Greg Gentschev
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
San Rafael, CA, United States
Toptal member since June 8, 2022
Greg is a seasoned product manager with 10+ years of in-house and consultant experience, focusing primarily on B2B SaaS and API products. He led the product strategy and road mapping, managed teams of up to 13, collaborated cross-functionally, and shipped multiple global products and features. Prior to product management, he spent the first half of his career in management consulting, working on growth strategy, product strategy, and benchmarking for Fortune 500 and growth clients.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Distributed Team Management
- Feature Planning
- Growth Strategy
- New Product Development
- Product Management
- Product Roadmaps
- Product Strategy
- SaaS Product Management
Work Experience
Product Consultant
33 Teams
- Provided product management coaching and facilitation for a new team creating a microservice to help improve transaction processing speed and scale the overall platform.
- Evaluated communication of customer demand and product gaps information from sales pipeline with product team and created an improved analysis of pipeline data and process for sharing that information across the company.
- Coached a web applications team on implementing more continuous product discovery through closer engagement with sales/CS, external interviews, and site-based surveys.
SVP Product
Gracenote
- Managed an $80 million portfolio of audio products and led a team of 11.
- Created the partnership for a podcast metadata product, went from plan to launch in nine months, and worked with sales to close multi-million dollar deals.
- Launched music and radio APIs and revamped the auto-strategy to leverage our product strengths and turn around the audio business.
VP Product
Gracenote
- Led the product strategy, roadmap planning, and execution for the video product portfolio. Achieved organic revenue growth from around $100 to about $150 million. Managed a global product team of 13.
- Launched new SaaS applications for sports market research and TV rating analytics and introduced enterprise workflow features for leading entertainment SaaS.
- Drove deeper qualitative and quantitative research and design sprints on consumer needs and behaviors related to voice interfaces and recommendations content discovery.
- Launched a video descriptors product that drove higher consumer engagement and viewing time.
Group Product Manager
Pivotal Labs
- Launched fitness tracking iOS and Android apps. Collaborated with designers on user research and app concept validation. Led backlog management for app delivery. Managed agile processes, including team backlog planning, retrospectives, and demos.
- Relaunched a primary subscription sports-content site. Conducted research with writers, editors, and subscribers to understand workflows and critical user experience goals. Collaborated with designers and engineers as a balanced team.
- Managed a team of four product managers, including coaching, mentorship, and performance management.
Director of Product
Tribune Media Services
- Managed the product direction and delivery of streaming video and social data products, working closely with partners like Netflix and Facebook and driving over 80% of year-over-year revenue growth.
- Defined our standards strategy in the entertainment ID and data ecosystem.
- Led redevelopment and relaunch of an industry-leading SaaS application for TV programming research.
Senior Manager
Blue Ridge Partners
- Led a team in market analysis, growth planning, and execution management for a media client across mobile, web, and TV properties.
- Managed a variety of customer research and product and growth strategy projects for portfolio companies of our private equity clients.
- Helped clients align product portfolio and customer segment targets, define product roadmaps, and improve pricing.
Managing Consultant
Kaiser Associates
- Led competitive analysis of the gaming hardware market for a leading console manufacturer.
- Spearheaded analysis of growth opportunities by use case and workload for a Fortune 10 software provider.
- Led benchmarking projects looking at the supply chain and sales organization for a medical device manufacturer.
Project History
Audio on Demand
Led the strategy, partner management, and development for a global podcast API.
The product covers 80 million podcast episodes and includes curated descriptive data, images, and a unique taxonomy of podcast genres.
Nielsen Fan Insights
https://nielsensports.com/nielsen-fan-insights/Led delivery and launch of a leading SaaS application enabling sports customers to easily access integrated analytics on fan market research.
I partnered closely with the market research and revenue organization teams to bring the product to market, including extensive customer research to understand the personas and use cases, especially the casual versus power users. I also led the delivery team.
Gracenote Advanced Discovery
https://www.gracenote.com/video/advanced-discovery/Developed the product strategy and assembled the product and engineering team to deliver the most sophisticated content metadata in the industry.
I reorganized my product team to put the most talented and driven director in this product area. I also helped close a startup acquisition that brought a top-tier engineering director with a proven track record in entertainment analytics on board.
With my guidance, the team developed several prototype concepts and tested them in client demos and proofs of concept. They found that better descriptors were the critical element that could power a variety of use cases. We partnered with the R&D team to test machine learning approaches and launched several applications, including the descriptors themselves and personalized image applications that leveraged them.
Most of the top streaming, TV, and consumer electronics customers have since adopted these products and have driven impressive improvements in viewing time and retention.
Education
Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
Georgetown University - Washington, DC, USA
Master's Degree in Structural Engineering
Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Architectural Engineering
Stanford University - Palo Alto, CA, USA
Skills
Tools
Jira, Slack, Zoom
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Microservices
Other
Product Management, Project Management, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Distributed Team Management, Feature Planning, Competitive Analysis, Product Ownership, Release Management, Software as a Service (SaaS), Stakeholder Management, SaaS, Transformational Leadership, Customer Experience, End-to-end Implementation (E2E), Discovery Workshops, System Requirements, Strategy, Quantitative Analysis, Product Discovery, Customer Analysis, Growth Strategy, Benchmarking, Facilitation, Customer Research, Backlog Management, SaaS Product Management, New Product Development, Cloud, Program Management, Data Integration, Data Migration, Product Leadership, Product Coach, APIs, Lean, Fintech, Startups, Customer Success, Refactoring, Marketing, Operations, Google Sheets, Financial Modeling, Go-to-market Strategy, Strategic Partnerships, Product Marketing, Acquisitions, Continuous Discovery
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