Joe Lacy
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since September 2, 2021
Joe has a proven track record of taking ideas from zero to one, architecting, shipping, and selling new products internally and externally. He's created a multi-drone control system fielded globally, co-founded an ML platform used by 300+ organizations, including the U.S. Space Force, and led PepsiCo’s AI programs, which generate $120+ million in value each year. Sample project: Autonomous Decision Support for Mission-Critical Operations.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Artificial Intelligence Product Manager
- Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS)
- Business Development
- Data Product Manager
- Machine Learning
- Strategy
Work Experience
Product Manager
PepsiCo
- Launched an enterprise platform for planning marketing investments to optimize for incremental revenue, leveraging a suite of predictive machine learning (ML) models.
- Coached leaders in restructuring organizations to deliver as cross-functional pods rather than siloed teams of specialists.
- Succeeded in saving over $70 million in marketing and supply chain expenses with internal products for decision-making.
- Led the AI Assistants initiative, integrating large language models (LLMs) and function-calling agents to accelerate workflows in search marketing, competitive intelligence, promotion planning, and supply chain analysis.
Product Management Consultant, AI Agents & Autonomy
U.S. Air Force
- Led a team of five engineers in developing AI agents that act as co-pilots for convoys of small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs).
- Groomed and prioritized features based on input from Air Force stakeholders, organized deliverables into a product roadmap, and conducted daily scrum with the team to drive delivery.
- Interviewed dozens of aerial mapping specialists in the agriculture, mining, and construction sectors, developing a go-to-market strategy for commercializing the technology beyond the Air Force.
Product Manager, Autonomy and Robotics
Army Futures Command
- Advised Major General Ahern, director of concepts, on technology requirements for robotic combat and sustainment systems, scoping features for high usability, and rapid, low-cost resupply.
- Defined mission payloads for self-driving vehicle fleets to aid field commanders in constructing obstacles, clearing hazards, and protecting soldiers in austere environments.
- Developed processes for developing robotic autonomous systems (RAS) at minimal expense to ensure the ability to replenish in a strained logistics environment.
- Acted as a tech scout to match emerging technologies with capabilities gaps for the army's modernization efforts in AI, autonomy, and robotics.
- Supported agile execution of research with scientists from Army Research Labs on robotics, autonomy, and human factors engineering, creating a roadmap for building robotic ground swarms.
Consultant, Data Science and Analytics
M&T Bank
- Developed a database to correlate customer location data with rich context instructive for customer behaviors.
- Managed the implementation of machine learning to produce classifications of behavioral patterns in data.
- Generated visualizations and annotated findings to support presentation by CMO to M&T's board of directors.
Infantry Officer
US Army
- Directed a 40-person element in conducting combat training, developing operational orders for maneuver exercises, and coaching subordinate leaders, succeeding in sustaining the highest-performing platoon in the brigade.
- Led a platoon in responding to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, embedding with the US Secret Service, developing operational plans, leading civil response training, and directly supporting the protection of lawmakers, the US president, and the VP.
- Developed product requirements for developing autonomous systems for the US Army.
Chief Operations Officer
All Vision Intelligence
- Designed and led the development of a software platform built on Python, FastAPI, and React that operationalizes non-supervised machine learning to classify trends, patterns, and subtle anomalies in data with high dimensionality.
- Scaled a data analytics platform to support accounts with 300+ data science and machine learning teams at Apple, McDonald's, Visa, Workday, and Walmart.
- Led a team of 11 machine learning, back-end, and human-computer interaction engineers in continuously building enhancements to the Allvision platform, enabling end-users to more easily interpret and make decisions based on operating data.
- Acted as a program manager for a $1,000,000 ARR contract to perform deep, unsupervised detection of contextual anomalies for surveillance objects in near-earth orbit.
- Acted as a program manager for a contract to help develop USAF's Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) program, publishing microservices to support USAF’s targeting and decision-making nodes within the broader JADC2 initiative.
- Performed interaction design and requirements management to develop an enterprise platform for data analytics and management that automates data correlation for causal analysis, population segmentation, and emerging trend analysis.
- Developed a product roadmap for MLOps suite optimizing usability, computational management, infrastructure, and scaling for unsupervised machine learning algorithms.
- Led product marketing and technical sales for a data analytics platform, scaling to seven figures in ARR.
- Spearheaded lifecycle product development of the AutoML tool for advanced data modeling applications, performing ideation, UX research, prototype delivery, launch, and maintenance.
- Led the analytics for product and customer acquisition performance and forecasted and monitored P&L results.
Product Manager
Capital One Financial
- Acted as the primary product owner for the development of mydata.capitalone.com, a new public-facing web application enabling 5,000 US visitors per month to exercise data control rights.
- Directed product development from UX research to QA development for peer-to-peer customer payments experience, generating a straightforward, assuring experience for customers whose payments take longer than usual to process.
- Defined the requirements for 33 original features, establishing user acceptance standards, technical architecture requirements for deploying features to production.
- Led the data analytics for the privacy platform, instituting session tracking infrastructure, developing KPIs and SQL queries, and generating reports on the behavioral patterns of thousands of monthly active users.
- Acted as interim product owner for eight sprint teams assigned to the privacy tech program for three months, providing support, fielding questions, and issuing requirements to sprint teams consisting of 40 developers.
- Conducted UX research on peer-to-peer customer payments, designing prototype, analyzing A/B tests from 30 test users, succeeding in identifying effective messaging to guide P2P users towards making safe payments decisions.
- Participated in daily standups with two sprint teams, supporting developers in clarifying workflow, accessing information, and ensuring engineers succeeded in building updated wire payment experience.
- Generated customer fallout reports for bill pay UI, matching points of heightened fallout to specific screen designs, ultimately recommending retention of existing bill pay UI.
Founder
ValCycle
- Implemented low-tech MVP to validate demand for sustainable reverse logistics platform, managing $500,000 of product in partnership with a community organization to raise over $30,000 for a partner, enabling 100% recovery for clients.
- Developed and executed growth strategy, monitoring key performance indicators including cost per acquisition, lifetime value, and continually adjusting operations to resolve inefficiencies, finally succeeding in achieving 212% expansion during pilot.
- Devised and implemented strategic marketing initiatives, encouraging recipients to buy from community partners, maintaining a 3% average digital conversion rate and 10% event response rate, cumulatively influencing 1,000+ transactions.
- Coached a two-man engineering team in developing a program matching product traits to pricing data, outlining workflows and mapping user experience, ultimately creating a prototype to optimize prices for $100,000 in merchandise.
- Researched user needs, networking with 35 supply chain and retail executives to analyze inefficiencies in retail operations and identify attributes of a solution, succeeding in designing a business model with product-market fit.
Project History
Privacy Platform for Capital One
https://www.capitalone.com/privacyLed the development of a full-stack platform for data management in six months, leading 40+ SWEs to build out an application that enables 5,000 users to manage their data privacy each month.
The Capital One Privacy Platform is a public-facing portal for users to file requests for reports on the personal data stored on them, as well as to request deletion of eligible data. The Privacy Platform acts as a resource for Capital One’s customers to maintain positive control over their data rights and signifies Capital One’s commitment to privacy-by-design in financial services.
Analytics Dashboard for Space Traffic Control
Led the design and implementation of a predictive analytics dashboard that assists US Space Force personnel in tracking objects in space.
US Space Control personnel rely on the dashboard for visualizations and insights about 8 million events in space daily. The application provides anomaly recognition, behavioral forecasts, and the capability to visualize alternate forecasts based on different courses of action.
Persona Database at All Vision
Led the scoping and generation of a dynamic dataset of customer communities in the United States in support of multiple D2C clients.
The All Vision Persona Database draws on multiple public data sources to provide rich contextual information for customers in any census tract. The database further classifies customers with similar attributes and behaviors, enabling precision marketing campaigns for over 300 million US residents.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Political Science
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Skills
Tools
Jira, Figma, InVision, Zoom, Slack, Asana, QuickBooks Online
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Agile, Requirements Analysis, Scrum, Key Performance Metrics, Team Development, Agile UX, B2C, Stage-Gate Process
Platforms
ProductPlan, Google Ads, Alteryx, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Industry Expertise
Logistics, Insurance
Other
Strategy, Business Development, User Stories, Feature Prioritization, Product Sales, Product Roadmaps, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS), Data Product Manager, Management, Operations, Leadership, Product Vision, Business Analysis, Communication, Lean Startups, eCommerce, Startups, Product Ownership, Digital Product Management, Technical Product Management, Agile Leadership, Voice of the Customer (VoC), Business Cases, New Product Business Cases, Software as a Service (SaaS), Product Discovery, Discovery, Stakeholder Interviews, Coaching, Business to Business (B2B), New Product Development, Requirements, Requirements & Specifications, Team Leadership, Project Planning, Cross-functional Team Leadership, AI Automation, Presales, Project Discovery, Stakeholder Management, Data Analysis, Project Management, User Research, Proposals, Roadmaps, Product Marketing, UX Research, Data Visualization, Planning, Innovation, Data Analytics, Product Strategy, Product Owner, SaaS, User Experience (UX), Product Design, Agile Program Management, Product Management, Fintech, Release Management, Business Models, Business Planning, Market Research, Growth Strategy, Growth, Product Consultant, Project Consultancy, Executive Support, Technology, Discovery Workshops, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Advertising, Sprint Planning, Product Development, Scheduling, User Interface (UI), Ideation Workshops, Workshops, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Service, Process Automation, Software Development, Growth Hacking, A/B Testing, Analytics, Conversion Rate, Mapping, Mobile Apps, Product Growth, Manufacturing Product Manager, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Customer Insights, Best Practices, Human Resources (HR), Backlog Management, Legacy Software, Retail & Wholesale, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Supply Chain, Estimations, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Proof of Concept (POC), Data Management, Databases, Solution Architecture, Cloud Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Data Platforms, Technical Consulting, Program Management, Fundraising, Profit & Loss (P&L), Customer Acquisition, Unit Economics, Agile Sprints, Agile Delivery, Scaling, Story Mapping, Feature Roadmaps, Feature Analysis, Feature Planning, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Validated User Research, Content, UX Writing, Product Analytics, UX Analysis, Product Delivery, P&L Management, Business Proposals, Product Mapping, New Products, Product Leadership, UX Roadmaps, Pattern Recognition, Product Launch, Lean, Lean Product Manager, Web Product Management, User Requirements, User Needs, User Flows, FastAPI, React, Tech Sales, Agile Coaching, Market Segmentation, Customer Segmentation, Operating Models, Gmail, SQL, Data Science, Python, Ads, Native Ads, Data Quality Management, Data Quality Analysis, B2B, B2C Marketing, Regulatory Compliance, Regulations, Regulated Industries, Scrum Product Owner, IT Projects, CTO, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Creative Problem Solving, Complex Problem Solving, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, eCommerce Platforms, IoT Protocols, Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Robotics, Finance Product Manager, Inventory Management Systems, Marketing, Web Content, Branding, Salesforce, Open Banking APIs, Waterfall Methodology, Technical Writing, Research, Scientific Data Analysis, Autonomous Navigation, Robotics Product Manager, Education, Mobile App Development, Data Extraction, Marketing Technology (MarTech), Underwriting, Learning Management Systems (LMS), MEAN Stack, Commerce, Cost Estimation, Market Research & Analysis
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring