Alex Fergus
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Rockford, MI, United States
Toptal member since January 21, 2021
Alex is a product and finance leader with over 10 years of experience in B2B SaaS and financial services. He has extensive experience working with international and remote teams to bring new products to market and scale existing ones. Alex is passionate about using human-centered design techniques and data analytics to deliver delightful product experiences and optimize for growth. He enjoys freelancing because it provides the opportunity to work on diverse projects.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Software Development
- B2B
- Jira
- Product Management
- Product Strategy
- Project Management
- SaaS
- Salesforce
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
MANTL
- Scoped Salesforce Financial Service Cloud integration with an account-opening solution. Owned client discovery and defined required fields. Collaborated with engineering to plan architectural approach. Proposed pricing to the CFO and planned a GTM strategy.
- Gathered requirements for SDR-automated outreach via Salesforce Sales Cloud. Defined the scoring method using Marketo data and implemented a reverse ETL connection with Salesforce, resulting in a 50% increase in MQL conversion rate.
- Aligned with senior stakeholders to develop product vision, strategies, and roadmaps for data products and platform integrations.
- Launched a Data API growing adoption to one third of the client base; managed all go-to-market activities, including documentation, training, and sales collateral.
- Led the redesign of reporting and analytics, resulting in improved adoption and client satisfaction.
- Defined product specifications and led the implementation of data platform and infrastructure improvements, resulting in a 90% improvement in page load times and a 33% reduction in incident rate.
Product Manager
Amount
- Led a successful platform project resulting in the automation of 80% of credit decisioning with an expected annual savings of $1 million; developed a business case and secured a buy-in from the CTO, sourced key partners, and ran a successful proof of concept.
- Oversaw a cross-functional team to integrate an identity verification vendor resulting in $1 million in annual savings.
- Conducted evaluative testing with 50+ participants using Figma and UserTesting.com; synthesized and designed against findings that improved the conversion rate for primary user flow by 5%.
Product Manager
Arity
- Grew revenue for a product portfolio four times, from $0.7 million to $2.8 million ARR over two years through product and channel expansion.
- Successfully launched a real-time data product resulting in $4.3 million incremental revenue; coordinated the delivery of capabilities end-to-end across mobile, platform, and data teams.
- Generated a sales pipeline of +20 leads, managed sales cycle in Salesforce, and successfully onboarded a business development manager.
- Secured the stakeholder buy-in for the product strategy and roadmap and navigated the product and GTM team through a strategic pivot resulting in successful new market penetration.
- Expanded strategic partnerships that led to a 50% increase in channel sales.
Senior Revenue Analyst
U.S. Cellular
- Provided strategic guidance and financial analysis to support negotiations, product launches, and promotional decisions related to roaming and data.
- Developed a business case that lowered operating costs by a projected $20 million over five years and was implemented by senior leadership.
- Designed and implemented A/B tests that led to a 5% improvement in customer retention.
- Built a regression model of data from 5 million customers to improve operating budget accuracy.
Financial Analyst, Wealth Management
Northern Trust
- Developed a lifetime value (LTV) model that led to improved targeting and contributed to a 25% increase in annual sales revenue.
- Designed and implemented a Salesforce project that raised system efficiency by 23% by identifying bottlenecks and redundancies in the sales recognition process.
- Reduced forecast variance from 20% to 5% by collaborating with budget owners to ensure the most up-to-date information was incorporated into the forecast.
Project History
Salesforce CRM Integration with MANTL
https://www.mantl.com/news/1b-milestone/Led discovery, technical estimation, and planning for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud integration with MANTL's account opening solution, contributing to the company's best sales quarter ever.
• Led discovery with the sales team and MANTL clients resulting in a recommendation to integrate with Salesforce Financial Service Cloud.
• Collaborated with engineering on the partner (Mulesoft) vs. build decisions and pitched recommendations to product leadership.
• Defined requirements, including field mapping and sync capabilities.
• Planned and estimated projects resulting in prioritization on the roadmap.
• Proposed pricing to the CFO and coordinated with marketing to create sales collateral and plan go-to-market activities.
SDR Automation with Salesforce
http://www.mantl.comLed the design and development of SDR automation for enterprise clients resulting in a 50% increase in MQL conversion rate.
• Gathered requirements from marketing and sales to improve the efficiency of sales development representative (SDR) outreach to qualified prospects.
• Defined scoring method for engaged prospects by using the website and email marketing data from Marketo.
• Implemented a reverse ETL connection between BigQuery and Salesforce, enabling automated notification of engaged leads.
• Documented the process and trained sales on capability.
Real-time Data Streaming for Mapping and Navigation
Led the design and development of data streaming software that processed data from 20 million mobile app users in real-time and led to signing customer contracts totaling +$1 million in ARR.
• Scaled an existing data streaming solution for IoT devices to incorporate data from a mobile app partner with 20 million MAUs.
• Managed the entire project end-to-end, including the initial project plan, coordinating with three development teams (internal and external), development, and launch resulting in signing new contracts with enterprise customers.
• Incorporated data streaming architecture that leveraged a range of technologies, including Android/iOS SDK, AWS EC2, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and Apache NiFi.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Marketing and Finance
University of Chicago Booth School of Business - Chicago, IL, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Applied Engineering Science
Michigan State University - East Lansing, MI, USA
Certifications
Certified Practitioner of Human-centered Design
LUMA Institute
Skills
Tools
Microsoft Outlook, Google Workspace, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Zoom, Tableau, Grafana, Pivotal Tracker, Apache NiFi, IBM Cognos, Looker
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Agile Product Management, Scrum, Human-centered Design (HCD), DevOps, Design Thinking, Quantitative Research, Microservices
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Insurance Technology (Insurtech), Lean Six Sigma, Financial Markets, Less-than-load (LTL) Shipping, Air Freight, Transportation & Shipping, Telecom Equipment & Solutions
Platforms
Apache Flink, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Marketo
Other
Microsoft Excel, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Microsoft Office, Product Strategy, Product Management, Pricing, Business Intelligence (BI), Business Requirements, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Product Ownership, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Financial Modeling, New Product Development, Pricing Strategy, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Process Design, Marketing, Operations, B2B, SaaS, Product Marketing, Product Roadmaps, Backlog Management, Team Leadership, Project Management, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Marketing Analytics, Sales, Competitive Strategy, Consumer Behavior, Accounting, Partnerships, Cross-functional Collaboration, Data Analytics, User Experience (UX), Contract Negotiation, Customer Success, API Integration, Big Data Architecture, Python, SQL, Business Development, P&L Management, Web, APIs, Retail & Wholesale, Negotiation, Amazon EC2, Android, iOS, SDKs, Apache Kafka, Data Science, Alternative Data, Investments, Quantitative Modeling, Forecasting, Microsoft PowerPoint, Financial Reporting, Order Management, Warehouse Management, Market Research, Customer Research, Competitive Intelligence, Go-to-market Plans, Prototyping, Internet of Things (IoT), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Loan Origination, Vendor Management, Due Diligence, Reporting, Analytics, Data Build Tool (dbt), Financial Services Cloud, Reverse ETL, System Integration, Accounts, Product Discovery, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, Automation
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