Alexander Schwertner

My client's engineers developed a prototype for an open, federated digital identity product, without any prior involvement of a product manager.

I was brought in by the executives to finalize the product and launch at a predetermined date. I caught up on the previously omitted product development work, including the user-flow and process analysis, essential UX design, drafting contract and governance policy documents, generated website copy, product pricing, and a go-to-market plan.

As part of the actual product launch, I gave product presentations and held implementation workshops at two tradeshows.

Changing market dynamics required the client company to pivot from a technical infrastructure operator to an innovative, market- and customer-driven organization. Executives realized that despite the best efforts in the past, they were not able to make progress towards meeting their strategic objective. I was brought in to come up with a proposal on how to introduce product management to the organization.

An analysis uncovered that current processes were largely Waterfall, without any representation of customers and only limited consideration of business objectives. I developed a comprehensive proposal analyzing the status quo, educating about Agile organizations, product management, continuous product discovery and delivery processes, and suggesting a path on how to introduce a product management practice to the organization (including job profiles, team structures, recruiting plan, and a strategy on how to approach and communicate the change process to the organization).

My client—a cloud and hosting service provider—had completed dozens of acquisitions and was faced with a highly fragmented domain name provisioning structure, with duplicated vendor relationships and back-end APIs over several brands and a resulting unfavorable purchase and operating cost structure. I was asked to provide a plan to save costs and consolidate vendor relationships.

An analysis showed that the client's current infrastructure was highly siloed between brands and in part plagued with technical debt with little opportunity to share back-end provisioning between brands.

I came up with a concept for a target architecture to consolidate domain management in a shared, microservices-based infrastructure accessible to all brands, allowing to consolidate vendor relationships and improve purchase costs. To outline a transition, I suggested approaching the implementation with a staged proof-of-concept plan that would deliver target elements with increasing complexity and allow to iterate and adjust along the way.

I created a concept and business plan for a new consumer-facing hosting brand. This work included a market analysis, product development, a user experience approach, a detailed business plan and P&L, and a go-to-market strategy.