Charles Myers
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Berkeley, CA, United States
Toptal member since November 6, 2019
With over 40 years of engineering and product management experience, Charles has designed, built, and managed a number of leading software products. As an experienced agile product manager and coach, he has been successful in leading and uniting teams on a product direction from inception to end-of-life. He is able to work well within large companies and also in small teams or business transformations where one leads both product and culture.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Business Strategy
- Cloud Computing
- Cross-functional Team Leadership
- Product Management
- Product Roadmaps
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Technical Product Management
Work Experience
Scrum Master
Capital Rx
- Led teams in sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Facilitated discovery, internally known as epic planning, workshops. Coached teams on how to create good user stories.
- Acted as the scrum master for various teams, including DevOps, clinical programs and member portal, Cybersecurity, and IT. Used Scrum or Kanban as appropriate.
- Partnered with product managers to create INVEST user stories and to get to a prioritized backlog.
- Acted as interim director of quality assurance, transitioning knowledge from the previous director of QA and mentoring the new director. Created actionable product quality metrics for company quality council.
- Acted as interim product manager for a few months for the clinical programs and user portal team.
- Integrated team Jira Kanban with Jira Service Management to integrate incident response with ongoing user-story work.
Director of Product Operations
Capital Rx
- Worked for Capital Rx, which transforms pharmacy benefits management to provide lower medication costs and seamless access. The JUDI platform, hosted on AWS, connects healthcare stakeholders for top clinical care.
- Began as a contractor to introduce the Scrum process to a newly formed and expanding engineering team. Set up sprint rhythm and ceremonies, metrics, and long-term roadmap to support the launch of our pharmacy benefits management service on 1/1/2021.
- Set up Jira and workflows from scratch to support the agile process. This began as two teams and later scaled up to nine teams working on the same project.
- Scaled, mentored, and coached new product managers on our product process as we expanded our engineering and product management team.
- Introduced story-mapping and epic planning as a framework for taking a large-scale project, breaking it down into smaller chunks, and then writing estimable user stories.
- Developed an onboarding methodology to bring new software developers and QA staff to be productive within their first week and fully up to speed in their first month.
Vice President of Product Management and Engineering
Support.com
- Led the software development effort that supported all three business areas with a team of 20 that was 1/3 local and 2/3 remote for Support.com, a customer support provider of approximately 2,000 employees, with revenue over $60 million annually. The business consists of direct agent call center technical support work for major brands and retailers, multi-tenant cloud software that is licensed to major retailers and brands, as well as our own agents for a direct to consumer (B2C) offering.
- Made a set of management structure changes, shuttering our Bangalore office, moving a few key engineers to Silicon Valley. With the addition of a number of contract engineers, we moved to a remote-first way of doing business.
- Rewrote and repositioned the Support.com legacy deployed software product on our servers for our agents as a scalable multitenant system sized to millions of sessions per month. It was originally done on our own servers and rehosted on AWS. We originally built a data warehouse on Vertica, which was phased out and replaced with AWS Redshift. The back end system had a rich REST API and event model, with user interfaces in Angular, React, Cordova/Phonegap and native mobile platforms.
- Worked with the management team to re-imagine our agent-focused support offering in a way that leveraged our strengths (decision tree guided paths and experienced work-from-home agents) into a unique consumer offering, using free self-help content to attract users. (See Support.Com Consumer Support Site project detail).
- Fostered a strong Scrum process and blameless culture in engineering. As part of this, he became a JIRA administrator and agile coach as we adapted tools to our environment.
- Applied scrum and agile principles outside classic software development. Developed content standards and a JIRA-based task and time management system for our content team to have a predictable process while managing thousands of content deliverables.
- Integrated an eCommerce and a subscription management system into the direct to consumer offering. We chose Recurly for our subscription billing system and then integrated this with custom React pages in our application and marketing pages that describe the offering and subscription plans.
Senior Director of Product Management
Support.com
- Began as a contract position in March 2016 when their previous product manager abruptly left. Upon arrival, I worked with the other product managers to have an organized backlog in JIRA, instead of a Jira engineering process and product process in Google Sheets. We eventually got to where we had our sprints estimated planned 2-3 months out.
- Organized a set of cultural changes, such as Scrum planning and grooming, high-level estimations for epics for a roadmap. As engineering was split between Silicon Valley and Bangalore, we also arranged videos of sprint closing so that they could be shared and a global retrospective.
- Advocated for the use of common tools across engineering, product management, sales, and execs. These included the use of Confluence (which was opened up so that all could access), JIRA, Stride (now Slack), and Groupmap for easy retrospective participation.
- Developed a business case, requirements, and competitive positioning for a productized version of the product after seeing strong customer demand for a shared video support tool (based on an engineering initiative). Rather than focusing on video-sharing only, we focused on the agent/consumer support interaction, making support available by streaming video with annotations or MMS image texting. Other industry products have been technology-focused rather than jobs-to-be-done focused.
Principal Consultant and Trainer
280 Group
- Served as the principal consultant and trainer for 280 Group, the world’s leading product management training and consulting firm. We help companies and individuals do GREAT product management and product marketing using our Optimal Product Process™. We have been in business for 20 years and serve clients around the world. Our headquarters is located in Silicon Valley, CA and we are named after the famous Highway 280, a corridor that houses the world’s most innovative companies and links San Francisco and the South Bay Area. Our products and services include consulting, contractors, training, certifications, recruiting, templates, coaching, books, and a product management optimization program.
- Evaluated and recommended a new product lifecycle for a major cable set-top box manufacturer that had unique processes in each of their divisions. This was a major engagement that began with interviews of product managers, stakeholders and executives, determining an optimal process, creating written and presentation templates, training the dozen product managers on the new process and coaching these product managers to success. We reached an acceptable unified product process, while still allowing for both agile and waterfall methodologies.
- Taught product management and agile product management/ownership to a broad set of industries from entertainment metadata to industrial control systems to massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming.
- Developed a product roadmap and requirements for a future product for an onboard ship management software provider.
- Was an interim product manager for a windows data reliability and replication software company after they lost their product manager. Stabilized the product management requirements, process, and backlog so that a new product manager could be hired and thrive.
- Taught a variety of product management classes, from "Intro to Product Management," "Optimal Product Management" (for all the necessary product management skills), "Phenomenal Product Manager" (for the personal and organizational skills to excel at PM), and "Agile PM and PO Excellence" (which teaches the essence of agile and product owner skills, while still being rooted in the why and not just the what).
- Provided training, coaching and mentoring of product managers and product management teams to help bring them to their full potential and delight customers with successful products.
Chief Product Officer
Datalogics
- Consulted with Datalogics on product strategy after Adobe and took a short-term position to bring a product process and new product development to this company that was more responsible for licensing and harvesting Adobe's technology, especially around PDF. Datalogics was approximately 50 people and $10 million annual revenue based in Chicago.
- Introduced a product process based upon 280 Group's Optimal Product Process and ensured that PM and PMM were trained and using this process for new product efforts.
- Instituted a bug prioritization and decision-making process so that issues were handled on a timely basis and that the customer's most important issues were handled well. Much of this was done by creating dashboards that made the state of bugs visible to the exec team so that resources could be focused.
- Initiated a business and product process for new ideas. We reviewed competitive products in both servers and embeddable technology and determined a compelling product. The net was a PDF server, PDF WebAPI, product that could do PDF and form manipulation and the rendering of PDF to image.
- Brought the engineering group, which was using Kanban with one team and no methodology for other teams into a common process around Jira with both Scrum and Kanban.
- Emphasized showing a full product to customers of Datalogics' ebook technology (from Adobe), building out a sample store and reference iOS and Android apps so that we could appeal to a wider set of customers.
Project Manager
Benetech
- Led a group of industry experts to make accessible content discoverable through the use of schema.org vocabularies. This was based on a grant from the Gates Foundation to make learning resources available to all.
- Established a WordPress site for marketing our effort. See http://a11ymetadata.org/. I set up the WordPress site from scratch, hosted on Wpengine, determined the value proposition and messaging, developed the structure, wrote the content, resources and blog entries.
- Met the group's chartered goal; we were adopted into schema.org, as seen at https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility. This role required international coordination, note-taking, and standards authoring.
- Took on this role, which required international coordination, note-taking, and standards authoring.
- Built upon my previous W3C standards activity on the advisory council, as well as accessibility knowledge from advocating PDF compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and other accessibility standards.
Director of Technical Marketing
Adobe Systems
- Handled technical marketing, which was a unique role. We trained and supported our sales engineers and partners, to ensure the success of a technically complex product within a B2B market that was a new area to Adobe. This was a new business area to Adobe and we grew at a CAGR of 30%.
- Ensured technical sales consultants, support, professional services, and partners were prepared for new product launches by developing eLearning strategies and train-the-trainer programs.
- Worked hand in hand with global technical sales management to resolve issues blocking sales.
- Educated customers on new features and technical issues and developed partner training programs.
- Led a two-tier organization with a staff of twenty through three LiveCycle release cycles.
- Led root cause analysis of failures on high-profile customer implementations of enterprise products, recommended proactive improvements to processes and programs to ensure customer success and prevent future crises.
Group Product Manager
Adobe Systems
- Led the marketing and product requirements process for LiveCycle ES to incorporate ten products on individual tracks into a single suite release, ES, which was implemented by a staff of over 300 engineers located in San Jose, San Francisco, Ottawa, Boston, Beijing, and New Delhi. We grew the product from an initial annual revenue base of $3M to over $250M.
- Moved the product process of engineering from Waterfall to Scrum as part of the overall team effort.
- Was product manager for LiveCycle Assembler and Reader Extensions, two parts of the suite, as well as managing the team for forms, output and LiveCycle Designer.
- Forged a partnership with StreamServe to provide a high volume document production engine in PDF and AFP. The direct product manager and I developed requirements and acceptance criteria.
Technology Strategist
Adobe Systems
- Led the product strategy from technology vision to product management and evangelism as Adobe began server products with $10 million revenue in 2000 with Adobe Document Server. The product line has risen to over $250 million annual revenue.
- Mentored product managers through the product concept, product requirements, implementation, and launch.
- Was an active speaker at SGML and document conferences such as AIIM, XPLOR, and ARMA on PDF as an accessible archive format.
- Took on a standards advocacy role for Adobe in the W3C as Advisory Council representative. This started with advocacy for PGML when it was authored, which later became the cornerstone of SVG.
- Drove Adobe Reader Extensions on our servers, from Reader 5.1 and beyond. The initial version was end-of-lifed 4 years later, and I managed that effort with our 500 customers. I drove the digital certificate licensing for versions 2 and 3, which was patented in "Using digital certificates to facilitate enforcement of product licenses," Aug 25, 2009, US patent 7,581,106.
Director of Business Development
Adobe Systems
- Developed Acrobat and Frame business partners, from plug-in developers to search vendors.
- Actively developed and brought to market Adobe's first generation ebook technology, PDF Merchant with great technology and industry partner backing.
- Advocated for PDF as an archival standard in customer and conference presentations.
- Was a key part of the business unit team, leading our product direction presentations.
Transition Director
Adobe Systems
- Managed the transition of two Frame acquisitions, Datalogics and Curo, out of Adobe after Frame was acquired.
- Met or came to a mutually agreed end state on all contractual commitments.
- Managed the two companies through the transiton, handling people's transition plans and maintaining a positive culture to the end.
- Managed the negotiation and business terms of both company spin-offs.
Vice President, Product Manager
Frame Technology
- Led the technical integration work between the two companies after Datalogics was acquired by Frame Technology. The first task was to integrate Datalogics database experience with Framebuilder structured editing to demonstrate company synergy and database publishing.
- Led the customer integration team to achieve major wins,.such as the user of FrameBuilder for Pinnacles-compliant semiconductor datasheets for Philips Semiconductor.
- Developed first-hand product experience with product gaps. I then started a business case for the next generation product, FrameMaker+SGML, which was successfully launched and is still an industry-leading product. Collaborated with engineering to develop proper waterfall requirements and led the process through launch.
- Was an active speaker at SGML and other industry conferences, promoting the product.
- Contributed to a number of industry standards efforts for SGML content standards such as ATA-100 for commercial aircraft, JCALS for milspec technical documentation, Pinnacles for the semiconductor industry.
Vice President
Datalogics
- Oversaw two-tier organization with a staff of 70 responsible for engineering, consulting, technical documentation, sales support, system management, and customer support.
- Oversaw the implementation of a full product suite for batch document publishing and SGML editing on OS/2 and Windows. Implemented a number of ground-breaking database-publishing systems. such as the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), A.C. Nielsen, Moody’s Investor Service, Standard and Poors, Eastman Kodak, Bowne, R.R. Donnelley, and Commerce Clearing House.
- Actively led system architecture and solution sizing as a Digital Equipment reseller and subcontractor to major system integrators as Perot Systems, Syscon, and CSC.
- Personally managed a set of engineers and document analysts who designed the first Milspec SGML tag set for technical documentation, and its implementation with Pager and Writerstation, and the more robust implementation in DL Composer.
- Architected and managed high volume personalized mailing systems. Two examples of this were F.W. Dodge construction, which delivered over 3 million personalized pages per day to construction contractors, and State Farm, where we pioneered personalized marketing messages from your agent to you, with the agent signature for over 13,000 State Farm agents.
- Architected the system for database extract and publishing of Standard and Poors stock reports on a daily basis, over ten thousand in a two-hour period.
Lead Engineer and Manager
Datalogics
- Datalogics began as a custom development shop and transitioned to a product company as I joined. We began at a dozen people and annual revenue of $1M. We developed software offerings and consulting to match, and developed integrated database publishing solutions for major legal and financial publishers. A few customer names include McGraw Hill, Standard and Poors, Moody's investor service, RR Donnelley, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Commerce Clearing House. We grew the company to $13M and were purchased by Frame Technology for our SGML and project expertise. I started as a software developer and took a number of roles as we grew, whether development, support, consulting, training or documentation.
- Led a team of 5 developers, developed coding standards, regression testing, and quality metrics to bring Datalogics software to production levels, as it was used in a variety of financial and legal printing environments, as well as book and database publishers.
- What began as a small custom effort for one customer became a robust and leading software product with quality support, training, and documentation.
- Developed the overlay mechanism and modified the assembler and linker to be able to create executables to run in Datalogics' own operating system environment.
- Developed drivers for over ten legacy phototypesetters, as well as EDGAR, Xerox meta code. Postscript was implemented by a team member.
- Developed and debugged our primary document formatting software, Pager. The software was written in wells-structured PDP-11 assembler, and was eventually ported to Vax, Alpha, and Windows and is still used and maintained today, 43 years later.
- Hired and guided engineers on the team.
Project History
Support.Com Consumer Support Site (Direct to Consumer)
http://support.comLed product management, UX, and engineering for a consumer-oriented self-support community and agent assistance subscription.
This site is the culmination of 18 months of work for PM, UX, and the engineering team.
We began this with a story map and mockups in Cordova/Phonegap and rapidly realized that mobile app development was too slow for building early functionality. We pivoted to a mobile-responsive front end, based on React.
Technologies used in this include AWS and React, as we built our own platform for chat as well as integration with InContact for voice. We implemented our own content repository and content authoring, which let us build the technology for user-focused decision trees (guided paths).
Product Management tools used in this effort include story maps, roadmaps, as well as normal user story writing, standups, reviews. We moved from a 4-week Scrum to Scrumban so that we could be much more responsive to emerging business needs while engineering had a predictable pattern.
During this period, I was responsible for managing product management, engineering, customer support, and sales support of the existing products as well as the effort on this new product area.
Project Coordinator for Schema.org Accessibility Metadata
Facilitated and drove the process for creating a schema.org vocabulary for accessibility information.
While the Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) provide standards for creating accessible content, much of this content is not findable. A major challenge for a person with specific needs is to find content that has the accessibility features that they need, whether well-understood features like closed captioning to very specific attributes such as tactile aids for people with sight and hearing issues.
The goal of the accessibility metadata initiative was to bring together accessibility experts around the globe to determine the best metadata vocabulary and to bring this to schema.org for general adoption.
I was responsible for coordinating meetings of the 10-12 people involved, running clear meetings with agendas and notes. I then drove these discussions and efforts to clear conclusions, authoring them on our marketing website, gathering partners to build proofs-of-concept of the technology, marketing the effort in social media and our blog, and finally driving a specification into schema.org. I also presented at various Learning Resource Metadata Initiative events.
My experience in standards organizations, such as the W3C, and having an open process were essential in driving this project to a successful conclusion.
Adobe Server Product Line Unification (LiveCycle)
Led the business case and product requirements effort for Adobe's Unified Server product line, LiveCycle ES.
Adobe, starting with the release of Acrobat 4 (Distiller server) and 5 (Adobe Graphics Server and Adobe Document Server) had begun a server product line. These products were point products and did not work together. We also had aspirations of bringing the document and form technology of Output Server and Form server together in this, along with a document workflow system and workbench for unifying the design of the components.
The best customer description of our products and aspirations was “you have a bag of doorknobs, and I want a unified product suite to solve my document processing issues.” This was a stretch for Adobe, as we had typically sold just creative tools.
Another product manager in Ottawa and I took on the role of driving the business case, selection of product approach and agile epic requirements estimation as a six-month two-phase effort, in a true DACI sense. We worked with engineering, marketing, and sales to determine the best product mix and the SAM/SOM estimates. This cross-functional process touched all parts of the organization, including learning systems and customer support, all who had new enterprise requirements brought upon them.
We succeeded to get this developed and launched.
Adobe Ebook Launch
Developed a product offering and full value-chain set of partners in ebooks to position Adobe in electronic publishing.
Adobe was faced with ebook competition and threats to the PDF franchise. I led an effort to both defend and expand our offering.
We took the following approaches:
• Assessed the competitive threat and realized that Adobe, while not the only player in the space, could stake out a leading position for highly formatted and technical books. This was essential
• Surveyed internal candidates for Digital Rights Management and decided on PDF Merchant. We also had competition from mobile devices and developed a reflowable PDF infrastructure that could produce reflowable and accessible content, even on mobile Windows and Palm platforms.
• Developed a set of partners across the value chain, from publishers, distributors, retailers, and device manufacturers to announce jointly with Adobe.
• Looked at future partners and acquisitions, setting up a relationship with Glassbook, who was later acquired.
• Product-managed the development of the server and acrobat DRM plugins
• Launched this technology in keynotes at the Seybold Seminars and Electronic Book ‘99, as well as various press interviews and articles and other presentations.
Education
Certificate in Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications
UC Berkeley Executive Education - Berkeley, California
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Purdue University - Indiana
Certifications
ICP-ACC ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Coaching
ICAgile
ICP-ATF ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Team Facilitation
ICAgile
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Agile Certified Product Manager Product Owner
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM)
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Certified Product Manager (CPM)
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Trello, VersionOne, Recurly
Paradigms
Scrum, W3C, Agile, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Acceptance Testing, Kanban, Waterfall Development, B2C, B2B2C, Agile Software Development, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)
Other
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Scrum Master, PDF, Publishing, Product Management, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Product Roadmaps, Story Mapping, Team Leadership, Product Owner, Stakeholder Interviews, Technical Product Management, Product Ownership, Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO), Instruction & Coaching, PSM-1, B2B, User Stories, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Project Planning, Sprint Retrospectives, Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, Backlog Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Roadmaps, Feature Roadmaps, Agile Leadership, Feature Prioritization, Requirements, User Requirements, Business Requirements, Consulting, Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM), DACI, Technical Requirements, Cross-functional Collaboration, Business Analysis, Business Cases, New Product Business Cases, New Product Rollout, Market Research, Technical Project Management, Training & Training Content Development, Scrum Coaching, Company Strategy, Business Strategy, Business Development, Cloud Computing, Team Mentoring, Mentorship & Coaching, Scrumban, Lean Inception, Agile Coaching, XML, Content, Software as a Service (SaaS), Remote Team Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Accessibility, Web Accessibility, Metadata, Business to Business (B2B), Cloud, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Interim Management, Product Vision, User Interviews, Customer Interviews, Discovery, Discovery Workshops, Product Discovery, Training, Employee Training, Technical Training, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Remote Work, SaaS, Product Strategy, Call Centers, Contact Centers, Engineering Management, Subscriptions, eCommerce, Presentation Design, System Requirements, Ebooks, Healthcare & Insurance, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Minimum Marketable Product (MMP), Ideation Workshops, Ideation, Healthcare IT, Coaching, Healthcare Software, Startups, Workshops, Customer Success, Business Processes, Documentation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Big Data, AWS Cloud Computing Services, Lean Product Development, Cryptography, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), React, Governance, App Development, Mobile App Development, Project Management, Director
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