Greg Cohen
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Sunnyvale, CA, United States
Toptal member since May 3, 2021
With over 25 years of product management and product leadership experience, Greg has led, managed, and coached teams in creating successful services and products. He is happiest working with stakeholders, customers, and the product team to release impactful products on tight deadlines. As an early adopter of Agile and Lean methods, Greg always works to advance his team's customer understanding and process while delivering against the roadmap and business outcomes.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Customer Discovery
- Delivery
- Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Product Leadership
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Structured Facilitation
Work Experience
Founder
Agile Excellence
- Founded a boutique product management consulting practice serving startups to Fortune 500 companies. We are focused on connecting the latest thinking in new product development and strategy to product management theory and practice.
- Launched a direct-to-consumer version of a small-cap client's white-labeled partner solution. 10 months after launch, the site had 1.5 million unique visitors per month and the business was on a $1 million annual run rate.
- Concept tested using both formal and rapid remote methods, launched the site, developed target personas and customer journeys, and redesigned content and architecture to optimize for SEO.
- Trained and coached a product management team for a Fortune 500 client on a critical project as a part of their company-wide Agile transformation. PMs earned improved team self-assessment ratings and successful launch of a critical product.
- Increased psychological safety for product managers as we worked through specific challenges within different product contexts. PMs had a better understanding of how to balance business-facing and development-facing responsibilities.
- Recommitted a healthtech startup's foundering product team to agile practices and worked with product managers to speak to customers to have the expertise to make business tradeoffs.
- Implemented a product steering process to create alignment between the executive team and product. Results included a high-priority project delivered in eight weeks, a major release delivered on time, and a product roadmap.
- Led a project for a client to achieve California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance. Evaluated solutions and chose OneTrust, the implementation of which led to usability issues on the mobile site that I found through Fullstory session analysis.
- Increased engagement by 25% with language changes and worked with the team to shrink the banner size.
- Led a project for a client to comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) for SMS messages sent with Twilio and used to deliver services.
CEO and Co-founder
Wakura AI
- Founded Wakura AI to build an intelligent AI recruiting assistant for healthcare staffing teams, a $2.4 billion opportunity.
- Worked on early features that included AI candidate matching, AI conversational screening, AI interview discussion guide and note taker, and credential documents collection.
- Lined up two beta clients, 28 prospects for demonstration, and a 2.5% response rate on outbound GTM via LinkedIn.
Head of Product
SnapCare
- Worked on a 7-month Toptal contract and became a permanent hire.
- Established and led a team of six product managers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team supported stakeholders, clinicians, and clients through a period of hypergrowth, enabling the company to deploy clinicians "ridiculously fast."
- Focused the team on improving efficiency post-pandemic by launching new products and re-positioning the product platform to help our clients reduce their contingent staffing costs.
- Directed the company's artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives at SnapCare, including the vision for using large language models (LLMs), algorithms, and machine learning in the platform.
- Implemented AI tools for staff and established an AI Center of Excellence to facilitate AI adoption across departments.
- Developed SnapCare's first product roadmap for an early credentialing module, transforming it from a basic document capture to a comprehensive document management system.
- Streamlined the credentialing process, eliminated multiple manual steps for the credentialing staff, improved clinician experience, enhanced security, and ensured compliance with The Joint Commission accreditation standards.
- Managed and delivered several critical projects successfully within tight deadlines of less than 30 days. Relaunched a PRN product, rebranded the platform, and spearheaded the requirements gathering and development efforts for a major state contract.
Product Coach
Bayshore Health - Main
- Coached a team of four product managers and business analysts responsible for the company's digital transformation on the principles of lean product management and agile development.
- Combined a short lecture with structured facilitation to work through aspects of the product lifecycle.
- Worked with team members in developing roadmaps for each of their products and elevating their leadership in the organization by presenting their plans to senior leadership.
Senior Principal Consultant and Agile Practice Manager
280 Group
- Served as senior principal consultant and Agile practice manager for 280 Group, the world’s leading product management training and consulting firm.
- Established the 280 Groups’ Agile practice in 2009. At this time in history, Agile was causing anxiety and challenges for product managers because they did not understand the process, their role, and how to use it for competitive advantage.
- Developed multiple Agile training programs for the company and partnered with AIPMM to provide the certification.
- Worked for a revenue cycle management client in the healthcare space with a new product management group to incorporate market analysis, competitive analysis, and voice of the customer into their planning.
- Led the team in creating a market analysis of each segment and competition, and then developing a 36-month strategic roadmap. The team successfully shifted from “order takers” to strategic product leaders.
- Moved a mobile startup team from their ad-hoc development process to Scrumban to improve predictability, throughput, and quality with a relatively inexperienced offshore team. Developers gelled as a team and doubled productivity.
- Led a product team for an enterprise resource planning provider for the marine transportation industry in creating a detailed three-year strategic roadmap tied to the company’s business plan and achieving alignment with the executive team.
- Identified gaps in product processes and assisted in building out a product management function and hiring a VP of product management for a major electronic game machine company whose growth had decelerated and was suffering release delays.
- Worked to define roles, adopt Scrum, identify new measurements for tracking innovation, add rigor to the requirements definition and launch process, and add clear business objectives for each release.
- Positioned the product group at the above electronic game machine client for an acquisition valued at over $1 billion.
Senior Product Manager
Instill, Inc. (acquired by iTradeNetwork)
- Provided corporate foodservice purchasing managers with actionable information through the aggregation, normalization, enhancement, and presentation of third-party data.
- Designed a hosted data access product for ease of use and simple integration with Excel. Ease of use work turned a major account around and increased user penetration by 400%.
- Delivered a solution for managing contract price variances. The contract management application used by three of the top 10 food-service companies in the USA, replacing and improving upon a manual process dependent upon random spot audits.
- Expanded into an adjacent problem area for inventory monitoring service for managing limited time offers in the supply chain.
- Helped customers using contract and inventory management solutions realize a 1 to 5% reduction in food costs equaling hundreds of millions of dollars in savings and reduced stockouts and excess inventory.
- Partnered with product marketing and sales, providing training, messaging, and technical support for RFPs.
- Guided products that contributed to the company's tripling revenue over five and successful acquisition by iTradeNetworks.
Director Product Management
Idealab
- Validated the product concept and business model for a novel online loyalty program by developing and launching a beta site with AMC Theatres in two months.
- Used the beta to gather user metrics and monitor and fix vectors for fraud. The beta was followed by general availability three months later (one month ahead of schedule.).
- Converted the organization to extreme programming to retain maximum development flexibility and product quality. Reduced time between releases by 40% and permitted flexibility to adjust roadmap for learning from beta users and partner negotiations.
Product Manager
Pandesic, LLC (A Joint Venture Between Intel and SAP)
- Established product management discipline within my team in order to permit the engineering team to work without interruption and shifting priorities.
- Performed focus group and usability research to validate concepts and designs.
- Conducted discovery work that avoided the development of a product that would have failed to meet ours customers' needs. The research revealed two distinct customer segments, each needing their own solution and faster to market.
- Partnered with marketing and sales, providing training, messaging, and technical support for RFPs.
Engineer and Analyst
Career Notes
- Created a competitive analysis framework for Smith and Nephew Endoscopy. The analysis averted a non-winnable price war and was also used to identify a $258 million acquisition into a new specialty.
- Performed market segmentation and competitor analyses critical to the development of Chiron Diagnostics' laboratory automation strategy and product development. The analysis identified an automation product with an IRR of over 50%.
- Established a national lab facility to support research programs studying global climate history and carbon cycle as a staff engineer for the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Project History
Building a Product Management Function and Hiring Team to Support Hypergrowth
https://snapcare.com/platform/Helped the company scale their product function to achieve massive revenue growth and the number two spot in America's 2022 Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies.
I established and led a team of six product managers to create a cross-trained product management function during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team supported stakeholders, clinicians, and clients through a period of hypergrowth, enabling the company to deploy clinicians rapidly. I focused the team on improving efficiency post-pandemic by launching new products and re-positioning the product platform to help our clients reduce their contingent staffing costs.
Self-support Website with Paid Support Service Offering
Led product management and ongoing customer discovery from idea to launch. The offering had surpassed the $1 million yearly run rate by the 10-month mark after my contract.
We began this project with a story map, wireframes, and a PhoneGap mockup. Given that this was an intermittent-use product, we decided to proceed with a mobile-responsive front end based on React rather than developing a mobile app.
I led regular customer discovery sessions, including problem interviews, concept testing, and usability studies using a combination of Respondent, Erlibird (now Betatesting.com), and Survey Monkey. We also used Google Analytics and Fullstory to track metrics and identify and reduce friction in the user journey. After studying Fullstory sessions, for example, we increased users who dismissed the cookie banner by 25% in the US market through two small changes: lowering the commit language from “accept” to “ok” and adding an x in the upper right corner for dismissal.
Data gathered through research and analytics was shared with stakeholders weekly to anchor prioritization discussions. I also facilitated a “Buy the feature” session with the executive team during a particularly contentious period around development priorities. This resulted in a stable nine-month roadmap that was fully supported.
This team was remote at first. We primarily used Zoom, Slack, Outlook, Jira, Confluence, and Miro.
Saving Three Major Accounts in 120 Days
Turned a project around in four months by rebuilding trust with three major customers and delivering millions of dollars in cost savings.
Three of the company’s five largest customers had threatened to cancel after a failed V1 release that was unusable. I was brought in to turn the product around and given 120 days to do it.
The effort started with visiting each customer, interviewing the managers, and sitting with their staff (our future users) to understand how their current business operated, the workflows they had developed, the triggers for those workflows, and the decisions they made based on their work. This also involved reviewing over 1,000 documents to ensure there were no edge cases the solution couldn’t handle.
Then, we got to work designing, coding, and testing the system. Hitting the deadline required disciplined scope management and deferring, a major capability needed for the product’s long-term success. It also required leaning in, including writing a manual regression test, creating test data, and recruiting account managers to perform acceptance testing for the user interface.
Although the customers initially complained about the missing capability, the cost savings that the product uncovered more than made up for it. It took nine months to convince them to move to the next version after it was available!
Best-Selling Author and Speaker
Wrote multiple books including "Strategy Excellence for Product Managers" and "Agile Excellence for Product Managers" and was a speaker and frequent commentator on product management and development issues.
AUTHOR
• Strategy Excellence for Product Managers (2017)
• Agile Excellence for Product Managers (2010)
• 42 Rules of Product Management (2012)
• Lean Product Management (e-book) (2011)
TECHNICAL EDITOR
• Lean Product Management by Mangalam Nandakumar (2018)
• Product Management for Dummies by Brian Lawley and Pamela Schure (2017)
CONTRIBUTOR
• The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge: ProdBOK Guide (2013)
PROFESSIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Speaker, panelist, and writer on product management issues and modern product management practices, including Agile Camp, Agile Dev Ops West, Product Camp, Product Collective, Project World, SQE Better Software Conference, Silicon Valley Product Management, plus Babson College, Hult International Business School, UC Berkeley Extension, and UVA Darden School of Business.
AWARDS
Intercon Top 50 Tech Leader (2019)
Education
Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College - Wellesley, MA
Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering
Tufts University - Medford, MA
Certifications
Certified Product Manager (CPM)
AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing and Management)
Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM)
AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing and Management)
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Confluence, Jira, Slack, Pivotal Tracker, Microsoft Outlook, Google Workspace, Balsamiq Mockups, ETL
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Scrum, Agile Project Management, Agile, Requirements Analysis, Design Thinking, Waterfall Development, Kanban
Industry Expertise
Education Technology (Edtech), Healthcare
Other
Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Scrum Product Owner, B2B Product Management, Product Roadmaps, Stakeholder Engagement, Delivery, Lean Product Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Functional Requirements, SaaS Product Management, Product Management, Product Planning, Sprint Planning, Coaching, Extreme Programming, Roadmaps, Product Ownership, SaaS, Product Leadership, Product Owner, Feature Prioritization, User Stories, Backlog Management, Backlog Grooming, Product Coach, Estimation & Planning, Web Applications, Feature Roadmaps, Requirements & Specifications, B2B, Startups, Mentorship, Early-stage Startups, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Product Development, Requirements, User Requirements, Microsoft Office, Customer Discovery, Structured Facilitation, Lean Startups, Scrum Coaching, Business to Consumer (B2C), Dual Track Agile, Workflow Analysis, Hypothesis-driven Development (HDD), Mentorship & Coaching, Product Strategy, Scrumban, Waterfall Delivery, Management, Writing & Editing, Client Management, Business Cases, Competitive Analysis, Market Research & Analysis, Story Mapping, User Research, Customer Journey, Enterprise SaaS, eCommerce, Product Launch, Pricing, Communication, Agile Coaching, Market Research, Workshop Facilitation, Innovation Workshops, Innovation Games, Product Design, Waterfall Methodology, Analysis, Ideation Workshops, Workshops, Cloud, Go-to-market Plans, Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Clinical Hiring, HR Staffing Tech, Project Management, Miro, Microsoft Teams, FullStory, Contextual Inquiry, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), User Journey Maps, Business Strategy, Operations, Entrepreneurship, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Product Marketing, Scrum Master, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Usage Analytics, APIs, Mobile Apps, Launch Strategy, Advertising Technology (Adtech), Media, Technical Product Management, Team Leadership, Large Language Models (LLMs), Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Hiring, Topography, Linear, Fintech, HRIS, Business Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Turnaround Management, Pricing Strategy, ChatGPT, Leadership, Sales, Financials, Product Vision, Evaluation
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