Publication
Beyond “Faster, Better, Cheaper”: Vertical Integration Strategy for Startups
https://www.toptal.com/product-managers/product-strategy-consultant/vertical-integration-strategy
Harish is currently unavailable
Harish Natarahjan
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Schaumburg, IL, United States
Toptal member since November 7, 2019
Bio
With nearly two decades of technology expertise in telecom and manufacturing, Harish specializes in product-market fit, new business models, product strategy, and road maps with well-articulated ROI in B2B and B2C verticals. He specializes in cutting-edge digital solutions (AR, VR, IoT, etc.). He has an MBA with a focus on marketing and strategy and an inherent ability to motivate teams with a clear vision and purpose.
Project Highlights
Product Roadmap for MES System at Panasonic
Defined a set of KPIs, identified key players to review, score and prioritize features.
Business Strategy for IoT—U.S. Cellular
Delivered key recommendations to the executive team on market verticals to pursue with a $2 billion revenue potential.
Careband Partner Strategy
Collaborated with the founder to define partnerships to build and operate technologies in a B2B environment.
Expertise
- Business Analysis
- Deployment
- Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy
- Market Research
- Product Strategy
- Product-market Fit
- Revenue Strategy
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
2020 - PRESENT
CCC Information Services
- Engineered P&L of $100M total loss roadmap and R&D team for cutting edge capabilities using AI and ML.
- Built the total loss care product from inception to execution, identifying key market pain points, and driving light touch straight-through processing.
- Worked on the product enhancements that led to incremental SaaS revenue of $15M annually.
Strategic Advisor
2018 - PRESENT
Careband
- Led business strategy, product roadmap, and partnerships to deliver a solution to the wandering problem for persons afflicted with dementia, Alzheimer's, and ADHD.
- Provided expertise in RF coverage and appropriate use of beacon and long-range wireless technology, such as low-power wide-area network, that will minimize the cost of operations.
Head of Product
2018 - PRESENT
Panasonic, North America
- Delivered guidance to executive leadership that solidified pricing, differentiation, product-market fit, GTM, including consumption model and financial analysis transforming to a SaaS solution.
- Defined customer engagement from initial discovery to deployment.
- Built a consulting team to map business and operational processes, identify business drivers, determine strategic resolutions, and drive maximized profits.
- Drove adoption across 20 global customers by identifying target customers and meet potential clients, deploying sales tools.
- Drove strategic partnerships with IIOT vendors to deliver video analytics, robotic, and augmented reality solutions.
Senior Manager – Data Strategy/Customer Experience
2017 - 2018
U.S. Cellular
- Collaborated with business strategy on organizational structure for transformation from a carrier to a solutions model across multiple verticals to drive revenue potential of $2+ billion by 2025.
- Partnered with the executive team to help craft the strategy for on-premise customer experience solution; identified use-cases, collaborating across organizations to deliver $30+ million in 5-year plant property and equipment (PPE) and spectrum savings.
- Oversaw service level agreement (SLA) and managed services contract development to ensure coordinated system upgrades; reduced timeline for software development changes by six weeks and delivered annual cost savings of $600,000.
- Devised and executed a vendor consolidation plan that reduced annual engineering operating expenses by $2 million and further streamlined data sources to enable actionable insights of network performance.
Senior Manager, Product Strategy and Innovation
2001 - 2016
Motorola Solutions
- Analyzed VoC and market research and assembled a rapid prototype team, that delivered key features including narrow-band data, multi-line emergency call merging, and accurate call scanning increasing service revenues by 15%.
- Oversaw software engineering and technical product management for projects exceeding $5 million in capital and $10 million in operations.
- Incepted, based on discussions with existing and potential customers, a software upgrade roadmap to transform from manual upgrades to a services model that reduced upgrade time from months to days, reduced costs by four times, and increased monetization by 30% over three years.
- Served on horizontal diversification patent committee and as co-chair of legacy solutions patent committee; filed +20 patents, including patents regarding mission-critical IoT, edge, and cloud computing interactions, and public safety solutions that increased services revenue 27% year-over-year.
- Directed operational efficiency solution that reduced essential configuration items from 400 to 20 and automated processes; delivered faster, error-free deployment, increased customer satisfaction, and reduced time and cost by five times.
- Analyzed difficult-to-identify race conditions and protocol enablement deemed computationally impossible to accelerate feature enablement; minimized coupling and implemented multi-thread operation to improve product reliability.
Project History
Product Roadmap for MES System at Panasonic
Defined a set of KPIs, identified key players to review, score and prioritize features.
The team was struggling with a number of features and poor clarity on the ones to pursue. Using a team-based decision model, identified important perspectives across sales, support, engineering, and product management to identify a set of KPIs and weights to score and prioritize the features.
Firmware Download to Drive Software Service Model at Motorola Solutions
Led the problem identification and a solution to broadcast firmware to multiple radios on a narrowband network.
Identified a critical problem statement that resulted in Motorola solutions losing revenue because customers were not upgrading the system because of the prohibitive costs of upgrading the radios. Came up with a sleek solution that allowed the firmware to be downloaded while insuring that audio was never lost on these mission-critical systems.
Business Strategy for IoT—U.S. Cellular
Delivered key recommendations to the executive team on market verticals to pursue with a $2 billion revenue potential.
The intent of this project was to research the market viability of IoT with the advent of 5G. The deliverable focused on firm capability using SWOT analysis and a recommendation using Strategy Diamond to define the offering, staging, differentiators, and the economic value of the proposal
Careband Partner Strategy
Collaborated with the founder to define partnerships to build and operate technologies in a B2B environment.
Defined the appropriate vertical integration strategy that allowed Careband to determine its core competencies and the right partnerships with technology distributors (for senior living homes), solution partners to deploy and operate networks at scale and a product roadmap of the solutions that Careband will develop internally.
Other Experience
Education
2017 - 2019
Master's Degree in Business Administration
Northern Illinois University - Illinois
1999 - 2000
Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering
State University of New York, Buffalo - New York
Certifications
OCTOBER 2019 - PRESENT
Design Thinking
LinkedIn Learning
OCTOBER 2018 - PRESENT
Block Chain
LinkedIn Learning
Skills
Tools
Jira, Trello
Paradigms
Waterfall Development, Agile Product Management, Scrum, Augmented Reality (AR)
Industry Expertise
Telecom Equipment & Solutions, Telecommunications, Industrial & Manufacturing, Global Economics, Insurance Technology (Insurtech), Insurance
Other
Sales, Market Research & Analysis, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Product Management, Business to Business (B2B), Business Strategy, Product Line Analysis, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Audio, Signal Processing, Product Leadership, Digital, Innovation, Offshore Team Management, Offshoring, Market Fit, Market Research, Software as a Service (SaaS), Patents, Product-market Fit, Feature Planning, Business Analysis, Product Strategy, Revenue Strategy, Data Warehouse Design, Go-to-market Plans, Business Process Re-engineering, Hadoop, Operations, Manufacturing, Vendor Management, Vendor Selection, Warehouse Operations, Data Warehousing, Inventory Management, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Competitive Strategy, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Data Science, Deployment, Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Request for Proposal (RFP), Pricing, Competitive Intelligence, Enterprise SaaS, SaaS, Pricing Strategy, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), eCommerce, Machine Learning, Strategy, Consulting, Product Roadmaps
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