Dale M McCrory, Product Manager in Avon, IN, United States
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Dale M McCrory

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
Avon, IN, United States
Toptal Member Since
November 28, 2018

Dale is an internet technologist with expertise in B2B product management building SaaS-based platforms in multiple enterprise domains (education, finance, and marketing). He's passionate about SaaS excellence and has deep knowledge in building SaaS products, Kanban agile project management, product strategy, building teams, API strategy, data analytics, product messaging, and technology standards that impact the user and developer experience.

Product ManagementWebSoftware as a Service (SaaS)KanbanSaaSJira

Project Highlights

Integration Platform for Large Datasets
Co-founded and led the development of a product company focused on helping make integration easier in higher education.
Application Marketplace for Martech Apps
Established the vision and led the technical execution for a marketplace for marketing technology apps (HubExchange).
Mobile Framework for Emerging Marketing Questionnaires
Led the vision and execution of an Android framework that enabled questionnaire content to be reused on web and mobile.

Expertise

APIsEducation Technology (Edtech)KanbanSoftware as a Service (SaaS)

Work Experience

Chief Product Officer

2015 - PRESENT
Lingk
  • Founded Lingk, a data platform for data processing and integration built on a big-data architecture.
  • Ensured the requirements were written (jobs-to-be-done), the sales team was prepared, the sales demos were impactful, the delivery of the product was high quality, the engineers knew what to build (agile/Kanban), the customers were supported, and the marketing content was accurate.
  • Led efforts on self-service subscription management to make the product easy to buy online.
  • Led efforts for self-service support to ensure that the product has great in-context support content that provides suggestions.
  • Implemented several key customers such as University of Texas and Cornell University.

Product Management Consultant

2015 - 2016
EFL Global
  • Led the product strategy and development of an Android application and web framework that leveraged ePub3 content, event processing and web analytics to enable emerging market lenders to gather psychometric data from those without credit scores.
  • Completed competitive intelligence to ensure the product exceeded what was in the market.
  • Created PRD documents and automated testing expectation to drive engineering efforts.
  • Tested Android and web frameworks to deliver a high-quality product.
  • Worked with Gigya, Facebook Graph, Twitter and other social APIs to gather social data.
  • Collaborated in teams in the United States and Poland.

Director of Product Management

2014 - 2015
Courseload
  • Led the product management process for prospect interviews, managing backlogs, jobs-to-be-done requirements, product canvases, mockups, retrospectives, and release notes.
  • Led competitive intelligence gather efforts to help understand strengths and weaknesses compared to competitor offerings.
  • Established the Product Working Group enabling cross-functional collaboration and knowledge on product direction and needs.
  • Managed customer expectations and product delivery around our mobile strategy (iOS) and SIS API integration strategy collaborating with UX and engineering teams.
  • Established customer development practice of networking and interviewing those in the industry to determine new problems and new markets to address with product development.
  • Defined language and messaging around the industry's first Learning Experience Platform targeting the cost and pedagogical effectiveness of learning experiences the around digital content.
  • Led release management and quality control efforts that increased feature and bug fix velocity.
  • Migrated internal sales operations from NetSuite to Salesforce.com.

Principal Product Manager, Fuel Plattform

2012 - 2014
Salesforce (after ExactTarget acquisition)
  • Completed competitive analysis on email service providers targeting developer personas to determine core differentiators to build a competitive product.
  • Drove the buy/build/partner decision, organizational adoption and implementation of private PaaS technology based on CloudFoundry.
  • Established innovation strategy and technology for content editing and drove internal adoption of a cross-channel message editor.
  • Determined the business case, wrote requirements and initial documentation on the re-launch OEM product offering.
  • Designed HubExchange application platform and ExactTarget's OAuth2 implementation (JWT) in order to improve the experience of the developer persona.
  • Wrote the design principles of the ExactTarget's enterprise REST APIs acknowledging legacy and support future innovations.
  • Drove the implementation and deep integration of a cloud-based REST API governance proxy.
  • Managed the team’s project managers.

Platform Product Manager

2010 - 2012
ExactTarget
  • Product manager of the ExactTarget platform technologies that are exposed to developers (internal and external) to extend and innovate using core technologies.
  • Helped launch the ExactTarget platform team by establishing platform product roadmaps and strategy.
  • Established roadmap and milestones for delivery of SOAP and REST APIs for consumption in the application platform.
  • Established a graded browser support initiative for the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub and applications to attempt to ensure a consistent user experience.
  • To support enablement of future platform initiatives, led the development of the ExactTarget developer community and successfully transitioned day-to-day management to a community manager.
  • Spoke at the ExactTarget Partner Conferences and events to the developer audiences.
  • Managed the team’s platform business analysts.

Manager, Product Specialists

2009 - 2010
ExactTarget
  • Led a small team of product experts dedicated to helping the organization better understand how to use ExactTarget application features to meet sophisticated marketing initiatives.
  • Led the introduction of several key product capabilities like Social Forward (our social networking integration) through research and development activities and customer interaction with early prototypes.

Product Manager, Integrations

2006 - 2010
ExactTarget
  • Served as the Product Manager over the API and data integration capabilities exposed by ExactTarget.
  • Established a pattern of platform innovation to support multiple products as ExactTarget expanded from a single product to multiple product organization.
  • Drove strategy, development requirements, and priorities for integration-related email product features and APIs.
  • Managed product and technical efforts for a strategic technical/business partnership in the web analytics vertical.
  • Introduced, selected vendor, and promoted a wiki to store product knowledge adopted by most parts of the organization.
  • Managed product, solution and technical efforts for the implementation of a key Fortune 100 customer relationship and interacted with multi-national teams.

Solutions Consultant

2006 - 2006
ExactTarget
  • Developed and demonstrated technical solutions to prospects (both technical and marketing contacts) in pre-sales engagements.

Senior Software Engineer/Team Leader

2004 - 2006
Katabat
  • Led a team of developers.
  • Engineered a platform API approach to handle many private-labeled marketing lead capture forms into a single system.
  • Selected and utilized web analytics software.

Senior Developer

2002 - 2004
StudioNorth
  • Built custom websites and projects for customers.

Senior Programmer

2000 - 2002
Three Mountain Group
  • Developed The Beast alternate reality game (ARG) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(game).
  • Developed CreedQuest alternate reality game (ARG) : http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1452103/creed-send-fans-on-quest.jhtml.

Web Developer

1998 - 2000
StudioNorth
  • Built websites, flash animations, and interactive CD-ROMs for customers.

Integration Platform for Large Datasets

https://lingk.io

Co-founded and led the development of a product company focused on helping make integration easier in higher education.

Built a product from nothing that provided strong differentiation in the market and solves integration problems in a reusable way at a fraction of the cost of other solutions in the market.

Application Marketplace for Martech Apps

http://pages.exacttarget.com/hx-central

Established the vision and led the technical execution for a marketplace for marketing technology apps (HubExchange).

Coordinated the product and engineering efforts for an ecosystem enabling a marketplace for marketing apps that fit into the ExactTarget Marketing Hub.

Mobile Framework for Emerging Marketing Questionnaires

Led the vision and execution of an Android framework that enabled questionnaire content to be reused on web and mobile.

This goal of this project was to enable multiple customer branded apps to embed or white-label credit scoring questionnaires for emerging markets. The Android framework had to support customized content flows per customer, reuse web content (used ePub3 for that), work offline, and capture all the data in a consistent way.
1994 - 1998

Bachelor's Degree in Multimedia Technology

Cedarville University - Cedarville, OH

APRIL 2013 - PRESENT

edX Verified Certificate for Design and Development of Educational Technology

EdX

JANUARY 2005 - PRESENT

UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics

University of British Columbia

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