Alan Arnfeld

A new service to match seven million exhibition visitors with exhibitors, products, and educational sessions. As the product development leader, I demonstrated that the in-house AI solution was as good as commercial solutions and provided a springboard for test and learn iterations for five years across 20+ countries, along with continuous in-house development. The NPS was consistently higher and it was the most successful engagement campaign.

I managed four regionally based customer success leaders, two data scientists, two competitive insight analysts, and a product development team of nine. I also worked with the exhibitions board of directors, C-suite executives, and show teams in 20 business units. Globally, there were 500 show teams.

I conducted on-site interviews in around 70 companies across the UK, focusing on leadership teams, training managers, and third-party training providers. This work was combined with the work of two other discovery specialists and an early prototyping team, and the outcome passed the Government Digital Service (GDS) assessment.

I led the global product management function, focusing on the development of a new subscription platform to underpin expansion and discovery, ideation, and delivery of new products. The platform connected suppliers with leading buyer organizations in 11 industry sectors globally to create efficient networks of highly qualified businesses.

Reporting to the chief marketing officer, I scaled a team that peaked at 23 direct and 15 indirect reports who were based across the UK, Argentina, and India, and I collaborated with up to 200 engineers. As a result of our work, new sectors were onboarded and company revenue grew from £12 million to £80 million.

In addition to platform development, I led the development of brand new entrepreneurial products, such as supply chain traceability with Nestle and Toyota, financial assessment models for suppliers with Deloitte, and CSR products. The supplier management process enabled buyer organizations to know their suppliers in a know your customer (KYC) model.

This project was a response to the foundational changes taking place in the exhibitions industry, and it raised $10 million in funding.

Key Activities:
• Selected regional commercial leads to workshop the selection process down to five projects.
• Recruited internal discovery leaders and teams for each of the five ideas.
• Trained the teams to complete discovery during the summer of 2020. A unique aspect of this initial discovery phase was testing the ideas in real markets with real customers.

All five discovery phases were completed with full business cases and moved into BAU projects for further development. One product focuses on the management of remote exhibitors. While still in the discovery phase, 200 units were sold in Japan in two months and delivered $1 million in revenue.

A director of a fintech company with over 40,000 employees invited me to mentor a product manager. I have leveraged my entrepreneurial product management expertise from other industries to guide this director in addressing the challenges he's facing.

Achilles is a supplier pre-qualification service operating worldwide but originally with disparate systems and data classifications. I led a project and established a team of information architects and analysts who I led to harmonize customer data collection, also dealing with common data dictionaries, industry variations, and internationalization.