Erick Watson
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
Toptal member since June 28, 2019
Erick Watson commercializes deep technology. He has led product at Google, Microsoft, and Protocol Labs; co-founded Trensant, which Interos.ai acquired; and served as VP, Product at Quantarium, which was acquired by Mr. Cooper Group (NASDAQ: COOP). His work accounts for $1.33 billion in cumulative revenue contribution and $54.3 million raised. A named inventor on three patented inventions, he actively writes TypeScript and Rust. Toptal recognizes him as a top 3% product manager.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Blockchain
- Business to Business (B2B)
- Growth
- Product Innovation
- Product Management
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- eCommerce
Work Experience
Preceptor
Watson Institute
- Taught the Product-Market Fit module for the Enlight Foundation cohort at the Watson Institute, a Boulder-based fellowship backing founders and social entrepreneurs, with 3,600+ alumni across 81 countries.
- Designed the module to apply segmentation and hypothesis discipline to the Fellows' own ventures, rather than case studies, pushing each team toward identifying a named buyer and developing a positioning claim that survives customer interactions.
- Enabled students who complete the course to go on to lead their own social impact startups.
Managing Director | Product Consultant
SproutVest
- Founded SproutVest, a fractional CPO and venture strategy firm specializing in AI, blockchain, and SaaS commercialization. Clients include Microsoft, Elevance Health, Angi, Protocol Labs, ASU, and others.
- Oversaw identity and access management (IAM) for two years for Elevance Health (formerly Anthem Healthcare), helping 34 million members, increasing YoY adoption and retention by 10%, adding member CSAT by 7%, and reducing YoY inbound call volume by 6%.
- Implemented the enterprise data lake house platform for Edge by Ascential, processing hundreds of millions of eCommerce records for their flagship product: Market Share.
- Led a team at Chainlodge to establish a 1,400 square feet, 1 megawatt, 2.1 petahash, tier 3 data center designed for GPU and ASIC blockchain mining.
- Partnered with Microsoft Research to spearhead product and program management of several AI and machine learning initiatives, including CodaLab, an MS Azure-hosted platform for research and data science competitions.
- Raised $54.3 million across multiple ventures: a $30 million pre-IPO secondary placement at Inception Capital Management, $15 million in debt financing at G.A.E.M.S., $6 million at Trensant, and a $3.3 million pre-seed at Randamu.
- Delivered 2 acquisitions: Trensant, acquired by Interos.ai, and Quantarium, acquired by Mr. Cooper Group (NYSE: COOP). Named inventor on 3 patented inventions across 4 US granted patents.
Co-founder
Chainlodge
- Co-founded an AI datacenter infrastructure venture in Okanogan, Washington, operating at 1 MW with 5 MW of available headroom, targeting AI compute, HPC, and cloud infrastructure workloads.
- Led product design, investor positioning, and bilingual outreach for a riverfront campus, giving a supply-side vantage point into compute markets, including power procurement, siting economics, and GPU capacity contracting.
- Wound the venture down in 2026 owing to stiff competition from hyperscalers.
Co-founder and CEO
Randamu
- Spun the drand project out of Protocol Labs into an independent company and raised $3.3 million in pre-seed funding led by PLVS Capital, building commercial products on top of a public-good randomness beacon without undermining it.
- Shipped dcipher.network to production, a threshold cryptography platform for verifiable randomness, conditional encryption, and programmable settlement, deployed across Cosmos, Filecoin, and Ethereum Layer 2 networks.
- Built and led a distributed team of engineers and cryptographers across five time zones, established Swiss governance through the Threshold Association, and delivered OnlySubs, OnlySwaps, and OmniPay.
- Established ecosystem partnerships with the Filecoin Foundation, SSV Network, DIA Data, Scroll, and the League of Entropy.
- Led the company through October 2025; the entity was wound down in 2026.
Entrepreneur-in-residence (EiR)
Protocol Labs
- Assessed the commercial potential of Drand, the open-source randomness beacon stewarded by the League of Entropy, and led its spin-out from a research project into an independent, funded company.
- Validated demand with Layer 2 networks, DAOs, and game studios across blockchain, gaming, fintech, and privacy-tech markets, identifying where verifiable randomness created value someone would pay for.
- Structured the spin-out itself: Swiss entity formation, governance under the Threshold Association, and the IP and team transition out of Protocol Labs, coordinated across academic institutions and industry partners.
- Delivered the spin-out as Randamu with a $3.3 million pre-seed led by PLVS Capital, and built a repeatable spin-out process for future Protocol Labs research ventures.
Principal Product Manager
Angi
- Rebuilt deep linking for a national home services marketplace so every campaign surface routed users to the correct in-app destination and every install could be attributed accurately.
- Increased app installs from web campaigns by 38% and deep link funnel conversion by 22% over a six-month engagement.
- Built a structured A/B testing program against a backlog of hypotheses on messaging, banner placement, and call-to-action design, replacing debate with tested decisions.
- Established a working rhythm across product, design, and analytics, plus dashboards and performance reporting that gave every team the same view of what was working.
Senior Product Manager
- Took over the search benchmarks, automated insights, and search trends and benchmarks portfolio mid-flight after its product manager departed, and carried both programs through approval and full deployment.
- Drove $1.22 billion in incremental annualized revenue for Google search advertising by identifying market dynamics that channel partners and sellers could act on.
- Rebuilt alignment across Ads Insights, Ads Planning & PARC, and Connect Sales, and built ML revenue forecasts validated against global ad market trends to move contested projections through internal business councils.
- Led the integration of Google's internal conversational AI into the Advertiser CRM so sellers could surface trend predictions and advertiser insights without leaving their workflow.
Principal Digital Product Manager
Elevance Health (formerly Anthem)
- Led product management and DevOps for identity and access management infrastructure supporting a Fortune 50 healthcare payer's member portal, serving 34M+ members, using SAFe methodologies.
- Traced authentication and session performance problems to root cause and drove fixes through the responsible engineering teams, improving digital adoption 10% year over year.
- Led the Provider Finder scrum team through a data quality initiative that improved both accuracy and speed of provider search, raising member CSAT 7% year over year.
- Reduced inbound call volume 6% year over year by linking interactive voice response to member records through an online virtual assistant handling the majority of call drivers, and by implementing HL7 and FHIR APIs for unified member data.
- Managed technical alignment across the SOA integration team and onshore and offshore engineering partners, introducing agile sprint cycles and reporting standards across the program.
VP, Product
Quantarium
- Recruited by the CEO to transform an AI software engineering startup into a mature cloud-computing business for the real estate industry, developing and executing a customer-focused, scalable product and commercialization strategy.
- Oversaw product development—including marketing, prioritization, and lifecycle management—CRM, and sales operations processes, managing a team of eight and a P&L of $10 million.
- Led the company acquisition and designed and launched a corporate spinout from the parent company to position the company for an over 100% growth rate and unlock latent business value.
- Drove the development of a predictive analytics SaaS platform and API, ranked first in coverage and accuracy by the industry's top benchmarking firm, using AI, computer vision, and machine learning to cover all 105 million residential US households.
- Launched an AWS B2B eCommerce, realizing a greater distribution of products and services and generating over $12 million in new sales opportunities.
- Spearheaded the development of a service powered by Quantarium Amazon Alexa, allowing channel partners to offer virtual assistant self-service functionality for mortgage servicing workflows to end users.
- Positioned the company for acquisition by Mr. Cooper Group (NASDAQ: COOP), which acquired Quantarium for its AI valuation platform covering 105 million US residential households.
Non-executive Director (NED) and Board Advisor
G.A.E.M.S., Inc.
- Led the finance committee, raising $15 million in debt financing to fund supply chain operations and product manufacturing in China.
- Focused on assisting the leadership team with corporate governance, business planning, intellectual property, finance, executive compensation, and M&A strategy.
- Managed the CEO Search and Executive Compensation committees, which secured a new CEO for the company and established competitive compensation guidelines for all corporate directors.
Co-founder | Chief Product Officer
Trensant
- Led development and commercialization of Trensant's patented portfolio of graph databases, text analytics pipelines, machine learning algorithms, and SaaS APIs, raising $6 million in venture funding across the build-out.
- Applied an NLP processing pipeline to structured and unstructured social media data sources to predict the 2016 US presidential election by one electoral vote.
- Secured board approval and implemented a new SaaS business model, assembling value proposition, sales motion, and P&L to achieve geometric revenue growth with only linear increases in cost.
- Launched a new SaaS API and landed numerous channel partners, including Microsoft, Domo, Qlik, Tableau, and PointLogic.
- Raised $6 million in venture funding to build the company's patented portfolio of graph databases, text analytics pipelines, and machine learning algorithms.
- Sold the company to Interos.ai, which acquired Trensant for its patented human opinion search engine and knowledge graph. Named inventor on US patents 9,471,883 B2, 10,162,900, and 10,621,183.
Principal Program Manager | Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft
- Led the technical program management for several artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives on behalf of Microsoft Research’s Academic Outreach team.
- Developed and led the functional design of core features for Project CodaLab, and over 60 online executable papers for computer scientists to enhance productivity and consistency in data-driven research.
- Hosted and enabled more than 300 machine learning data science competitions.
- Identified and retained collaborators to specify, design, develop, and launch http://www.codalab.org as an open-source, GitHub-hosted project.
- Established and grew a highly specialized and technical community of machine learning experts from zero to over 3,000 members.
Director | Business Strategy and Market Development
Microsoft
- Established new partnerships on behalf of Microsoft Research Asia for product development, technology transfer, and strategic sourcing with software development partners.
- Led Microsoft's innovation and market access agenda with the Chinese government, industry, and academia.
- Managed a USD $150 million P&L supporting an organization of 130 people.
- Grew Microsoft's investment in the China partner ecosystem by over 33% or USD $50 million.
- Established the company's first formal market research function focused on Microsoft Partners in China, unleashing a wave of Sino-centric insight.
Project History
CodaLab Platform for Reproducible Research and Data Science Competitions
Developed and led the functional design of core features for Project CodaLab.
I was involved in developing and leading the functional design of core features for Project CodaLab. I also led the technical program management for several artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives on behalf of Microsoft Research’s Academic Outreach team.
Human Opinion Search Engine
Led the development of a patented Internet Human Opinion Search Engine and resulting knowledge graph.
Led the development of a patented Internet Human Opinion Search Engine and resulting knowledge graph, which led to the parent company being acquired for this technology.
Blockchain Mining Data Center
Led the design, construction, and operation of a boutique 1,400 square foot, 1 Megawatt, 2.1 PetaHash, Tier 3 data center.
Led a team of industry experts in the specification, site selection, construction, provisioning, and operation of a Tier 3 data center designed for ASIC blockchain mining of Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies. This included the definition of all operational processes, such as maintenance, security, power, and heat management.
ASU Pocket | Portable & Secure Digital Wallet
http://pocket.asu.edu/Cultivated industry and public partnerships, handling all partner onboarding and training for ASU Pocket, an open source blockchain wallet enabling users to carry and manage their verifiable learning credentials anywhere.
ASU Pocket is a portable, secure, and verified digital wallet for learning, work, and life. ASU aspires to what President Crow calls the fifth realm of education: infinitely scalable learning. In service to that vision, we need infinitely scalable ways to showcase that learning and match it to jobs of the future. Learner empowerment is the most vital accelerant to accomplish this.
Under the moniker Pocket, we designed a solution built on trust that offers nearly unlimited capacity for students to capture their learner journey and connect their skills with jobs of the future.
Certifications
Claude Certified Architect - Foundations
Anthropic
Google Ads Search Certification
Google Digital Academy (Skillshop)
Google Analytics Certification
Google Display & Video Certification
Google Digital Academy (Skillshop)
Executive Data Science Specialization
Coursera
Skills
Tools
Jira, Google Analytics, Google Workspace, Adobe Analytics, Asana, Claude
Paradigms
Agile, Data Product Management, Change Management, Agile Project Management, Hosting
Platforms
Blockchain, Google Ads
Industry Expertise
Healthcare, Financial Services, Venture Capital
Other
Program Management, Project Management, eCommerce, Startups, APIs, Business Development, Marketing Strategy, Competitive Strategy, Finance, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Big Data, Data Science, Software as a Service (SaaS), Intellectual Property, Microsoft Azure, Machine Learning, Angel Investing, Digital Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Partner Management, Strategic Partnerships, Product Management, Product Marketing, Innovation, Growth, Strategy, A/B Testing, Analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Backlog Management, Business Intelligence (BI), Business to Business (B2B), Cloud Computing, Community Development, Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Market Research, P&L Management, R&D, Customer Engagement, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Senior Executive Management, Leadership, Google Search Console, Product Innovation, Digital Product Management, Squarespace, Fintech, Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Pitch Decks, Storytelling, Predictive Analytics, Product Roadmaps, Technical Product Management, Business Analysis, MVP Design, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Data Centers, Early-stage Startups, Distributed Team Management, Digital Transformation, Workflow Automation, Project Discovery, AI Integration, Data Analytics, Product Strategy, Product Discovery, Product Ownership, Discovery Workshops, Prototyping, System Architecture, System Integration, Workflow, Business Process Improvement (BPI), API Integration, Large Language Models (LLMs), Product Strategy Consultant, Market Opportunity Analysis, Product Positioning, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), YouTube SEO, YouTube Marketing, YouTube API, Google Display Network, Cybersecurity, Web Scraping, Full-stack, Agentic Frameworks, Agentic AI, Procurement, Vibe Coding, Product Procurement Manager, AI Agents, Automation, Notion, Cryptography, Private Equity, Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Cryptocoin Mining, Data Inference, Knowledge Graphs, Customer Discovery
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