Jon Clark

A brand name with a tremendous legacy following but only marginal awareness from younger enthusiasts sought to build on their recent popularity in the sport compact and tuner segment of the aftermarket. I had the idea to build and run the first virtual drag race competition. Users built their own cars, searched online for cheat codes, and other ways to unlock special parts to improve the performance of their cars. We awarded prizes at different points in the contest.

Popular aftermarket engine program was not able to fill orders because of poor performing suppliers and worn out foundry tools. Reputation had taken a beating in the market, and competitors were investing in a competitive offering. Despite a strong desire within the company to stay the course with the current supplier, I was able to build compelling business and product image case which garnered significant investment in a year when the company was losing money. Competitors stayed out of the market once I regained the product line's footing

I led a Fortune 100 company's participation in an industry joint venture to bring eCommerce tools to auto dealerships. The first product was missing the mark in terms of adoption. I drove the effort to study the user journey which uncovered they preferred to use the phone to accomplish the task. This would have been good to know prior to investing resources into a different channel, so we used the information to determine the "value" that the community was deriving from the phone calls and built those features into the app. After other UX tweaks, we had massive leaps in adoption, and the largest automaker in the US finally agreed to make the tool "mandatory" for their dealers.

I brought the perspective that our mission was to digitally deliver the document management model (for the deal terms) and a business process management model (for sales manager approval). This naturally led the team to understand the need to manage key capabilities with role-based tools. I coached our client and explained that the app could not be built in a vacuum-considering the dealership's ecosystem was paramount; otherwise, calculations and entries would have to be re-keyed in other systems-negating any productivity gains we claimed. I showed the client that focusing on barriers to adoption meant we needed to consider adjacent systems. If we built certain functions into our app, that meant that a dealer could consolidate several functions into one app, retiring other apps and reducing spend.

This company wasn't sure if they wanted to remain in the business of building and offering mission-critical software to their dealers. I helped them see the benefits they had derived from doing so (most of them differentiating) and the need for them to retain those capabilities going forward. I then designed a process that leveraged the analytical-hierarchical process to rack/stack and evaluate the different consumption options for a software platform. It was necessary to facilitate a number of workshops and wade into some very contentious discussions. Inside the company, there were camps "for" and "against" this approach. I facilitated them understanding the selection process so that the platform decision they made was truly that-a decision they themselves made, not merely a recommendation from me, which could be thrown away. I helped them settle on Microsoft Dynamics platform and they also picked the ISV that I brought to their attention.

The company wanted to enter the Industrial IoT market but had no idea how to do it. I led the effort to identify the addressable market, determine which capabilities were valuable to potential customers, and then look at existing capabilities the company already had vs. ones they needed to build or acquire. To better understand what customers needed and how a potential product would be managed, I led the process to interview and assess players in the market for a pilot project.

A major automaker was suffering from an exploding backlog of defects and dealership support issues resulting from several products compiled from a messy code library. I led the effort to consolidate the products covering hundreds of vehicle models into a single shared library-without duplicate objects, spiraling out of control. The result was a greater ability to focus on new model support and less self-created defects during maintenance.