Grant W. Hunter

As a strategic advisor to the chief product and operating officer of a leading education publisher (in 2016-2017), I helped evolve and strengthen the product organization through major disruption in their industry.

Through a kick-off workshop, I aligned the extended leadership team around a market-focused product management framework and through an assessment prioritized the focus for the engagement.

Next, I partnered with a select team to develop a market-focused approach for their product team—by leveraging existing best practices in the organization—that was developed into a two-day applied workshop for the entire organization.

The workshop was followed up with a series of more in-depth webinars and coaching sessions to continue the transition of learning to application and capabilities.

Throughout that process, I engaged with the senior leadership of the organization to re-design the organization based on this framework and the realities of downsizing. Capitalizing on the new approach and organization, the publisher outperformed all of its competitors in 2018-2019, keeping their revenue’s flat while the entire market shrunk by 30%.

As part of the first 100 days of the acquisition, I conducted discovery interviews with close to a dozen customers to better understand their needs that the product addressed, and their value equations.

The insights from those conversations led to the pivoting, and eventual sunsetting of one product, and helped define the core focus and value proposition for the evolution of the product. This work positioned the company to extend its relationships with its existing and new aviation partners and provided the foundation for two acquisitions.

I was engaged by the COO of a fast-growing provider of AI-enabled solutions to help improve safety and productivity to underground hard-rock mines. I did this by developing a comprehensive product roadmap and narrative to meet commitments to sales leadership and the board of directors.

I started with a discovery phase to get up to speed on the breadth and depth of the client's offerings and strategy.

Leveraging my knowledge from the product organization, marketing, sales, and the CEO, I then created a market and problem-focused framework for the product strategy. Next, I engaged with the product managers and owners to map every requirement into the framework. Finally, partnering with product leadership and the head of engineering, I worked through all of the dependencies, complexities, and resource commitments for every deliverable on the roadmap to create the timeline for the roadmap.

I then developed a comprehensive narrative and presentation deck for the sales and board meetings that were so successful; the CEO utilized it to engage their eventual acquirer enabling a successful exit for the company and their investors.

I was brought in by a private equity owner to advise the CEO on the development of the product management organization and processes.

Initially, I focused on developing the capabilities and knowledge of the product management organization. Through "ride alongs," I helped the team develop and strengthen their customer engagement and discovery capabilities, and build a process for ongoing customer engagement.

I then partnered with their development leadership to create a product management process and related artifacts to set expectations, and ensure the proper flow of requirements.

Additionally, I helped the product marketing team launch a win-loss program, and advised the CEO on adding a design expert to the product team.

Over the next three years with strong leadership from the CEO, this product organization helped drive 73% revenue growth.

I was engaged by the vice president of services for a corporate collaborative solutions provider to help increase the revenue and profitability of the services business unit. To do this, O developed and executed a strategy to productize professional services offerings.

After a discovery period spent interviewing sales, services, and product management, I started by clearly defining and pricing their services offerings, including the creation of a pricing schedule for their channel organization.

Next, I developed product marketing support materials and developed a channel training presentation that was delivered to the sales and channel management organization to formally launch the productized services.

In the two years following the engagement, the service attach-rate grew from less than 50% to more than 95% and service revenues grew by 700%.

In 2018, I was engaged by the senior vice president of product at iPipeline, a $200+ million insurance technology provider to develop a product management maturity model and create a one-day workshop that addressed the matrix and focused on capabilities development for the most underperforming areas.

I worked with the SVP and his top lieutenant to understand and strengthen their product management framework and use this to develop the maturity model and an assessment that each member of the product organization took.

Next, I completed one-on-one interviews with each product manager to help understand where they were on the model, as well as gain access to best practices.

Finally, I developed and delivered the one-day interactive workshop, helping strengthen key capability areas and offering some new ways of thinking about growth strategy and resource allocation.

Coming out of the session the team changed their prioritization and allocation process, enabling them as a team to shift resources across their product based on the current situation and opportunities.

From 2014-2015, I was engaged by the product and solution management leadership of a $5-billion financial services technology firm to help develop. after a series of acquisitions, a standard product management framework that would facilitate the sharing of resources and standardized career paths across the businesses.

My initial focus was on developing standards and best practices for internal and external roadmaps and creating educational webinars and tools to help product managers across the organization. In partnership with leadership, I identified existing good practices that we evolved into best practices to gain internal support.

Next, I helped develop the templates for product managers to utilize for their long-range and mid-range planning presentations, including new aspects of portfolio strategy.

Finally, I helped developed and launch the standard business planning framework for Fiserv to go from idea to launch, training both the product management and product marketing organizations on the framework.

I was engaged by the president of a leading B2B information service company to do a complete market analysis of the environmental health and safety market and develop a market entry growth strategy for the company.

I started by completing a comprehensive research project into the market, helping clearly define the market segments, market size, and competitive landscape.

Next, taking into consideration the client's core capabilities and strategy, I created the market-entry growth strategy, including a prioritized list of acquisition targets focused on providing both scale and alignment with those core capabilities.

Over the next five years, the client systematically executed the plan that I had made and built the new business unit to more than $50 million in revenue, creating a market leader.

I was engaged by the CEO and founder of Insight Catastrophe Group/SageSure as their third-party provider of product management and development was acquired and no longer able to serve them.

During the engagement, I helped the CEO to hire a complete product management team, collaborated with the team to develop a standard product management playbook and process. I also served as a product strategy advisor to the CEO and helped them identify, hire, and onboard a head of product.