Chris is available for hire
Hire ChrisChris Busch
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Location
Woodside, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
January 27, 2020
Chris is a self-starting entrepreneur who transforms visions into compelling SaaS product strategies and delivers ROI. He's invented and led product, design, and CI/CD engineering up to 130 FTE for impactful products in real-time analytics, NLP, and IoT for consumer/enterprise markets as well as healthcare AI/ML. Chris's platforms generate $350 million in revenue, using emerging technologies at SAP and Cognizant. He is a two-time recipient of the "IoT Evolution Product of the Year" award.
B2BProduct OwnerSoftware as a Service (SaaS)App DesignMinimum Viable Product (MVP)SaaSEnterprise SoftwareProduct ManagementMobile App DevelopmentMobile ApplicationsProject ManagementAppsProduct ConsultantProduct Strategy ConsultantB2B Product ManagementFractional CIOFractional Chief Product Officer (CPO)Interim CIO
Project Highlights
Self-service Advertising SaaS Platform
Led a product from concept through development to market launch.
Expertise
Work Experience
Chief AI Engineer | Head Technical Product and Product Portfolio for AI Platforms
2020 - PRESENT
Elevance Health
- Led efforts to structure product and engineering processes and patient data for 60 million members, developed market and end-user expertise, established channels into healthcare organizations, and drove adoption of a customer-focused culture.
- Led matrixed, cross-functional team of 160 across product leaders, front/back-end engineers, data scientists, Quality, CI/CD.
- Invented and delivered transformative prior auth solution, reducing prior auth decisions from days and weeks to seconds using FHIR patient data. Identified and analyzed a $1 billion cost-saving opportunity.
- Established and led a cross-functional team of 38 FTE from idea to production launch in five months on a zero-trust platform.
- Established ethnographic customer research methodologies and strategic product management focus to drive a better understanding of target users, customer segments, revenue opportunities, and GTM strategies.
- Forged strategic partnerships with data science leads at Harvard, Mount Sinai, UT Austin, and other leading institutions to collaborate on machine learning and improve patient outcomes.
- Oversaw technical product and portfolio for the Elevance Health AI/ML app platform and product portfolio of around 30 initiatives like telehealth, Machine Learning models, utilization management, and interoperability.
- Led a team to create FHIR R4 clinical data pipeline, transforming multi-sourced data into FHIR R4 lifetime patient records for 70M Elevance members/patients, crosswalk CMTs, and UCUM, updated daily.
- Established ethnographic customer research methodologies and strategic product management focus to drive a better understanding of target users, customer segments, revenue opportunities, and GTM strategies.
CEO Mentor
2014 - PRESENT
Stanford University
- Acted as a startup mentor and angel investor at Stanford Business School Ignite, Alchemist Accelerator, and the German Accelerator Silicon Valley with exits of over $250 million and raised over $160 million in capital.
- Served as a startup mentor and member of a VC panel on Ignite New Business Incubation Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford, CA.
- Worked with Stanford startups to enable them to successfully raise capital and launch rapidly growing products to market.
Product Manager
2024 - 2024
Media in vita
- Researched and delivered competitive analysis and target market segmentation for the German market.
- Performed research on pricing strategy, pricing, and tiers for the German market.
- Researched and delivered a go-to-market strategy for the German market.
Emergency Systems Software Seeks Fractional CIO
2022 - 2022
Retrac Inc dba Think Safe Inc
- Worked directly with CEO to restructure team and engineering processes and set strategy for the next 12 months reducing overhead and enabling the team to consistently meet deadlines.
- Introduced scalable and agile engineering processes and methodologies, reducing conflicts, and enabling the team to meet deadlines and properly prioritize work. Trained them in agile, created a prioritized roadmap, and introduced and implemented DevOps and CI/CD.
- Led multiple vendor evaluations for a mass communication platform.
AVP Global Product Practice | Head of “Insight to Code”
2017 - 2019
Cognizant Technology Solutions
- Hired to turn 2.5-year old, zero-revenue software product development practice off the ground and scale it. Three months later, I won multiple new product development deals after analyzing root causes and implementing a new strategy, leading at C-Level.
- Combined human-science-driven insights and agile development methodologies to define, build, and launch new strategic digital products for Cognizant’s F500 clients within 4-6 months, hiring, and leading an engineering team of 50 FTE.
- Increased ARR for product practice from $300,000 to $10 million across 12 SoWs in ten months, 7x of 2018 MBO at a 65% margin, 100% utilization 100% turned into multi-year SoWs, $60-million pipeline in August 2019 from $600,000 invest.
- Specified, engineered, and launched to market an elastic, self-service advertising platform from concept to market launch by hiring and leading a team of 47 engineers across five global scrum teams.
- Oversaw the client engineering delivery from concept to successful market launch in five months. Delivered new strategic Azure self-service advertising platform for Comcast (TVadplanner.com), hiring and leading CI/CD and DevOps engineering team of 47.
- Defined and rolled out repeatable agile, CI/CD, DevOps product engineering methodology and practice GTM and sales. As part of the new practice strategy, led client product ideation, defined epics/stories, requirements, and multi-year roadmaps.
GTM | Product Head | Global Head of IoT for Consumer Industries and Life Sciences
2016 - 2017
SAP Labs, LLC
- Was promoted and expanded the industry coverage of my IoT solution into healthcare and life sciences and continued to lead the product team and drive sales and GTM for IoT products that I conceived.
- Obtained a $30-million product development approval and investment from EVP (Feb 2016) for a global DevOps product engineering team of 130 engineers (2012–2016) and eight PMs.
- Launched an IoT platform to market in November 2016 (today: SAP Connected Goods, released Nov 2016).
- Worked on an IoT Salesforce platform (CPG and retail industry) which closed $33 million (2016) and entered $54 million into a CRM pipeline for CPG and retail IoT (2017).
Global Chief Product Owner and Creator | SAP Leonardo IoT Connected Goods
2012 - 2016
SAP Labs, LLC
- Reported to the EVP Global Business Incubator and conceived product, validated product/market fit, created business cases, defined the requirements & architecture of an IoT platform leveraging IoT sensor signals to streamline real-time monitoring, maintenance, replenishment of large distributed fleets of assets (2012). Analyzed market to define $250 ARR IoT product SOM in the installed base.
- Analyzed the market to define a $250 million ARR IoT product SOM—conceived product, validated product/market fit, and created the business case, requirements, and architecture of an IoT platform using sensor signals for real-time monitoring of distributed capital assets.
- Planned and delivered an IoT platform from product vision, MVP, customer pilots, launch to a multiyear roadmap for SAP CPG IoT portfolio.
- Assembled a cross-functional team of 60 FTEs and coordinated multimillion-dollar cross-functional efforts with engineering, QA, design, sales, marketing, pricing, legal, and other internal teams across 15 product teams in North America, Germany, France, Austria, and Hungary.
- Established a strategic partner ecosystem, filling SAP IoT portfolio gaps with global telco carriers (Verizon, Orange), and leading IoT hardware (Telit, Intel, Samsung) & software (ILS) partners.
- Enabled a sales team of 50 account executives globally, collaborated on creating a pricing model, sales motion. Built and drove a pipeline with 100 leading global CPG businesses, e.g., Unilever, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Phillip Morris, and Red Bull.
- Won the first $4-million implementation deal with Coca-Cola six months after creating a business plan.
- Established SAP as a thought leader in IoT.
- Created a solution that was covered by CNN as 1 of 5 highlights at Mobile World Congress (2015); demonstrated in Cisco IoT World Forum Keynote (2013) and added coverage from BBC, CNN, CCTV, and AP. It also demonstrated SAP’s thought leadership in Gartner Magic Quadrant assessment for SAP Cloud-CRM (2014).
- Created a project management methodology that was applied at the bottling company above and was turned into a case study and featured throughout a design-thinking training curriculum at SAP for 8,000 attendees.
Senior Director | Head of Product
2010 - 2012
SAP Labs, LLC
- Turned around SAP NLP technology through first “Voice of the Customer” solution, now $13B TAM (2016), among leading consumer product manufacturers. Product eventually included in SAP Customer Activity Repository and capability in SAP HANA.
- Created a product that eventually included in the SAP customer activity repository and capability in SAP HANA. Led a dedicated agile, full-stack engineering team of 15 in India.
- Increased the total obtainable market to $600 million and 30x (2012) which turned around the modest revenue.
- Pioneered a consumer-facing CPG product solution by transforming unstructured into structured data.
- Demonstrated product/market fit by winning customer pilot implementations with leading CPG companies.
- Created a product that went on the SAP price list and contributed $30 million in ARR in 2016.
- Won the best talk award for VOC at SAP consumer products advisory council by CIO’s of SAP’s 20 largest CPG customers.
Senior Director | Senior Product Owner of SAP Cloud Imaging and New Product Development
2009 - 2010
SAP Labs, LLC
- Conceived and led cross-functional product development for SAP’s 1ST internal system imaging cloud, replacing physical computers with cloud virtual machine clusters to reduce TCO by 90% per user/month.
- Assembled and led a team of 15 engineers across SAP to prototype, test, and deploy.
- Saved SAP $80 million within ten months, serving 15,000 instances/month (2013) enterprise-wide across all development and external demo systems.
Director | Product Manager of Enterprise Widgets and New Product Development
2007 - 2009
SAP Labs, LLC
- Led product management and engineering team to develop small, real-time analytics apps providing succinct business value via real time reporting. Led cross functional development team of 30 in Latvia.
- Managed a cross-functional development team of 30 in Latvia.
- Presented to the CEO which led to the CEO adding the functionality and roadmap into SAP HANA Analytics product portfolio.
Director of Head User Experience and Mid-market ERP
2005 - 2007
SAP AG
- Directed enterprise software user-centered design processes throughout product planning, development, and user testing life cycle.
- Led a team of ten user experience designers.
- Increased ease of use by 80% when objectively measured user experience of the flagship SMB ERP product.
- Saved SAP €5 million in development cost with a project with the introduction of the Six Sigma approach.
Principal Consultant
2004 - 2005
SAP, AG
- Led a software quality engineering unit of eight directly reporting to me.
- Served as a principal quality manager on two of SAP’s biggest/most risky custom development projects (Siemens, Schneider Electric), each with ~20,000-person days.
- Increased ease of use by 80% when we objectively measured the user experience of the flagship SMB ERP product.
- Delivered 20,000-person day quality projects on time and within budget.
Director of Process Implementation
2003 - 2004
SPM Technologies GmbH
- Worked with a German F100 to sell and develop complex enterprise software.
- Evaluated, created business case, and began the implementation of 400 FTE joint-venture between SPM and Deutsche Telekom.
- Developed quality management offerings for large IT organizations.
Founder | CTO | CEO
1996 - 2003
Brainjunction GmbH
- Built the company and product from scratch to 30 FTE and $2 million in revenue.
- Won deals between 50-400 TEUR with German blue-chip customers: Bertelsmann, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, DaimlerChrysler, and VW.
- Created a product used by the M&A team to coordinate the merger between Chrysler and Daimler Benz.
- Obtained a two-year frame contract for €250,000 from Daimler Chrysler.
Project History
Self-service Advertising SaaS Platform
http://www.tvadplanner.comLed a product from concept through development to market launch.
As part of a new practice strategy, I led the creation and delivery of a strategic elastic Azure self-service advertising platform for Comcast, one of Cognizant’s biggest clients.
Tasks:
• Led product ideation.
• Defined epics and stories.
• Established requirements.
• Created a multi-year roadmap.
• Handled technical discovery and engineering delivery.
• Hired and led the development team of 47, including eight directs, SD POs, SD architects, VP UX, VD, and QE with four on/offshore agile, full-stack engineering teams.
• Was accountable for client engagement delivery from concept to successful market launch in five months.
Tasks:
• Led product ideation.
• Defined epics and stories.
• Established requirements.
• Created a multi-year roadmap.
• Handled technical discovery and engineering delivery.
• Hired and led the development team of 47, including eight directs, SD POs, SD architects, VP UX, VD, and QE with four on/offshore agile, full-stack engineering teams.
• Was accountable for client engagement delivery from concept to successful market launch in five months.
VP Product | Health Care AI/ML Platform
Invented and delivered a transformative prior auth solution, reducing previous auth decisions from days and weeks to seconds using FHIR patient data. Initiated and won an implementation agreement for $4.8M on the ML platform.
Brought in as contractor without AI/ML or healthcare experience. After 24 months, hired at VP-level to re-focus and support AI/ML engineering and product teams to transform healthcare through machine learning at the second-largest insurance company with around 40 million members. Led efforts to structure product and engineering processes, develop market and end-user expertise, establish channels into hospitals/healthcare organizations, and drive the adoption of a customer-focused culture.
Invented and delivered a transformative prior auth solution, reducing previous auth decisions from days and weeks to seconds using FHIR patient data. Identified and analyzed a $1 billion cost-saving opportunity. Established and led a cross-functional team of 38 FTE from idea to product launch in five months on the AWS zero-trust platform.
Established ethnographic customer research methodologies and strategic product management focus to drive a better understanding of target users, customer segments, revenue opportunities, and GTM strategies.
Forged strategic partnerships with data science leads at Harvard, Mount Sinai, UT Austin, and other leading institutions to collaborate on machine learning and improve patient outcomes.
Invented and delivered a transformative prior auth solution, reducing previous auth decisions from days and weeks to seconds using FHIR patient data. Identified and analyzed a $1 billion cost-saving opportunity. Established and led a cross-functional team of 38 FTE from idea to product launch in five months on the AWS zero-trust platform.
Established ethnographic customer research methodologies and strategic product management focus to drive a better understanding of target users, customer segments, revenue opportunities, and GTM strategies.
Forged strategic partnerships with data science leads at Harvard, Mount Sinai, UT Austin, and other leading institutions to collaborate on machine learning and improve patient outcomes.
Education
2001 - 2001
Attended Lectures in Economics
UCLA - Los Angeles, CA, USA
1998 - 2001
Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics
Freie Universität Berlin - Berlin, Germany
1994 - 1996
Completed Courses in Computer Science
Universität Passau - Passau, Germany
Certifications
APRIL 2013 - PRESENT
Trainer | Professional Scrum Product Owner I, PSPO I
Scrum.org
JANUARY 2010 - PRESENT
SAP Trainer for Business Model Innovation
SAP
APRIL 2007 - PRESENT
SAP Project Management Professional (SAP PMI)
SAP
MARCH 2007 - PRESENT
SAP New Product Ramp-up Coach
SAP
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