Dammy Akinfenwa
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Kennesaw, GA, United States
Toptal member since June 3, 2021
Dammy is a product and business leader who approaches complex problems with customer empathy, a furious curiosity to learn, and a belief that crafting a clear, convincing story about the solution is as important as the solution itself. Analytical and action-oriented by nature, Dammy thrives at structuring problems, driving strategic alignment and vision, and delivering solutions to capitalize on high-impact opportunities for customers and companies.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Client Management
- Competitive Intelligence
- Cross-functional Team Leadership
- Customer Research
- Executive Presentations
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Product Management
- Product Vision
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
The Home Depot
- Developed the product vision for an internal payment acceptance experience with a total addressable market of approximately 2 billion annual transactions totaling over $80 billion in annual sales.
- Created and executed the plan that increased product adoption by over 3x clients and over 2.5x in traffic in the first 15 months with partners in business, operations, and engineering.
- Built a new online payment capability for one of the top externally-facing eCommerce sites that process over 5,000 daily transactions and enables more than $9 million in potential sales annually.
Senior Manager
Adobe
- Increased, by 500%, the A/B testing capabilities of a platform that reaches 3 million customers by defining the business case for a new feature and managing its end-to-end launch in partnership with corporate strategy, operations, engineering, and product management.
- Developed quarterly and annual plans as part of a $5 billion global business to drive strong in-quarter performance and sustainable long-term growth for VPs and other senior executives.
- Identified a $100-million strategic opportunity by conducting and synthesizing quantitative and qualitative competitive research.
- Led a cross-functional global team of product and program management, engineering, testing and analytics, operations, and sales to drive improvements across key customer segments representing $650 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Associate Product Manager
Telesign
- Modeled 3-year revenue projections and analyzed revenue potential of strategic partnership of more than $230 million in contract value.
- Configured, tested, and deployed an internal tool for new product innovation process used by 15 people by iteratively gathering requirements from customer success and technical/non-technical product management teams.
- Conducted research to identify customer needs and approximate the cost and market size of fraud in two industries.
Product Marketing Manager
Microsoft
- Identified the opportunity in a $30-billion global market to capitalize on customer trends to drive more effective product positioning based on customer insights of two key personas using extensive primary and secondary customer research.
- Synthesized quantitative and qualitative research of competitors into analysis for more effective messaging of Microsoft products; collaborated with sales, product management, and legal colleagues to plan to reach over 200 salespeople.
- Drove the product/company positioning and general communication to more than 500 people in response to a competitor’s $9-billion+ acquisition.
Teaching Fellow
Flatiron School
- Completed approximately 100 hours of prework covering various computer science topics.
- Co-taught two courses (introduction to software engineering and web development) to about 25 middle and high school students.
- Planned and executed engaging daily lessons for classes.
Senior Product Analyst
The Advisory Board Company
- Integrated user feedback and product knowledge and vision into refined requirements for data acquisition tools used by five product teams, powering more than 300 distinct client implementations totaling more than $120 million in contract value.
- Conducted internal technology and process optimization research, configured and deployed internal tools to address inefficiencies; resulted in large-scale adoption by three engineering teams responsible for over 25 external clients.
- Led a 10-person software development team in the planning and execution of a company-wide initiative to replace a tool that manages 30 terabytes of data across 2 million files—decreasing error rate and increasing user satisfaction.
Senior Business Analyst
The Advisory Board Company
- Spearheaded the redesign of internal and client-facing processes and trained more than 15 business analysts and project managers on new processes, driving a 75% reduction in implementation time.
- Diagnosed issues during comprehensive quality review of fellow analysts’ data transformation SQL code and implementation configurations for eight projects, saving the associate director and director approximately 12 hours per month.
- Delivered consistent superior project results across 15 client projects, totaling over $10 million in contract value by managing project timelines and communication to key stakeholders; resulted in an accelerated promotion to senior business analyst.
- Developed the onboarding documentation for use across the department of over 15 analysts and mentored three senior analysts on software and processes; was awarded the departmental “Grand Slam” award.
- Collaborated with marketing, account management, and healthcare consulting teams to turn around at-risk projects with large hospital systems, resulting in on-time project completion, increased client satisfaction, and securing of future business.
Project History
Launch of an A/B Testing Platform
Led the business prioritization, process definition, and rollout of the first-ever A/B testing platform for improving customer retention of more than 3 million users.
Build of a New Payment Capability
Built and launched a new online payment capability that processes more than 5,000 transactions daily and enables over $9 million in potential annual sales.
I drove collaboration across engineering, technical architecture, UX, operations, security, and other teams through various challenges—such as new information and a tight timeline to deliver—to launch this new capability in one of the company's top externally-facing eCommerce site. Subsequently, I received an executive award from the senior vice president for successfully delivering this new capability to users on behalf of the company.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Technology Management, Marketing
UCLA | University of California, Los Angeles - Los Angeles, CA, United States
Bachelor's Degree in Engineering Sciences, Computer Sciences
Harvard University - Cambridge, MA, United States
Skills
Tools
Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Slack, Balsamiq Mockups
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, MVC Design, Test-driven Development (TDD)
Other
Executive Presentations, Client Management, Microsoft Office, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Business Cases, Product Management, Financial Modeling, Feature Prioritization, Strategy, Product Vision, Competitive Strategy, A/B Testing, Project Management, Competitive Intelligence, Customer Research, Process Improvement, Agile Product Delivery, Backlog Management, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Client Presentations, Cross-functional Collaboration, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Card Payments, Microsoft Teams, Computer Science, Economics, Programming, Marketing, Management, Accounting, Entrepreneurship, Operations, Statistics, Algorithms, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Stakeholder Management, Business Requirements, User Requirements, Strategic Planning, Product Marketing, SaaS Product Marketing, Sales Enablement, Customer Interviews, Strategic Partnerships, Process Innovation, Market Sizing, Aha!, Data Transformation, SQL, Relational Databases, Employee Training, Code Review, Healthcare IT, Teaching, Curriculum Development, Web Development, User Research
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring