Mark DelSesto
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Boston, MA, United States
Toptal member since November 8, 2022
Mark has over 25 years of software and product management experience. He started his career at Motorola, writing embedded software for cellular radios. Transitioning to product management, Mark successfully grew a new startup product to over $20 million in annual revenue, selling it for $135 million. He's worked with a healthcare startup to create a SaaS-based AI/ML analytic product for the pharmaceutical industry. Mark has a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from DePaul.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- B2B
- Computer Science
- Due Diligence
- Entrepreneurship
- Healthcare IT
- SaaS Product Management
- Software Engineering
Work Experience
VP | Data & Analytics Products
EVERSANA
- Owned the roadmap of a SaaS tool enabling analytic access to healthcare claims and electronic health record (EHR) data, empowering user personas to pull patient journeys, market intelligence, and other insights, requiring no data science experience.
- Built an automated analytical capabilities suite to enable advanced patient-finding techniques leveraging standardized machine learning (ML) algorithms.
- Led due diligence meetings for selling HVH to EVERSANA, a private equity-backed company, resulting in the acquisition of HVH for an undisclosed amount of over $20 million.
- Focused on the post-acquisition roadmap expansion to include new client portal concepts, productization of traditional consulting projects—including switch prediction and influence mapping—and drug commercialization after the FDA approval.
VP | Monetization Product Management
Mavenir
- Managed the integration of a startup, Aquto, into the much larger process-oriented company, Mavenir. Covered integration concerns ranging from sales compensation, roadmap planning, and engineering assignments to legal and finance coordination.
- Focused on short-term execution, maximizing revenue from existing SaaS customers, and securing additional deployments across telecommunication operators in Asia and Latin America.
- Collaborated with wireless operators for sponsored data usage. Managed the operator's integrations while leveraging technology partners to lead on-site tasks.
Director | Solution Architecture
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Led a team of solution architects charged with increasing the sales pipeline for long-term evolution (LTE) traffic steering and load-balancing solutions.
- Managed a complex sales cycle with deep-dive technical discussions, in-person and remote, to identify key use cases, leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) and networking function virtualization (NFV) technology.
- Participated in SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2016, presenting unique applications of SDN technology for MSOs to offer L2 and L3 VPN connectivity inside and outside their traditional footprint.
- Directed a unique SIP load-balancing product from initial customer discussion through requirements specification and design sign-off to wide-scale production deployment at a large MSO.
Founder
620 Systems
- Incubated multiple company concepts, such as transitioning stand-alone monolithic LTE core network products into virtualized commodity hardware solutions.
- Investigated third-party advertising models leveraging broadband and mobile service provider privacy data and potential incentive arrangements to enable identity sharing.
- Validated concepts with venture capital partners and potential customers, such as Verizon and Comcast.
VP | Product Management
Camiant
- Managed the company's overall product and positioning strategy as the executive team member, holding the complete product portfolio and roadmap prioritization.
- Participated in the $135 million sale of Camiant to Tekelec in May 2010. Drove extensive deep-dive due diligence meetings, covering roadmap details, software architecture, sales strategies, and future development plans and costs.
- Championed a 10-times increase in orders, achieving over $20 million by 2009 while scaling headcount more than two times and growing to 110 employees worldwide at the time of acquisition.
- Sold the product policy to top-tier operators, including Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and Telefonica, besting large integrated competitors, such as Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia-Siemens.
- Championed a phased development process to ensure product design through delivery aligned with customer requirements and expectations. Implemented a roadmap management process to ease the integration of product planning with tier-1 operators.
- Led America's sales engineering team in post-acquisition to drive sales expansion and continue customer-facing activities. Communicated with product and engineering teams to provide guidance and prioritization on product direction.
Project History
Camiant PCRF
Led the development, sales, and deployment of the Camiant Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) for cellular 3G and 4G networks.
Camiant successfully sold PCRF to Vodafone, Verizon, and Bouygues Telecom in France, participating in trials and pitches with many other important providers worldwide, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Bharti, Reliance, KDDI, and China Unicom.
In 2010, Tekelec acquired Camiant; nevertheless, due to the strength of the product and adjacent development leveraging the PCRF beachhead, Oracle acquired Tekelec in 2013.
ACTICS.ai Portal
https://actics.aiLed the ideation, development, and deployment of a client portal that delivers customized healthcare analytic insights.
SCIPHER Healthcare Claims & EHR SaaS Platform
Led the development, trials, and launch of the SCIPHER platform.
PRDICT Social Media Listening Platform
Led the development of the PRDICT Platform, designed to enable users to query social media conversations and perform predictive analytics to understand sentiment and conversation direction.
PRDICT enabled users with no data science background to run predictive analytics across social media conversations, leveraging custom ontologies and contextual search powered by named entity recognition (NER).
I led the PRDICT program as the product manager, owning the roadmap and managing all customer interactions and day-to-day engineering management.
Education
Master’s Degree in Business Administration
DePaul University - Chicago, IL, US
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA, US
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Slack, Zoom
Paradigms
Data Product Management, Requirements Analysis, Agile UX, Agile, HIPAA Compliance, Agile Project Management
Industry Expertise
Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals
Other
SaaS Product Management, Head of Product, Product Management, Product Vision, Product Roadmaps, Roadmaps, Product Strategy, B2B Product Management, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Team Management, Requirements, Technical Project Management, User Requirements, Feature Roadmaps, Technical Product Management, Feature Planning, Snowflake, Software as a Service (SaaS), Strategic Planning, Ideation, R&D, Conceptualization, Business to Business (B2B), Process Development, Build Processes, Growth, Product Sales, Strategy, New Product Development, SQL, Data Visualization, Product Owner, Client Delivery Management, Python 3, Delivery Management, Business Requirements, Product Discovery, Software Engineering, Computer Science, Entrepreneurship, Agile Delivery, Agile Sprints, Mobile Advertising, Internationalization, Telephony, Venture Funding, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Big Data, Analytics, Healthcare IT, Due Diligence, B2B, Pitch Decks, Pitch Preparation, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), SaaS, Business Models, Product Marketing, Data Analytics, Data Analysis, Enterprise SaaS, Artificial Intelligence (AI), User Research, Feature Prioritization, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Pricing Strategy, Pricing Models, Natural Language Processing (NLP), A/B Testing, Feature Flags, LaunchDarkly, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Project Planning, Project Timelines, Discovery Workshops, Servant Leadership, Chief Product Officer (CPO), Interim CPO, User Experience (UX), Mobile Apps, Product Positioning, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Wireframing, Workflow, Business Analysis, Digital Product Management, Data Auditing, Scope of Work (SOW), Databricks, Agile Project Management, API Integration, Accounting, Valuation, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Life Science, Project Lifecycle, CI/CD Pipelines, Project Tracking, Salesforce, Microsoft PowerPoint, HTTP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Responsive Web Design (RWD), Machine Learning, Healthcare Claims, Microsoft Excel, Miro, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Long-term Evolution (LTE), 3GPP, Diameter, PCRF, Cryptocurrency, Mobile Applications, Clients, Fundraising, Product Branding, iOS, Android, Clearing Houses, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)
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