Mike Mitchell
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Winston-Salem, NC, United States
Toptal member since May 27, 2020
Mike has 30 years of experience in the enterprise technology industry as an entrepreneur, consultant, and product strategist. He has been a founder or early contributor to several successful startups, leading product organizations, and digital consulting practices, most recently focused on AI and transformation. Mike holds a computer science and engineering degree from MIT, plus a minor in music.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Data
- Digital Transformation
- Leadership
- Product Delivery
- Product Strategy
- Technology Consulting
Work Experience
Managing Director
Trigr Innovation
- Led product strategy, innovation, user experience, and engineering for Agorai as founder and chief product officer. Designed a 2-sided data and model marketplace to bring innovative AI to a broader community.
- Designed and implemented the product operations architecture for Lyra Intel, an engagement platform and mobile marketplace connecting multi-family and office communities with their property management and local merchants.
- Advised a number of startup firms on business and product strategy, including EntityKeeper, Odigia, SwipeBy, Leading Role, Petrics, Proodos, and others.
- Served as a board member or advisor for startup accelerators and business mentoring groups including Winston Starts, New Ventures, Plato, Veterati, Venture Cafe, and CLT Joules.
Vice President of Transformation
Hypergiant Industries
- Initiated the AI transformation practice for Hypergiant's Space Age Solutions division.
- Led an AI-first digital transformation for a global conglomerate, heading strategy, discovery, and execution teams in a comprehensive program to bring a diverse industrial organization into the modern era.
- Created a platform strategy for a large global client, tying together a complex portfolio of bespoke AI-powered solutions in a coordinated business and technical architecture to deliver tens of millions of dollars of business value.
Chief Product Officer
Agorai
- Founded the product organization for Agorai, assembling a design and engineering team to most effectively drive value for the organization and its customers.
- Designed the Agorai architecture incorporating distributed ledgers, federated data systems, as well as a centralized storage to facilitate a multi-sided marketplace for data, AI models, and software which together fuel the intelligent economy.
- Created the Agorai company operational infrastructure, establishing toolsets best suited to virtual collaboration by a global team.
- Performed due diligence on all Agorai partners and key marketplace contributors, ensuring unique and differentiated capabilities were represented in its data and AI marketplace.
Director
Publicis Sapient
- Led the cognitive product development to showcase joint solutions with AI alliance partners, seeding tens of millions of dollars in the commercial pipeline for the data and AI team.
- Headed the transformation office’s change program following Publicis’ acquisition of Sapient, integrating 25,000 employees, diverse toolsets, methodologies, and operational practices and establishing today's Publicis Sapient organization.
- Advised executives on the setup of a technology product joint venture between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, successfully establishing a new company that will automate securitization of most US home mortgages through technology.
- Led the company setup and product strategy for a new software venture building complex, one-of-a-kind grid-scale electrical power solutions, paving the way for the first-ever integration between all three US power grids.
- Created the strategy for supporting a product organization within a professional services firm, which was adopted and is being successfully utilized within Publicis today in organizations such as Publicis Spine.
Chief Operating Officer and Head of Product
MissionMode Solutions
- Oversaw and was accountable for product management, technical operations, alliances, and client services for MissionMode's global customer base.
- Drove the portfolio strategy, Agile development, and delivery; developed strong partnerships enabling innovation and scale; designed, built, and maintained global technical infrastructure supporting hundreds of enterprise customers.
- Maintained daily customer interactions as chief product consultant on sales, support, implementation, privacy, and information security.
- Grew a multi-product portfolio to profitability within three years and annual recurring revenue to approach $10 million.
- Sustained a schedule of six major releases per year, setting the bar as the most current, customer-driven incident management platform on the market.
- Pioneered a multi-tiered global telecommunications platform for critical enterprise communications, producing the best message quality with one of the lowest delivery costs in the space.
- Engineered a resilient, scalable SaaS infrastructure supporting four consecutive years of uptime.
- Partnered with FedEx, Stanford University, and others on cutting-edge industry solutions.
Project History
Industry-leading Enterprise Incident and Crisis Management Platform
I founded MissionMode and led its product and operations organizations in creating the situation center platform and its component products, leading the company to profitability within the first three years.
MissionMode began as a business automation platform to integrate voice, text, and email to automate business tasks for executives. Through interactions with early clients, it became clear that the need for such automation went far beyond the C-suite and extended throughout the enterprise.
Over the course of 10 years, I led MissionMode’s product and operations team, pioneering the technology that integrated voice, text, web, and mobile-based tools into a comprehensive crisis management and communications platform. It was the platform that utilities, banks, airlines, manufacturing, and logistics firms counted on to be available when their own systems and processes failed.
While competitors focused on increasingly commoditized mass notification functionality, MissionMode went far beyond notification to add value in situational awareness and task management. I partnered with organizations like FedEx and Stanford University to create innovative industry-specific solutions in logistics and higher education. For example, he designed a dynamic crowd-sourced situational awareness tool called EarShot, which revolutionized the approach to safety and security in large campus environments.
AI-powered Enterprise Transformation Portfolio
I architected an AI-first enterprise transformation strategy for a diverse global conglomerate proposing themed platforms across a dozen business units to deliver tens of millions of dollars in business benefit over 3-5 years.
As VP of Transformation for Hypergiant, I led the design and execution of a multi-project portfolio to initiate the digital transformation of a global client who was trailing years behind its competition in multiple industries.
My team took a center of excellence approach to perform discovery across a broad and set of business groups, prioritize pain points and common themes, establish design and infrastructure standards, and architect shared platforms that could be leveraged by diverse business to achieve tens of millions of dollars in annual business value.
Artificial intelligence and an aggressive data strategy was proposed in every possible solution to ultimately centralize and normalize the client’s vast enterprise data and knowledge. AI ethics policies and governance were proposed to ensure the use of such technology and data maintained the client’s longstanding corporate principles, prioritizing its customers, employees, and the communities it serves.
Product Strategy for a Services Organization
Developed enterprise product strategy for a large consulting firm, including organization structure, leadership and process.
Even the most successful services firms struggle with how to leverage their IP into higher margins and better efficiency for their services engagements. While developing accelerators and even whole products is common within these organizations, the business model is generally antithetical to what’s needed to commercialize and sustain a software product.
As part of an internal enterprise transformation effort which Mike also led, he developed a recommended structure and process under which a large services firm could support its ongoing development of productized software IP. This strategy included specific goals and KPIs which acknowledged the difficult nature of product development in services firms, and identified specific organizational, cultural and financial structures and incentives necessary to drive success in this area.
The strategy was adopted and is being used today as the basis for the product division at the firm.
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cambridge, MA
Skills
Tools
Jira, Slack, Zoom, Confluence, Trello, Basecamp
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Agile
Platforms
MacOS
Other
Product Delivery, Strategy, Leadership, Tech Sales, Product Support, Technology Consulting, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data, Product Strategy, Agile Product Delivery, iOS, Marketing, Management Consulting, Digital Transformation, Lean UX, Aha!, Smartsheet, Formstack, Qualtrics, Project Management, Product Management, Management, User Experience (UX), Data Products, Data Science Product Manager
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