About
I’m Danielle Voorhees. For the past 15 years, I’ve worked in the space where growth strategy meets technical implementation. I build growth engineering systems at Medium & Message. I write about analytics systems, conversion optimization, and the technical problems that come up when building growth infrastructure.
The Work
Most of my time goes into three areas:
Technical Growth Engineering. The infrastructure work that supports sustainable growth: technical SEO implementations, performance optimization, experimentation frameworks, API integrations. This is the unglamorous work that determines whether your marketing efforts translate into actual business results.
Conversion Systems. Websites optimized for the specific business outcomes they’re supposed to drive: trial signups, purchases, qualified leads. This requires understanding user behavior at a technical level and implementing changes that compound over time. Small improvements to form validation, page speed, or messaging hierarchy often matter more than complete redesigns.
Analytics Infrastructure. GA4 and GTM implementations designed to produce actionable insights. The challenge isn’t collecting data—it’s building systems that tell you what’s working and what to fix. Most analytics setups fail because they answer the wrong questions or produce answers nobody trusts. The Decision Loop, a framework I developed over several years of client work, solves this by converting overwhelming dashboards into weekly decision points.
The common thread: bridging the gap between strategic intent and technical execution. Most businesses fail here not because they lack strategy but because they can’t implement it reliably at scale.
Background
Before specializing in growth engineering:
- Managed digital properties for a major bank, where I learned that large-scale technical systems either work predictably or fail expensively
- Taught economics and data analysis at the college level, which shaped how I think about incentive structures and decision-making under uncertainty
These experiences are directly relevant to how I approach technical work. Economics training means I think in systems and incentives. Teaching experience means I can explain technical implementations to non-technical stakeholders. Banking experience means I understand that reliability and accuracy aren’t negotiable.
Technical Stack: PHP, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Ruby, GA4, GTM, and whatever else a specific implementation requires. I’m not ideological about tools. Programming languages are generally variations on the same underlying concepts. Concepts stay the same, syntax changes. I care about outcomes and maintainability.
Current projects in addition to client work
The Decision Loop. A system for turning analytics overwhelm into actionable weekly insights. This is a methodology for structuring how teams interact with their data. The framework addresses a specific problem I kept encountering with clients: they had good data but couldn’t convert it into decisions they felt confident making. The Decision Loop solves this by changing the question from “what does our data say?” to “what specific action should we take this week?”
Epigramm. I’m building a reading app. Specifically, the one I’ve wanted for 15 years. This serves two purposes. First, it keeps me honest about user experience and technical architecture. Theory about what makes good software is cheap. Actually building something forces you to confront the gap between “sounds reasonable” and “actually works.” Second, it provides a laboratory for testing growth engineering principles on a product I control completely. The lessons from building Epigramm feed directly into how I approach client work.
Philosophy
Growth engineering isn’t about implementing the most sophisticated technology. It’s about building systems that reliably move the specific metrics that matter to your business. Sometimes that requires ML-driven personalization. Sometimes it requires fixing broken form validation. The skill is knowing which problem to solve first and why.
The work requires three things: technical competence to implement reliably, strategic thinking to prioritize correctly, and communication skills to explain what you’re doing and why it matters. Most consultants have one or two of these. All three are necessary.
I’m particularly interested in how technical systems support mission-driven businesses. Companies attempting to grow sustainably while maintaining actual values create specific constraints and opportunities that generic growth playbooks don’t address.
This Blog
This is where I document what I’m learning while implementing these systems. Some articles explain frameworks that work across multiple clients. Others dive into specific technical challenges and their solutions. The goal is to share strategic and technical thinking.
If you’re dealing with analytics that don’t produce decisions, websites that look professional but don’t convert, or gaps between what your marketing team wants to accomplish and what your technical infrastructure can support—these articles might prove useful.
All consulting work happens through Medium & Message. For other inquiries: d {at} dvoorhees {dot} com.