Matti Kakkori, Product Manager in Carlsbad, CA, United States
Matti is available for hire
Hire Matti

Matti Kakkori

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
Carlsbad, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 12, 2019

Matti is a product management leader with 15+ years in both large organizations and startups. He has managed technology PM teams, re-structured $5+ billion product portfolios, and built and brought to the market several 0-1 products. He has established data and development processes and built and managed teams in product, engineering, design, and data. Matti has worked on products—consumer HW devices, smartphone SW platforms, physical goods and eCommerce, applied AI/ML, SaaS platforms, and GIS.

Project Highlights

AI/ML SaaS for Water Utilities
Led product strategy, design, and development. Built the product from prototype to v4 and 40+ B2B customers.
Product Portfolio Strategy for $5+ Billion Revenue Business
Developed a product portfolio strategy to simplify an overgrown but very successful consumer electronics product range.

Expertise

Work Experience

Chief Product and Technology Officer

2019 - PRESENT
Rehinged.ai
  • Built and led the product, data, and engineering teams to create a simple, elegant modern B2B SaaS application that leverages a custom-built AI NLP platform.
  • Scaled the initial product and engineering team of four to 20+ distributed team members across the globe.
  • Grew the customer base from paying customers to dozens of successful B2B enterprise customers.

Chief Product Officer

2012 - PRESENT
Galaxy & Sons
  • Designed and built data-focused web applications leveraging AI and ML.
  • Ran a product management consulting practice targeting mobile and web application space.
  • Contributed to projects including a smartphone technology roadmap for a world-leading semiconductor company.
  • Defined, designed, and managed the development of a cross-platform consumer mobile application for iOS and Android.
  • Defined, designed, and managed a mobile insurance software platform development. The platform ran on the web with mobile clients on Android and iOS.

VP Product

2016 - 2019
Fracta.ai
  • Defined the product strategy and developed a web application prototype that was used to correct assumptions and gather feedback from lead customers.
  • Drove the development of SaaS SW platform that wraps a complicated AI/ML algorithm utilizing geospatial GIS data into an easy-to-use SW product that meets the needs of municipals customers in tackling renewal of aging water infrastructure.
  • Led a team of data engineers and built Fracta’s data pipeline and process to guide customers from messy data to refined ML driven results.
  • Defined and executed a structured agile product and SW development process for the company. Helped evolve the product from Prototype to V4 and grow the customer base from zero to 40+ municipalities.

Product Management, Smartphone Experiences

2010 - 2012
Nokia USA
  • Led the Nokia smartphone experience definition for Nokia Verizon products with a long term vision of sensor and AI-driven complete product experience.
  • Collaborated across all functions of Nokia North America from the leadership team to SW and HW engineering.

Product Portfolio Strategy and Product Range Management

2008 - 2010
Nokia Denmark
  • Defined portfolio strategy and product lines for Nokia Live Business Unit with $5+ billion annual sales.
  • Led product strategy to restructure part of Nokia’s sprawling product portfolio, with many hard decisions.
  • Guided the PM function as a product range manager, coordinating activities across sales, marketing, design, R&D and PM in Nokia’s large matrix organization to maintain a coherent product line.

Senior Manager, Business Strategy

2006 - 2008
Nokia USA
  • Developed a classic business strategy for the Nokia CDMA Business unit - analyzing available markets, M&A, and partnerships.

Technology Product Management

2003 - 2006
Nokia USA
  • Led the tech marketing team to define technology roadmaps for Nokia CDMA products. Technologies covered from RF/Bluetooth to DRM and multimedia.
  • Worked closely with engineering and SW platforms to build products that meet customer.

Various Engineering Roles

1998 - 2003
Nokia Finland/UK
  • Worked at various roles in different mobile phone and software business units.
  • Developed game engine software that shipped in 100+ million devices.
  • Wrote and held mobile internet technology training and workshops across the globe, e.g. consulting swiss banks on mobile internet security.

AI/ML SaaS for Water Utilities

Led product strategy, design, and development. Built the product from prototype to v4 and 40+ B2B customers.

The project centered around building a complex AI application utilizing GIS and mapping technologies for a startup. A complete end-to-end strategy and development project that included:
- Developing a well researched customer-needs driven product strategy
- Coding a quick and dirty mockup to test assumptions with lead customers
- Specifying and leading the development of an MVP version of the software
- Creating product marketing materials and launching the product in a large industry trade show
- Leading the technical sales for the product
- Running engineering and building a structured agile development process for further improvements
- Through multiple architecture and technology improvements reaching V4 of the software and 40+ B2B customers

Some basic technologies used in the project: AWS, Laravel, Django, Mapbox, ESRI, JIRA, Python, Jupyter, etc.

AI/NLP Web Product for Market Research

http://rehinged.ai

Led product design and development for a groundbreaking AI/NLP-driven market research platform.

Led the product definition for an AI/NLP-driven software product that can ingest a huge amount of textual data, analyze and enrich it and then provide detailed insights into perception people and markets have about brands and products.

The software product is delivered as a SaaS product.

Product Portfolio Strategy for $5+ Billion Revenue Business

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XpressMusic

Developed a product portfolio strategy to simplify an overgrown but very successful consumer electronics product range.

The product portfolio comprised of 20+ devices that as whole were very successful and were generating $5+ billion in revenue annually. But overall the marketing message and effectiveness of the product development was suffering from a too complicated offering.

I created a thorough market and consumer needs-driven analysis on how to re-structure the product portfolio to be more balanced and more accurately capture the market volume and demand.

The strategy was adopted and implemented as part of a larger restructuring of the business unit.

Foldpass - A Creative Collaboration Game on iOS

http://foldpass.com/

Designed and ran the development for a simple turn-based creative game with a design twist.

Foldpass is a simple turn-based game where users can write short text passages and invite friends to complete the three-line haiku poem.

The result can then be made into a well-designed poster through an embedded poster editor with downloadable poster packs.

I led the design, development, and launch of the application.

The architecture was a Phonegap-based iOS application connecting to a Django back end.

MobileCrax - Insurance Application

https://appadvice.com/game/app/mobile-crax/1221835534

Designed and ran the engineering for the web application and multi-platform iOS/Android mobile app development.

Led the product strategy, design, and development for a mobile device screen insurance product for the Mexican market.

The mobile application was designed to run on both iOS and Android and was built on Apache Cordova. The backend and the web interface used by customers and the repair was a simple Django/Bootstrap development.

I wireframed the application and UX in detail and led the engineering project with a development company.

Dsider - a Decision-making Platform

https://web.archive.org/web/20130531131837/http://dsider.com/

Designed and built a social decision-making platform running in iOS.

Dsider was an idea of a decision-making platform with a social component. Users could enter criteria that are important in their decision, weigh them, and also include friends' opinions. The weighted algorithm then recommended the choice.

I ran the UX and product development for the application and managed the off-shored development of the back-end server and the mobile application.

Long-term Smartphone Experience Planning

Led a team planning a comprehensive long term smartphone experience for the US market.

The project scope was to design a long-term plan (2-5 years) for a leading smartphone experience for the US market.

The project team was huge with participants ranging from executive office to sales and marketing to HW engineering.

The project considered various inputs from consumer and technology trends to competitive M&A transactions and developed HW and SW prototypes and mockups.

Building an Agile Development Process from Scratch

I defined and ran an agile development process for a startup growing from 2 engineers to 10+.

Earlier the company development was more ad-hoc and focused on heads-down coding.

I established an agile development process when the team started growing. The development team adopted the system of 2-week sprints with well defined epics, user stories and tasks in JIRA.

The implementation of the agile process sped up the development of new features and products. (Of course, hring a larger team didn't hurt either. ;-) )
1996 - 2001

Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering

Helsinki University of Technology - Helsinki, Finland

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring