Joshua Childs
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Salem, MA, United States
Toptal member since August 5, 2020
With over 10 years of experience in 0-to-1 ventures, Josh has written code, designed UX, and built roadmaps as an individual contributor; in leadership, he's run businesses, hired teams, and led enterprise portfolios in excess of $50 million ARR. His experience includes real estate, learning management, healthcare, consulting, and email deliverability.
Expertise
- Business Models
- Design Management
- Financial Modeling
- Product Design
- Product Roadmaps
- Product Strategy
- SQL
- Team Leadership
Work Experience
Director of Product Management
Validity
- Handled a 3-product $60 million portfolio, spanning SMB eCommerce offerings to Fortune 500 enterprise contracts.
- Engaged regularly with senior leadership, developing strategy, facilitating decision-making, and resolving escalations.
- Developed the portfolio strategy, including product team-level goals and overseeing roadmap development.
- Managed new product development from capital asset review to design research, to financial modeling, and through to development and launch.
- Maintained cross-functional relationships that were key to gathering needs, driving change, alignment, and organizational preparedness.
- Hired and managed the PM team, emphasizing empathy and collaboration; mentored and coached on best practices.
- Enhanced multiple development processes in collaboration with engineering leadership.
- Facilitated security and privacy compliance efforts required by enterprise software procurement.
Senior Product Manager
Validity
- Led a cross-functional team to conduct competitive analysis and set new pricing for the product's pay-as-you-go and subscription customers, representing 11% of company revenues.
- Coordinated two org-wide projects related to Salesforce automation and ToS agreement management.
- Led efforts in overhauling the product’s pay-as-you-go revenue model, including a customer migration project, resulting in a revenue increase of 29% YoY.
Product Manager
OpenMarkets
- Managed a product portfolio comprised of two legacy offerings and three new products developed and launched.
- Organized and led empathy-building activities for the development team, on-site hospital visits and observation in context, interviews, and user journey mapping.
- Launched the first GPO-agnostic marketplace. Within three years, this resulted in over $47 million in transactions and adoption from over 4,100 healthcare facilities across the US.
- Coordinated engineering, sales, customer support, and marketing in winning key customer partnerships. Wins from this work include three of the top 25 healthcare systems in the US.
- Won key partnerships with Fortune 500 suppliers, including Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare, and Toshiba.
- Launched a reporting system as part of a company-wide KPI overhaul, resulting in double-digit growth in key metrics.
- Advised CEO and sales on data, channel, and enterprise opportunities. Many projects were reconsidered or restructured due to thoughtful discussions about opportunity costs.
- Offered one-on-one mentoring sessions with interns and entry-level team members.
Product Manager
Learncore (Showpad Coach)
- Recruited to stand up the product management function and to re-orient the development process around a desirability-feasibility-viability framework of prioritizing work.
- Developed a listen-build-communicate-learn process internally, bringing account managers, developers, and customers into alignment around changes and improvements; executives used these standards to vet the first permanent product manager.
- Saw Learncore growth accelerate between 2016 and 2017. Showpad acquired it for $50 million in 2018.
Chief Technology Officer
inRentive
- Designed and launched an industry-first global distribution service for apartment leasing data with a companion iOS photo app, addressing a pain point in creating and publishing listing content for mid- to high-rise apartment buildings.
- Built and led an offshore development team; achieved a 16-hour development day between time zones.
- Managed the product innovation process, visiting customers on-site, observing needs and friction points, and conducting postmortem. This resulted in several outspoken internal champions at existing and potential customer organizations.
- Designed a customer onboarding service, reducing onboarding time from weeks to days.
- Structured and executed partnership proposals with Realtor.com, Zillow, and Apartments.com; ran product strategy, resources planning, and roadmap discussions with executive counterparts.
- Prepared and pitched to VC groups in Chicago and San Francisco, fielding product- and tech-related questions; won investment from both, including Steve Case (AOL) and Sam Yagan (OkCupid).
- Recruited by 1871 to represent Chicago at Google for Entrepreneurs' Demo Day; co-pitched inRentive at the event.
Design and Development Manager
Urban Lux
- Designed and launched internal-facing web applications, resulting in around a 50% reduction in work required by agents and customers through the apartment shopping process.
- Designed and launched a customer-facing web application for dynamic apartment searching.
- Established development processes for more reliable and easier code deployments.
Education
Master of Science Degree in Product Design and Development Management
Northwestern University - Evanston, Illinois, USA
Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Graphic Design
Texas Christian University - Fort Worth, Texas, USA
Skills
Tools
Slack, Asana, Google Docs, GitHub, MURAL, Figma
Paradigms
Agile, Design Thinking
Industry Expertise
Marketplaces, Professional Services, Healthcare
Platforms
ProductPlan, Productboard
Other
Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Roadmaps, Roadmaps, Web & Mobile Applications, Feature Prioritization, Product Design, Team Leadership, Design Research, Human Factors, Business Strategy, Typography, Graphic Design, Digital Photography, Web UI Design, SQL, Financial Modeling, B2B Product Management, Project Estimation, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Product Discovery, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Data Analytics, Pitch Decks, Technical Product Management, Market Research, API Integration, Stakeholder Management, Project Scoping, Service Design, Data Analysis, Phase-Gate Process, Negotiation, Intellectual Property, Design Management, Marketing, Business Models, Business Model Canvas, Print Media, Web Application Architecture, Periscope Data, PostgreSQL, Release Management, Product Planning, Feedback Review, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Mentorship & Coaching, User Research, Remote Team Leadership, Customer Support, Technical Hiring, Investor Presentations, Scrum Master, B2B Partnerships, Customer Research, Customer Success, Excel 365, Pendo, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Management, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Mentorship, Executive Presentations, Organizational Leadership, Pricing Strategy, Revenue Modeling, P&L Responsibility, Cross-functional Collaboration, Design, Market Research & Analysis, Fractional CTO, Machine Learning, eCommerce
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