Donna Battista

Donna Battista is the Managing Director of Learning Solutions at Top Hat. Donna has over 20 years of experience in product management, including their previous role as Vice President of Product Management for Burning Glass Technologies and their long tenure as Vice President of Product Management for Pearson Education.

At Pearson, Donna led a 41-member team consisting of Portfolio Managers, Market Development Managers, Content Development Editors, etc. in the US and UK. Donna was responsible for the company's strategic vision, capital development budget, and operating expense budget. Under their leadership, the team achieved ambitious revenue goals in 2014 and 2015, as well as aggressive operating income goals in 2016-2018.

In 2017 and 2018, Donna guided the development and launch of 10 digital projects that included the creation of new content and testing programs. These projects produced $17M in incremental revenue. To ensure that the company's short-term and long-term growth goals were met, they placed significant focus on digitizing legacy print systems. This resulted in a 30% boost in direct sales and a 15% increase in compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 through 2016.

Aside from the digital transformation initiative, Donna led the organization to produce annual revenue growth of 9% in 2014 and 6% in 2015, exceeding the U.S. industry average by 8%. Additionally, they secured $14M+ in new products through the acquisition of authors and strategic partnerships through networking within academic communities (high-profile researchers and educators).

Donna's implementation of a customer-centric product development process led to an increase in

After receiving their Bachelor's degree from Northeastern University, Donna Battista pursued a Master of Arts in Literature at Boston College.

Their manager is Joe Rohrlich, CEO. They work with Michael Laccetti - VP, Engineering, Hong Bui - Chief Product Officer, and Jessica Hately - Chief Legal Officer. Some direct reports include David Ferguson - VP, Learning Solutions, STEM Labs, Salim Bradley - VP, Sales, Learning Solutions.