Former Mozilla Leader Joins Groupon’s Product Side

Groupon added two new faces to its executive team — one of them with a specific knack for the tech industry.

The two executive announcements came from Groupon yesterday (March 17) and included Carol Campagnolo, who will serve as Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and Jay Sullivan as the new Senior Vice President of Consumer Product. Sullivan, in particular, is an interesting pick for the commerce and daily deals site company as he is a former leader of Firefox maker, Mozilla Corporation. While Campagnolo will work out of Groupon’s Chicago base, Sullivan will oversee all consumer technology products, including Groupon’s popular mobile app and website, and will be based in Palo Alto, California.

“Carol and Jay are incredible complements to our strong Groupon senior management team,” Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky said in a prepared company news release. “Adding their expertise will help ensure that we have the right people and technologies in place to take our marketplace and company to the next level.”

Campagnolo was previously an executive at SGK Worldwide, a brand strategy company. Sullivan served as Chief Operating Officer and interim CEO at Mozilla. According to Groupon’s news release, Sullivan also served as SVP of Product where he led the product management and design teams and oversaw the user experience for the widely used Firefox mobile and Web browser.

As Groupon has positioned itself toward an online local commerce model, Sullivan’s diverse expertise may just be the recipe the company is looking for to lead it into its next direction. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a search giant expert in your back pocket.

“Our goal is to one day have millions of merchants plugged into Groupon and connected to our hundreds of millions of subscribers, thereby creating the first real-time local commerce marketplace. It’s a big ambition, one we believe we can achieve given that we allow our customers to interact with their surroundings in ways others don’t or can’t, making purchasing more relevant, more personalized, more immediate and more efficient,” Lefkofsky said during Groupon’s fourth-quarter earnings call last month. “Plain and simple, we believe we’re well positioned to take advantage of the offline to online conversion that is occurring in local commerce.”