Michael Bychowsky
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Chicago, IL, United States
Toptal member since April 9, 2019
For 20+ years, Michael has successfully led multiple programs as a product management and product development executive. He's able to blend advanced engineering skills with practical business acumen, operational excellence, and process development with hands-on technical expertise. Along with having exceptional communication and presentation skills, Michael is an energetic leader with the ability to collaborate among a globally dispersed team.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Analytics
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Organizational Development
- Process Design
- Product Leadership
- Product Management
- Scrum
- Team Leadership
Work Experience
Director of Warehouse Automation Offer and Service Delivery
Zebra Technologies Corporation
- Owned the service offer management portfolio and roadmap for the Zebra AMR business. Collaborated with sales and product business units to drive new solutions introduction and flawless delivery across all regions.
- Directed, planned, managed, and oversaw the activities of the Warehouse Automation Services Organization.
- Developed a strong working relationship with business stakeholders and leveraged peripheral functional teams to execute and enable delivery of all aspects of client solutions, including custom features and add-ons.
- Identified and executed process improvement, activities, and techniques to grow and scale the business.
- Translated corporate and business objectives to build and manage the roadmap to improve service delivery and provide direction for regional sales and global services leadership teams.
Product Manager
MWB Consulting
- Focused on helping clients solve critical issues using my deep experience in product management, portfolio management, product development, software engineering, big data, and analytics.
- Corrected the courses of projects to get them back on track and to be managed smoothly and deliver as expected.
- Performed at multiple speaking engagements across different industries focusing on data monetization and data-led product development lifecycles.
Technical Product Manager
Caterpillar
- Increased adoption of the Caterpillar Helios Platform by focusing on uncovering the core needs of industry partners and aligning them to platform capabilities.
- Led the assessment of Caterpillar’s current API landscape and defined a transition and strategy plan that pivots Caterpillar from disconnected development across multiple silos into a common and structured API Product Portfolio and Roadmap.
- Defined the overall product structure to manage the API Portfolio to ensure that it is highly focused on meeting and exceeding customer values and has the proper foundation for scale.
Director of Offer Management
Motorola Solutions
- Employed as a Senior Leader and helped in the transition for Motorola Solutions from a Product company to a Service Led and XaaS Solution Organization.
- Managed 20+ Global Product and Offer Managers focused on a broad set of solutions ranging from optimization of enhanced warranty programs to Incubator-driven complex solution offerings.
- Defined processes to work closely with product development and service delivery to create offers that are continuously validated throughout the development lifecycle. Ensured MVP targets are met while maximizing execution velocity.
- Aligned closely with the sales organization to identify VoC input about their offer portfolio to understand their overall experience better and give guidance to create new solutions that extend beyond Motorola Solutions' product and software.
Director of Product Management
Harman International
- Led Harman's data analytics product line that is focused on providing analytics and data management for the automotive industry and consumer insights as part of the IoT (internet of things). Focused on defining and driving the analytics to be provided to our customers, improve internal processes across the organization, generate new sources of revenue, and create a high-tech, high-touch customer service experience.
- Created, championed, and drove the new industry models for external and internal data monetization to create new value that hadn't existed previously.
- Defined and managed Harman's portfolio analytics roadmap utilizing thorough engineering, business development, and project management expertise.
- Oversaw and was responsible for the global coordination of individual product requirements across business development and technical teams in Germany, India, China, and the US.
- Acted as the industry leader with membership in SensorIS working group, Genivi RVI, and CCC Car Data Working Group.
Owner
Young Rembrandts | Wholesome Tummies
- Owned and managed two franchise businesses dedicated to providing healthy alternatives for children’s lunch programs and creative arts for school programs.
- Rapidly established, grew, and stabilized the operations of two local children-focused franchise businesses.
- Managed the operations which were overseen by family, hiring staff to operate independently.
- Grew the art business 143% in revenue YoY and reduced costs by streamline processes and removing non-value-added activities.
Product Manager
HERE Technologies
- Product-managed the digital transportation infrastructure product by developing and implementing the solution using the LTE Roadmap which delivered a quick cost-efficient delivery of roadway dangerous driving events and analytics.
- Product-managed the German TMCPro RDS Broadcast service, managing a seamless cut over to a new data center and optimization of service that is used by a 10 million+ installed base of drivers.
- Acted as the knowledge champion of next-generation experiences with community and crowdsourcing of traffic data.
- Defined and executed the digital transportation and social traffic roadmap, focusing on improving the existing quality to increase contract wins with OEM auto partners and government agencies.
- Championed innovative social product concepts that created brand-new revenue opportunities.
- Managed the global traffic incident roadmap within the HERE's Connected Driving organization, significantly increasing global footprint by 50% and improving quality by introducing innovative validation techniques.
Senior Director of Technology
Motorola
- Successfully built, coached, and mentored a team of 25 engineers, program managers, and testers from scratch, and quickly drove the execution to accomplish all milestones within a 16-month period.
- Launched the first mass-market consumer product smartphone in the US market which allowed Motorola to build new volume and revenue opportunities on top of success in other rest-of-the-world markets (Latin America, Asia, EMEA).
- Launched the final mass market portfolio products into the NA market. Shipped over 3 million units with 300 million in revenue for 2H 2012.
- Successfully managed and strategically defined US customs and import plans for phones manufactured by Asian ODM partners to cooperate with multiple patent infringement complications.
- Built and managed the technical team charged with driving the mass market portfolio successfully into the competitive North America market. Responsibility included full regional accountability for the product, safety and legal compliance, program management, technical requirement definition and testing, and overall execution of the programs across North American carriers.
Director of Software Engineering
Motorola
- Drove, as the senior leader, third-party supplier management, requirements planning, software development and execution of all mass market mobile products.
- Defined, structured, and managed software resources and feature development plans for mobile phones shipped to worldwide regions through Asian manufacturing partners.
- Managed a $12 million product development and testing budget.
- Championed and managed consistency and transparency among programs to achieve maximum leverage and program alignment while avoiding duplication of effort.
- Directed a 60-member global software team with staff located in the US, Beijing, Nanjing, and Taipei. The projects relied heavily on Digital Six Sigma tools and processes.
- Created a consumer experience culture, implementing a clearly differentiated set of solutions in the market keeping customers loyal to the brand.
- Built and managed a third-party portfolio process which allowed for streamlined vendor management and aligned with product releases. The right solutions at the right time for the product plan.
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Motorola
- Directed the development, testing, and delivery of software solutions of Japan DoCoMo products.
- Managed the quality, performance, and budget of device management, user interface, applications, and release management teams.
- Worked with an international team of ten (directly reporting) and 80 (indirect) engineering/system architects working in India, Japan, Italy, Israel, and the US.
- Engaged directly with customers, third-party vendors, and internal teams to drive timely progress within challenging schedules.
- Utilized Six Sigma practices to resolve issues.
- Managed a $9-10 million annual resource budget.
- Raised the overall performance level of these groups through effective mentoring and motivation, achieving a front-line manager zero attrition rate for two years.
- Drove a process improvement focus that included the elimination of excessive changes in project requirements through a new requirements management policy.
- Reduced third-party dependency by improving the competency of internal teams.
- Created a release management organization for the Japan Products group resulting in the launch of Motorola’s first FOMA phone in Japan.
- Led a software development team to provide first digital network access devices to the automotive industry, moving from the previous analog AMPS approach.
- Implemented 3:1 Vocoder for Motorola's iDEN platform release. Several patents were issued with Motorola on this technology.
Test and Integration Engineering Manager
Motorola
- Led software release integration and box/system test functions for small to mid-market wireless communications system. Features included telephony interconnect, push to talk, packet data, and SMS.
- Managed an offshore test facility, coordinating all operations to achieve challenging goals.
- Defined, implemented and managed a vital process improvement system that institutionalized professional software development procedures and disciplines, resulting in a major turning point that greatly improved the capabilities and deliveries from the group.
- Drove new processes to adaptively group test cases around results and to define test cycles.
- Worked as a member of the management team that defined portfolio features for future Harmony product releases.
- Worked as a system architect for iDEN Harmony Platform, and designer/architect for the 32 DSP Transcoder board which was able to process 96 simultaneous calls.
Business Development Manager
Motorola
- Managed the Telematics Portable Handset portfolio, driving roadmap development, supply chain management, warranty and remanufacture processes, contract negotiation, and new business development.
- Engaged actively with external customers, internal groups, and vendors to define and present the vision and goals for this group.
- Gathered and analyzed feedback to determine market needs.
- Oversaw and was responsible for distribution and phone content for the Cadillac and Harley Davidson boutique phone programs.
DSP Software Engineer
Motorola
- Played an instrumental role in the design, configuration, integration, and process improvement activities.
- Contributed highly innovative and novel approaches to solving technical issues, resulting in several US patent applications.
- Worked as key developer in voice technology improvements that allowed Nextel to grow at record pace.
Project History
TMCPro Traffic Service
Product-led the TMCPro traffic service for a seamless transfer over to a new data center for 10 million+ users.
ROLE: Product Manager
I was brought in to assess the current program that was several months behind schedule. I was then able to determine multiple feature creep tasks, adjusted the program’s course back to an MVP level, and delivered within six months.
iDEN Harmony Platform
Developed with a contract manufacturer on an entirely new transcoder processing board to work on CompactPCI.
ROLE: System Architect
The iDEN Harmony platform was designed to bring all distributed infrastructure functions into a single computing box. This was intended to be used by small countries or large corporate campuses to reuse the current base stations and off the shelf handsets.
I developed a full cPCI board with 32 DSP and a microcontroller to deliver 96 simultaneous voice channels per card. The transcoder processing board is still in use as it was originally designed until the end of the product’s life.
HSDPA DoCoMo Phone Handset
Owned and delivered an 8,000+ page UI flow document for the HSDPA DoCoMo phone handset.
ROLE: Senior Software Development Manager
The key item to be included in all deliverables to DoCoMo was a user UI document. This includes all of the possible screen flows that are on the phone. Initially, this was documented separately than software development but later it became clear that this document was the source of test specs and test cases for the phone.
On this project, I worked closely with an outsourced provider (Omron) in Japan to define a process to keep the UI document and all software releases in full lockstep to dramatically improve customer test results.
Education
Post MBA Certificate in Business Administration
The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University - Evanston, IL, USA
Executive MBA Degree in Business Administration
Northern Illinois University - DeKalb, IL, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Northern Illinois University - DeKalb, IL, USA
Certifications
New Product Development Professional (NPDP)
PDMA
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Certified Professional in Business Intelligence (CPBI)
Villanova University
Skills
Tools
Jira, Tableau
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile Product Management, Stage-Gate Process, Agile
Industry Expertise
Automotive, Telecommunications
Other
Process Design, Product Management, Freelancing, Business Analysis, Requirements, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-market Plans, User Research, Business Models, Product Design, Product Marketing, Product Frameworks, Innovation, Product Ownership, Product Discovery, Waterfall Methodology, Patents, Organizational Development, Product Leadership, Team Leadership, Voice of the Customer (VoC), Business Cases, New Product Business Cases, Software as a Service (SaaS), Python, SQL, Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI), APIs, Platforms, Aha!, Product Portfolio Manager, Portfolio Management, Service, Automation, Leadership, Robotics, Consulting, API Integration
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