Mohamad Chehab
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Berlin, Germany
Toptal member since October 11, 2022
Mo is a product leader with experience across various industries and businesses, from early-stage startups to enterprise-level companies. He specializes in product strategy, business transformation, and execution. Mo is an expert at maximizing impact and ensuring that a strategy is well-executed across the organization.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Business Models
- Growth Strategy
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)
- Product Leadership
- Product Strategy
- Strategy
- User Retention
Work Experience
Chief Product & Technology Officer
OpenUp
- Transformed the organisation to increase throughput and team velocity by 100% while reducing spend by 10%.
- Delivered a unified product and technology strategy to drive annual recurring revenue (ARR) and net revenue retention (NRR).
- Delivered on the product roadmap, including new services, mobile app, and user-facing AI features, increasing activation by 50% and ARPE by 10%.
Global Director | Vice President
Babbel
- Increased YoY growth by 100% in the first year and led the new business unit to profitability.
- Grew the team by 50% from <40 team members to more than 65 while successfully transitioning the engineering freelancers out while hiring our core engineering capabilities.
- Led the strategy review process and successfully recommended and deployed a strategic pivot based on market research and user data. This led to better growth numbers, reducing the cost of acquisition and increasing lifetime value.
Director of Product and Engineering
Babbel
- Headed a tribe of cross-functional teams with 10 direct reports, six product managers and designers, and a total of over 50 full-time equivalents.
- Drove engagement and retention, increasing weekly active users by 10% in 2020 and the activation rate by 10% in 2021.
- Led the product strategy-setting process, including setting product-wide OKRs and focus areas for all product teams. Served as the owner of one of three company OKRs and handled company-wide execution across all departments.
- Set up product processes and portfolio management and reorganized team setups, reducing discovery time by 50% and boosting delivery predictability across teams.
- Hired product managers, product design leads, and product marketers and devised a development plan to upskill product managers across different stages of their careers after setting up a career framework for the broader product organization.
- Provided regular support to the M&A team in the early assessment of opportunities and ran the product aspect of the due diligence process.
Chief Product Officer
Basking Automation
- Headed the company's product development, operations, and strategic partnerships, generating 6-figure revenues in the first year of operations and 7-figures after three years.
- Hired and managed a team of more than 10, including the heads of operations, engineering, design, and data science. The goal was to roll out and iterate on the platform used across Europe, the US, Canada, and Latin America.
- Led the proof of concept and partnership negotiation with Colliers as a strategic partner during the Techstars accelerator program in Q4 of 2018.
- Optimized the sales growth loop across all customer touch-points, halved the lead time, and generated a solid lead base leveraging freemium acquisition loops.
Head of Digital Ventures
Bombardier
- Launched Bombardier's first venture investment program, focused on mobility, cybersecurity, and AI while reporting to the CIO.
- Led the scouting, business cases, and due diligence of 120 potential startups, resulting in 3 MVPs and Bombardier's first startup investment.
- Advised the C-level suite on digital transformation projects related to smart cities and B2C products.
Head of Product for Big Data, Analytics, and AI
Bombardier
- Set up multiple product teams and Agile processes to deliver ten new digital products in the B2C and B2B spaces, leading a team of 20 full-time equivalents and three direct reports.
- Led the design, testing, and implementation of the first company-wide data lake on Amazon web services within three months, unlocking new capabilities across analytics, AI, and new B2B product services.
- Headed the centralization of business intelligence services and delivered company-wide KPI dashboards to the CEO and board as the near real-time single source of truth.
- Managed the development of internal AI products in supply chain and predictive cash management.
Project Manager for Business Turnaround
Bombardier
- Headed the project management office for a €1 billion portfolio, targeting an EBIT recovery of 20% and deploying new business processes.
- Led the preparation and negotiation of a €25 million legal claim in Saudi Arabia facing one of the world's largest infrastructure firms, recovering 90% of the mandated target, compared to the 30% company-wide average recovery rate.
- Advised three projects with over €600 million in cost restructuring, cashflow optimization, and claim management to achieve the region's turnaround targets.
- Managed a project delivery with five direct employees for the regional Turkish government. The budget was over €300 million, and my contribution led to €3 million in avoided costs.
Project Manager
Bombardier
- Developed a product roadmap and go-to-market strategy for a predictive maintenance solution in Europe and the Middle East.
- Headed one of six project teams, audited the performance of the London subsurface re-signaling project worth over €400 million, and worked with Transport for London.
- Modeled the financial performance of transportation systems, including recommending the best-winning bid strategy for the 30-year Crossrail project worth over €1 billion.
- Managed the due diligence process for acquiring assets and contracts in Asian markets.
Project History
Product Strategy Process
Devised the product strategy for Babbel by working with the C-level and the company leadership team.
Babbel is a German premium subscription-based language learning software and e-learning platform, available in various languages since January 2008, and today one of the top-grossing language learning ecosystems.
I devised the product strategy with the C-level during the yearly planning period and followed an approach that included diagnosis, guiding policy, strategic scenarios, product strategy, product roadmap, and OKRs.
OKR Management Process
Served as a key results owner of the company's three yearly objectives, devised and implemented a method to assess confidence and process towards the objective, and implemented it across the entire product organization.
The implemented process enabled the C-level to understand all product initiatives, how they contribute to product OKRs, and how overall OKR confidence is affected. This allowed product leads to have a future-looking view and be proactive about roadmap changes to maximize the outcome.
Cloud Architecture Implementation on AWS
Managed the design, implementation, and delivery of the entire back-end cloud architecture to unlock new capabilities in the B2B and B2B2C space for one of the world's largest service providers.
As head of the program for digital transformation, I was tasked to bring about new capabilities by leveraging cloud architecture, enabling the company to unlock new analytics capabilities, implementing machine learning projects, and upgrading the software service offering.
I started by designing the back-end cloud architecture, consisting of ingestion platforms, data lakes, data warehouses, and different scalable and price-efficient services. Using the RFP process that I implemented, we selected Microsoft Azure and AWS as the two preferred vendors. Then, we tested the architecture on both platforms by running simulations and live projects and assessed the performance based on speed, capabilities, privacy, security, scalability, and SLA. Eventually, we selected AWS and started a partial cloud migration that consisted of all BI reporting, new machine learning projects, and future software solutions in B2B and B2B2C spaces.
Education
Master's Degree in International Business
Grenoble Ecole de Management - Grenoble, France
Research Fellowship in Biomedical Engineering
University of Wisconsin - Madison, WI, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
American University of Beirut - Beirut, Lebanon
Certifications
Monetization and Pricing
Reforge
Advanced Growth Strategy
Reforge
Product Strategy
Reforge
Retention and Engagement
Reforge
Skills
Tools
Slack, Asana, Jira, Trello, Atlassian Suite, Figma
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, B2B2C, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)
Platforms
Azure
Other
Product Strategy, Product Leadership, User Retention, Engagement Strategy, People Development, Strategy, Startups, Product Management, Finance, Product Roadmaps, Roadmaps, Digital Product Management, Product Consultant, New Product Development, Project Planning, Startup Funding, Early-stage Funding, Market Research, Mobile Apps, Pitch Presentations, Auditing, Technical Product Management, Leadership, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Market Opportunity Analysis, Marketing, B2B, Business Models, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Process Improvement, Growth, Pitch Decks, API Integration, Estimation & Planning, Technical Project Management, User Experience (UX), Growth Strategy, Monetization Models, Pricing Strategy, Organizational Design, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Big Data, Software, Research, Financial Modeling, Innovation, Microsoft Office, Google, Venture Funding, B2B Partnerships, Stakeholder Management, Architecture, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Business Intelligence (BI), Partner Management, Project Management, Restructuring, Business Transformation, Business Transformation Program Management, Corporate Law, Corporate Strategy, Bid Management, Product Growth, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Portfolio Management, Operations, Cloud, Program Management, Digital Transformation, Serverless Architecture, Engineering, UX Design, New Products, Content, SEO Marketing, Product Marketing, Technology
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