This content was written prior to the renaming of Watermark products in July 2021, and refers to an old product name. To learn more about the new names for Watermark products, read our press release here.
AUSTIN, TX – November 11, 2020 – Watermark, a pioneer in educational intelligence, announced today that Erin Shy has been appointed its new Chief Executive Officer. Shy succeeds Tayloe Stansbury, who served as Interim Chief Executive Officer for the last four months and will continue to serve on Watermark’s Board of Directors. In addition, Darren Bauer Kahan has joined as Chief Product & Technology Officer.
Erin Shy brings more than a decade of senior management experience, including an extensive background in product management, strategic planning, and optimizing organizational excellence by building high-performance teams. She comes to Watermark from Community Brands, where she served as the Managing Director of their largest business unit, focused on providing cloud-enabled solutions to non-profit organizations. Prior to this role, Erin was Executive Vice President — leading sales, marketing, product, research and development, service delivery, and customer support teams. In her work with Community Brands, Erin brought innovative new products to market and delivered an end-to-end suite of solutions for customers – advocating for a frictionless user experience, zero-data entry integration components, and customer-driven design through strong UI/UX driven software development teams.
“I’m honored to take the baton and help us move forward in delivering solutions for educational intelligence,” said Shy. “We know that institutions are relying on technology more than ever to support their mission-critical processes, and we know they cannot do that with siloed data. Watermark will consolidate the systems used to measure student learning and institutional effectiveness and better connect this data through an integrated product ecosystem that drives meaningful outcomes improvement so that our institutions can meet the challenges of today and well into the future.”
Darren Bauer Kahan also joins Watermark with extensive experience leading global engineering and product management teams of all sizes. Most notably, he moved up the ranks to manage all software engineering for Hotwire, served as CTO for SAP’s small and medium business suite, and most recently led a global product management team of more than 170 team members. In his role as Chief Technical Product Officer for SAP Concur, Darren successfully delivered against long-standing architectural initiatives and product features, addressing enterprise customer demands and leap-frog AI, ML and UX capabilities. He drove architectural decisions that cut travel booking time in half, brought operational stability to the core travel product, released early access to Concur’s next-generation expense product, and drove innovative changes to TripIt, which was featured multiple times by Apple.
“Erin is the right leader for Watermark,” said Tayloe Stansbury, Interim CEO and member of Watermark’s Board of Directors. “She brings a unique combination of multi-product SaaS suite expertise, acquisition integration, and a personal passion for higher education and serving mission-driven organizations — all of which make her particularly well suited to lead Watermark into the future. In addition, Darren’s background in engineering leadership, building teams, and integrating product suites lends itself well to the journey Watermark is on and adds a valuable skill set to the organization. Together with the rest of the Watermark team, their strong leadership experience will help move the Watermark vision forward.”
Over the last four years, six leading edtech companies – Taskstream, Tk20, LiveText, Digital Measures, EvaluationKIT, and SmartCatalog – have come together under Watermark in support of a shared vision for improving learning through educational intelligence. Watermark is the largest provider of educational intelligence solutions worldwide, supporting more than 1,700 colleges and universities worldwide in the areas of planning, assessment, ePortfolios, faculty activity reporting, course evaluation and institutional surveys, as well as curriculum, catalog, and syllabus management.
