Chad Bockius
Verified Expert in Product Management
Growth Product Manager
Bee Cave, United States
Toptal member since May 17, 2019
Chad is a strategic, hands-on product leader with over 20 years of experience. He's launched, managed, and positioned multiple award-winning, patented products to secure over $50 million in enterprise product revenue. He’s raised over $26 million in venture funding to fuel product and company growth. Combining a unique background in sales, marketing, and product, he’s a great choice to help bring the right solutions to market at the right time.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Design
- Mobile
- Product Management
- Product Marketing
- Product Strategy
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Startups
Work Experience
President | Chief Product Officer
Vast
- Led all of the product strategy.
- Managed the design, research, marketing, partnerships, and product management.
- Launched four new products.
- Delivered an innovative AI-based computer-vision application.
- Secured Fortune 500 strategic partnerships thanks to a product offering.
CEO
CopperEgg
- Managed and directed six executive direct reports.
- Drove a 150% increase in customer acquisition with a high-velocity sales model.
- Oversaw offshore product and development teams.
- Managed the company P&L.
- Drove the recruitment of top talent.
CEO
Socialware
- Defined and evangelized a social middleware category.
- Spearheaded the product strategy for three products that delivered $5 million in recurring revenue within three years.
- Secured partnerships with Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Raised over $12 million in venture funding.
- Lobbied regulators to help drive the social media compliance space.
VP of Manufacturing Vertical | Director of Product Marketing
Bazaarvoice
- Developed the vision and launched the industry's first product review syndication platform (patent granted in 2012).
- Improved the company's competitive differentiation and customer lock-in across multiple verticals.
- Established and led the company's global product marketing team.
- Led an eleven-person go-to-market team that closed $15 million in recurring revenue in two years.
- Evangelized new product offerings internally and externally.
Product Manager | Business Development | Solutions Engineer
Various Companies
- Structured a one-of-a-kind strategic relationship that positioned BetweenMarkets’ solutions as a competitive differentiator for EDS.
- Spearheaded the creation and implementation of Trilogy’s first product management methodology.
- Implemented Trilogy's new product management methodology and delivered a product resulting in $10 million in revenue from Nissan.
- Was selected by Trilogy management to serve on a specialized recruitment team charged with hiring the best talent from top universities.
- Created my first business in 1996 delivering custom web solutions for clients such as Microsoft and Nestle.
Project History
Predictive Inventory Intelligence Suite for Automotive Dealers and OEMs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP4VxVXZUs8Built the first predictive AI tool for inventory management; in 9 months gained 2,200 users along with a patent-pending UI.
This application is a combination of iOS and Android mobile apps, as well as a responsive web interface. One of the significant challenges was giving dealers an easy way to assess their inventory across hundreds of vehicles. Our solution was a patent-pending interface that delivers every key data point in a skimmable UI.
Leveraging the latest machine learning techniques, the predictive models get smarter every day as the system processes more details across the dealer customers.
Content Syndication Product for Manufacturers and Retailers
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8321300In 2 years, earned $15M in direct revenue. Created a moat of differentiation for other verticals; patent granted in 2012.
The impact on a manufacturer’s and retailer’s business was fast and very significant:
• Retailers saw a more than 20% increase in conversion on products with syndicated reviews.
• Products that had a critical mass of answers saw an 80% drop in support calls.
• Products that had multiple answers saw a more than 200% increase in conversion.
Beyond helping consumers make buying decisions, this platform created a massive point of differentiation for the business. This differentiation helped increase close rates of new manufacturers, retailers and keep churn low for existing customers.
Social Media Compliance and Marketing Suite
Closed in 3 years, $5M in recurring revenue across 125 enterprise clients. Raised $12M in funding on product successes.
The first product we created—Socialware Compass—solved the compliance problem by managing access controls for thousands of regulated employees and ensuring all the necessary content was archived.
After becoming the category leader in this space, we tackled the next opportunity, making our end users, such as financial advisors and insurance agents, more effective with social media. The combined platform helped us sign Morgan Stanley which is still the largest deployment in the industry with over 150,000 users.
Beyond creating numerous patented innovations, this solution required deep collaboration with our partners, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Symantec. It also called for significant education of the key regulators in the industry to help them understand the opportunities and dangers of using social media for financial services.
Mobile Consumer Marketplace for Automotive Shopping
http://www.carstory.comFacilitated huge improvements (50x for SEO, 55% in organic traffic, 3x lead conversion) and won multiple design awards.
The project resulted in a number of inventory firsts:
• A patented discovery experience to quickly find a great match.
• Shopping by proprietary vehicle and market insights.
• An integrated, chatbot platform to quickly connect consumers to dealers
The increases in traffic, conversion, and speed highlighted above were all measured from the existing platform deployed used across multiple enterprise clients.
This application is a combination of iOS and Android mobile apps as well as a responsive web interface. The project included a massive data science investment to drive the vehicle and market analytics, the recommendation engine and conversation optimization. The design and approach were informed through months of user research and testing to ensure the innovations were well understood and valuable for the shopping process.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering
Vanderbilt University - Nashville, TN, USA
Certifications
Articulus Presentation Training
Articulus
Skills
Tools
Apple Keynote, Trello, Slack, InVision, Jira, Sketch, Google Analytics
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Scrum
Industry Expertise
Automotive, Financial Services, Consumer Products
Other
Software as a Service (SaaS), Product Management, Product Marketing, Strategy, Product Strategy, Sales Strategy, Microsoft PowerPoint, Startups, Leadership, Interim CPO, Business Analysis, Requirements, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-market Plans, User Research, Business Models, Product Design, Product Frameworks, Innovation, Product Ownership, Product Discovery, Product Leadership, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Web Product Management, Marketing, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), iOS, Android, Web, eCommerce, Retail & Wholesale, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Social Media Strategy, Adobe Photoshop, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Design, Mobile
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