Principal Consultant
2019 - PRESENTProduct Tranquility- Helped technology businesses accelerate their product growth and increase customer loyalty.
- Provided product management and strategy consulting services to growth-stage technology companies that operate primarily in the B2B SaaS or marketplace areas.
- Offered services that include: pricing strategy; market and account segmentation; current, prospective, and churned user interviews; competitive analysis and positioning; product strategy; and customer churn and retention improvement.
Program Leader
2019 - PRESENTKellogg School of Management - Northwestern University- Served as a program leader for Kellogg's Executive Education Product Strategy and Professional Certificate in Digital Marketing courses.
- Helped train the next generation of product leaders in the following areas of product strategy: analyzing product opportunities; discovery and requirements definition; designing business models; agile product development; taking products to market.
- Helped train the next generation of digital marketing leaders in the following areas of digital marketing: marketing fundamentals, customer research and segmentation, customer personas and positioning, customer journeys, and metrics and testing.
Independent Travel Consultant
2018 - 2019Viajero Ltd- Independently envisioned, planned and executed a 21 country round-the-world expedition as part of a long-term personal dream goal. I volunteered for two positions each one month in length.
- Performed daily service in the dishing temple, creating a hygienic and festive experience at Ängsbacka (Molkom, Sweden), an intentional community offering festivals and workshops focused on bringing about broad-scale change in human possibility.
- Assisted the founding team with digital marketing, including social media, SEO, conversion tracking improvements, and website A/B testing for Spanish Adventure (San Carlos, Colombia), a small Spanish language school in rural Colombia focused on helping individuals attain the best possible Spanish language immersion experience in the world.
Head of Product
2016 - 2017Lawnstarter- Assisted the company in growing its customer base 10x through various product initiatives, including revamped onboarding, automated communications, and logistical improvements.
- Increased additional service acceptance rates by 150% through request and fulfillment automation.
- Implemented technology and operational process change leading to 300% faster issue resolution between engineering and customer support.
- Researched, maintained, and published product metrics using Tableau and SQL.
- Created and executed the company strategy for product A/B testing.
- Sourced, interviewed, and hired the company's first data scientist.
- Administered Jira and Confluence Cloud platforms for the engineering team.
Product Strategy Principal
2015 - 2016SolarWinds- Led strategy and new product development for SolarWinds' Cloud (SaaS) business, reporting directly to SolarWinds' CTO.
- Oversaw new product definition, market and customer needs analysis, competitive analysis, white-space opportunity identification, and product roadmap definition.
- Created pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy for new key product initiatives.
- Defined partnership and business development initiatives.
- Recommended a life cycle strategy for some of SolarWinds' legacy products.
Group Product Manager
2014 - 2015SolarWinds- Grew revenue 100% over two years for our enterprise-class virtualization management product. Helped formulate and then implement an integration strategy to dramatically improve cross-sell and attach rates with the core product portfolio.
- Increased the unit volume by 66% in the first quarter after releasing SolarWinds’ enterprise storage monitoring product by analyzing customer segments, company competency, sales strategy, building out the strategy and v1 of the replacement product.
- Owned multiple “CEO #1 priority” projects, including a company-wide initiative to build customer awareness of other products by leveraging product as a marketing channel for cross-selling lead generation.
- Led and mentored a team of product managers, helping them remove roadblocks and inform strategic decisions.
- Collaborated closely with design, architecture, and engineering to deliver new products and delightful user experiences on time.
Senior Product Manager
2013 - 2014SolarWinds- Increased profitability of products by 40% though investing in supportability features offering a high return on investment.
- Led the product management team feedback process from sales engineering.
- Improved the product management team's hiring process.
- Led customer training webinars for several products at the company's virtual conference, ThwackCamp.
- Drove agile release processes into the development cycle to accelerate product release cycles by 50%.
Product Manager
2012 - 2013SolarWinds- Improved customer onboarding process, accelerating customer time to value 100% in a single release.
- Drove company's mobile strategy and accelerated mobile app release cycles for iOS and Android platforms.
- Established partnerships with third-party hardware vendors' engineering teams, decreasing customer issue resolution times by 50%.
- Interviewed hundreds of IT management pros to learn about the contextual use of our product.
- Partnered with product marketing to create a brand new pricing and packaging strategy.
Product Marketing Intern
2011 - 2011Location Labs- Created a freemium strategy for the company’s location-based services applications and presented recommendations to the CEO and the senior executive team.
- Constructed competitive analysis of the “Distracted Driving” mobile application landscape which secured government agency support of our DriveSmart Plus application.
- Formed relationships with key partners to support the company’s new brand launch.
- Acquired expert knowledge of the pros and cons of Freemium business models.
- Built financial model sensitivity analysis for the freemium business model.
Software Engineering Group Manager
2008 - 2010National Instruments- Developed and prioritized an 18-month product roadmap with 70 driver software features for the new $150 million revenue per year hardware product line, then presented a plan to three vice presidents.
- Implemented process improvements around software defect and feature management that reduced the outstanding defect backlog of the team by 75%, saving more than $150,000.
- Performed team leader responsibilities for a nine-person team which included interviewing, conducting staff performance evaluations, salary planning, mentoring, and budgeting.
- Improved testing efficiency of multiple product teams by 300% by isolating, prioritizing, and championing improvements of automated test infrastructure.
- Directed a 10% increase in developer efficiency by adopting a continuous build system that isolated new problems in the code and created daily transparency on the health of the software.
- Instituted continuous innovation practices within my team.
Product Owner
2007 - 2008National Instruments- Led a cross-functional management team in evaluating commercially available software test products and designing a replacement system that would result in a net benefit of $1 million annually.
- Presented to 50 test engineers at NIWeek, the company's global customer conference, on three key hardware architectures leading to increased customer adoption of new hardware platforms.
- Streamlined decision making of software project with 14 engineers working on a $200 million per year product line by assuming the role of project lead, resulting in promotion to group manager position within 4.5 years, fastest among peers.
Software Engineer
2003 - 2006National Instruments- Developed four independent features from design through release for kernel-level driver software that resulted in closing customer accounts worth over $7,000,000 in total sales.
- Led Marketing Leadership Training Program project team on a four month project to design a defensive market strategy resulting in additional committed R&D expenses of over $100,000.
- Implemented and improved upon a complex calibration algorithm for analog input measurements.
- Coordinated cross-group efforts to successfully implement software events support.
- Managed and implemented improvements to groups’ automated test suite.