James Routledge
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since March 24, 2021
James is a serial product leader with 15 years of experience. He notably built the product of a fintech now exited for $490 million and specializes in product-market fit and product-led growth work for Seed to Series B. James has built products in the following markets: health, fintech, social networks, eCommerce, and beauty. He speaks internationally on product-led growth, including keynotes; his talks are available online.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
CPO/CTO
James Routledge
- Ran a consultancy helping Series A companies and venture builders. Built a top beauty SaaS for Europe's number one venture builder, Founders Factory.
- Built the product organization for Grant Thornton. The squads were constructed from the new horizontal product organization and produced seven figures of new revenue within the first three months.
- Pivoted an HR-tech company from SMB to enterprise focus, resulting in a valuation increase from £5 million to £200 million within two years (NDA).
Chief Product Officer
Harper
- Built and scaled a healthcare mobile and web product to look after the mental health and wellbeing of patients undergoing medical treatment or suffering from chronic illness.
- Launched into the IVF (fertility) market with the B2B2C model to partner with clinics to look after the emotional wellbeing and levels of wellness of 100% of patients in clinics in the US (New York) and UK (national).
- Developed and recruited the team from 0-12 staff, building the organization and rapidly scaling, using a large seed round. Brought network and ten years of experience in product management to help find a product-market fit within six months.
Interim Head of Product
NDA - Beauty eCommerce
- Rebuilt the growth and eCommerce strategy for the beauty leader for their web initiatives including fulfillment in their dedicated warehouse.
- Built a data warehouse across Shopify, Ometria, and GoogleAnalytics to aggregate one view of the customer and helped them to calculate customer lifetime value (CLV) over cohorts to find which customers are profitable.
- Built a customer-focused model where eCommerce defined its customers and market sizes and started to personalize the experience to increase advocacy.
CPO
Halo
- Built a social network that acquired 1 in 20 homes in districts of London for an average customer acquisition cost (CAC) of $2.
- Built an average engagement of 3.5 sessions per day, creating a daily addictive product.
- Increased WAU retention to 60% at 90 days, building a sticky habitual product in local communities.
Product Lead
Sentenial
- Created a new payments platform, Nuapay. Sentenial processes €2 billion every 10 days through their payment networks.
- Advised the business on how to acquire SME clients with a virtual bank account strategy.
- Created the initial thinking around an API strategy which eventually closed Worldpay as a key client.
Product Lead
Simply Business
- Built the UX for the UK insurance market. Built white-labeled into leading aggregators. Redefined how people buy insurance in the UK.
- Optimized the back office (200+ staff) to help improve efficiency around payments by 80%.
- Increased the bottom line revenue by 7% in my last seven weeks.
Project History
Social Network
Led the creation and product market fit of a app used daily and weekly by millennials in the UK market with 60% WAU and strong network effects.
Fintech SaaS
https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/Grew the online insurance market in the UK, created the highest converting forms in the industry.
Luxury Rental Marketplace
Helped the business build a matching solution for getting people with an ultra-high net worth (UHNW) to find and book during luxury holidays. The average basket was $12,000+. This company is Airbnb for UHNWs.
In many cases, a UHNW would delegate to a PA/EA, both the source and decision-maker.
Digital Banking App
https://www.nuapay.com/en/Created, from the whiteboard stage, a new payments account product for the European market in 2015, one of the first global Neobank accounts.
Blockchain Recruit Tech
https://eva.ai/Led the turnaround of a recruitment startup to use blockchain technology to find product market fit for candidates with no work experience in the hospitality sector.
Project and Resource Management System for Talent
https://beamery.com/platform/overviewBuilt out a new UI around passive talent pools to enable the acquisition of talent that could be held until ready to activate
Their CRM/SaaS is designed to acquire all the potential talent you might need, create an engagement strategy around these pools of different people, and keep them connected to your hiring process until you are ready to put them into an active role.
Influencer Marketplace
Built a leading influencer marketplace, now partnered with the largest agency WPP for their influencer marketing.
For brands, it is the only product to give a rating on the quality of engagement and the fake follower counts tied to each type of social account.
Zine is a marketplace that enterprise customers use to learn which influencers to trust and offer a one-click management option for working with them on a retainer or a one-off basis.
Payments on a Home Services Marketplace
Helped Angi reshape their payment offering, increasing their volumes of payment by the hundreds of millions.
My job was to run the teams at Angi to help increase payment volume, as this would directly improve pro retention.
Reorganized the team and helped the business add data-driven decisions by rebuilding how data is used from customer service and across the product streams. Added customer focus to the department with direct access to customers, which resulted in teams understanding the customer deeply for the first time, which resulted in massive improvements across the customer experience and increases in payment volumes after an extended period of stagnation.
Marketplace for Short-term Rentals
https://www.snaptrip.com/Improved conversion between consumers and b&b's by revising the UX for finding and booking stays.
Skills
Tools
Jira, Strategyzer, Google Analytics
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Agile Product Management, Agile Product Management, Requirements Analysis, CRO, Marketplace Platforms
Platforms
Mixpanel, Shopify
Industry Expertise
Consumer Products, Healthcare App Design, Logistics Consulting, Marketplace Design, Luxury Goods
Other
Data Science Product Management, Customer Discovery, Product Roadmaps, Design Strategy, P&L Management, Technical Product Management, Agile Team Leadership, Feature Roadmaps, Product Strategy, SaaS Product Management, Fintech Development, Product Management, Startup Development, Growth Product Management, UX Development, E-commerce marketing, Head of Product, Roadmaps, App Product Management, GTM Marketing, Growth Product Management, Business Partnerships, Business Strategy, Partnerships, Product-market Fit, Business Model Canvas, Business Modeling, Product Delivery, New Product Development, Consumer Applications, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Product Coach, Product Strategy Consulting, Product Discovery, Design Consulting, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Web Application, Documentation, Virtual Product Management, Research, User Stories, Web & Mobile Applications, Team Leadership, Stakeholder Management, Project Planning, Project Timelines, Discovery Workshops, Conceptualization, Ideation, UX Development, Branding, Brand Strategists, Pricing, Strategic Partnerships, Value Proposition, Market Research & Analysis, Developer Relations, Medical Applications, Medical Software, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), UX Development, B2B Product Management, Dashboard Design, SQL, JavaScript, Analytics Development, Digital Health, Marketing Design, Go-to-market Plans, Coaching, MVP Design, Influencer Marketing, Social Marketplaces, Mobile App Design, Payment Networks, Payment APIs
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