Christophe Williams
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Arlington, VA, United States
Toptal member since June 2, 2020
Christophe has led product development in three data-intensive startups and held technical product management and data science roles at Capital One, Amazon, and the 2012 Obama campaign. His expertise includes finance, marketing, and retail products, and he specializes in using data analysis to build and improve products. Christophe holds an MBA from Wharton Business School and a BA in mathematics from Williams College.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- B2B
- Data Analytics
- Data Science
- Financial Modeling
- Fintech
- Machine Learning
- Tableau
Work Experience
CEO
Cedar Labs
- Led a data science consulting practice focusing on data strategy, data product development, and growth-oriented data services.
- Served as a fractional chief data officer for early-stage startups where I set strategy, built capabilities and products, and hired talent.
- Supported user acquisition, forecasting, resource allocation, and product development. I specialized in fintech and SaaS companies.
- Offered the following services: strategy, governance, hiring data teams, architecture, predictive analytics, time series analysis, regression, classification, recommendation systems, machine learning, natural language processing, ETL, and pipelines.
General Manager, HUD.ai and Lead Data Scientist
Foundry.ai
- Served as the general manager of hud.ai (the second oldest portfolio company within the Foundry.ai startup studio). I led the product roadmap, data science, business development, and customer success.
- Developed dozens of new feature sets/models across the full stack, coordinating in-house and offshore developer teams and doubling sales. I executed a pivot in product strategy, built new products, and developed go-to-market strategies.
- Built NLP models with TensorFlow and Scikit-learn, deployed using Docker and Serverless/Lambda, and scaled with Node and Elasticsearch.
Co-founder, Head of Product
CitySense Technologies
- Provided SaaS analytics services to water utilities to reduce lost revenue.
- Developed the most popular product, which forecasted resource usage and identified deviations in order to pinpoint equipment degradation.
- Built an MVP and beta app and launched it in three pilot cities.
- Won third place at the Penn Wharton Startup Competition ($35,000), Summer Venture Award ($10,000), and Innovation Fund ($1,500).
Senior Product Manager (MBA Intern), US Marketplace
Amazon
- Designed and built machine learning models to target grocery and CPG items to fast-growing Amazon shopper segments.
- Led partner teams around the world to implement and refine models that were scaled to three international markets.
- Coordinated technical and non-technical teams during scoping, development, and planning for rollout.
Product Manager
Capital One
- Led acquisitions of high-spending consumers across the company’s flagship products, Venture and Quicksilver.
- Created an innovative model connecting the effects of offline and online marketing. I obtained a $10 million testing budget to conduct a full analysis and led a small team to analyze the results.
- Delivered key learnings to the CEO and board, driving millions in annual value. I developed the product strategy for Quicksilver, a market-leading cash rewards card, increasing new customers through digital channels by 40% annually.
- Designed and launched multimillion-dollar campaigns to acquire customers and build brand value in high-impact markets. I coordinated six internal and external teams and received a promotion within nine months after joining the team.
- Oversaw credit card loss forecasting using advanced financial models in multibillion-dollar credit portfolios.
- Managed a biannual stress test on $70 billion in card loans, coordinating the process across 15 people and producing a white paper for the Federal Reserve.
- Received promotions from earlier roles as a business manager and a senior business analyst.
Statistical Modeling Analyst
Obama for America
- Developed finely tuned models of voter turnout and candidate support in 2012 battleground states.
- Mined massive voter-level datasets with 1,000+ data fields such as demographics, voting history, household information, and third-party data.
- Discovered prediction discrepancies and created new models that overcame poor state data in key variables such as age and party registration.
Project History
Topic Modeling for a Sales Intelligence Platform
I built an end-to-end system for modeling news article topics for hud.ai, an AI-enabled sales intelligence platform. I led the roadmap, development, deployment, and maintenance of the model, ensuring an efficient operation for millions of articles.
• Conducted user interviews to qualify needs and scope the project
• Sourced training data
• Cleaned and preprocessed data
• Developed and iterated on the topic hierarchy
• Built, validated, and evaluated models, choosing the gradient-boosted decision tree approach based on sentence-vectorized embeddings
• Dockerized models for serving at an API endpoint
• Built new data tables and API logic to score hundreds of thousands of articles and store scores in RDS and Elasticsearch
• Updated the UI/UX to incorporate topic models and fine-tuned them through additional user interviews
Education
MBA in Management
The Wharton School - Philadelphia, PA, USA
Bachelor of Arts Degree (Hons) in Mathematics
Williams College - Williamstown, MA, USA
Skills
Tools
Tableau, Jira, Jupyter, GitHub, Asana, Trello, Slack, Zoom
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Product Management
Other
Microsoft Excel, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning, Fintech, Business Analysis, Financial Analysis, Product Development, Databases, Back-end, Product Marketing, Product Management, Software Architecture, Data, Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Design, Data Pipelines, Product Roadmaps, Product Strategy, Amazon Web Services (AWS), B2B, Web App Development, Financial Modeling, Program Management, Architecture, Data Visualization, Data Warehousing, User Experience (UX), UI Design, User Journey Maps, UX Design, Data Warehouse Design, Node.js
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