audience’s attention is not something you fake. For Thom, it’s been practiced in front of live microphones for years, and it shows up every time he’s in front of a room.
Let’s Work Together
Thom is available for consulting engagements across product strategy, digital analytics, SEO, user behavior analysis, and game development. If you have a problem that needs someone who can think technically, speak strategically, and actually build things, let’s talk.
In The Press…
» Thom cited in news and blogs
» Audio Archive (Radio Production)