
Phillip Wood
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Salt Lake City, UT, United States
Toptal member since August 4, 2020
Phillip is a senior product leader with 17 years of fintech experience and a passion for creating vision and inspiring teams to execute. He has led consulting engagements with Visa, MasterCard, TD Bank, and has also built successful products with several fintech startups around payments and small business loans. He has worked extensively with cross-functional teams and has a track record of driving increased user engagement through better product and UX design.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Product Management
- Execution
- Fintech
- Investments
- Mobile Payments
- Product Strategy
- Product Vision
Work Experience
Senior Product Manager
Ancestry
- Led annual and quarterly planning sessions among teams, outlining business strategy, relevant OKRs, and execution plan. Led efforts among teams, including resourcing and tradeoffs to ensure that commitments were met.
- Built onboarding flow for a brand new product that resulted in 95% completion rate.
- Led product updates to main DNA user experience that resulted in a 38% return of dormant users.
- Create new initiatives on a quarterly basis, and work with senior leadership to identify where those initiatives should be prioritized based on business impact.
Senior Product Strategist
PayClip
- Built a referral program that allowed merchants to received discounts on commissions payable to us by referring other merchants. Was adopted immediately and increased referrals from partners by 20%. Referred merchants also had high transaction rates.
- Built a catalog/inventory system that increased customer retention from 40% (at six months since onboarding) to 55% over that same time frame. Also increased the number of transactions per merchant for users who added three or more items.
- Recognized as a leader and asked to start a program to help employees who needed to understand our strategic vision and the impact our products were having on our users. Mentored over ten employees in the six months of the program.
Senior Product Lead
Lendio
- Managed partner relationships and the products they used. Built an analytics dashboard that highlighted relevant metrics for each partner. Decreased time to funded loans by 5% and increased total loans funded by 8%.
- Managed onboarding of lender partners to the Lendio API, which enabled instant responses to small business loan applications. Led and completed integrations with some of the largest lenders in the world.
- Led efforts to automate exchanges between lenders/borrowers, which expedited the processes of loan applications, gathering required documents, approval processes, and getting loans funded.
Senior Operations Manager
FIS Protegent
- Owned ongoing relationships with financial organizations such as AIG, US Bank, TD Bank, and JP Morgan. Provided support for compliance software for investment divisions.
- Designed and implemented processes that streamlined estimation of new work that reduced time to estimate delivery as well as time to project completion.
- Led a team of seven operations analysts servicing 60+ clients. Provided on-site and remote training and led implementation efforts of on-premises software.
Project History
Inventory Management System
https://clip.mx/Led the planning and development of an inventory management system designed to help merchants manage their product inventory. Increased retention from 20%, after one year, to over 40%.
Our intention was to help users manage inventory (which many of them were doing with several different systems) and accept payments with only one system. We also used this as a way to increase retention.
We went through several rounds of user testing, UX strategy sessions, and iterative builds/releases. Users who adopted the inventory system and added at least three products were retained at a rate of 40+% compared to those who didn't. In the short time that we had the product live, it was adopted by 22% of users.
Lender Reporting Dashboard
http://www.lendio.comLed the design and development of a web dashboard that enabled lenders to track the progress of applications sent/received, offers sent/received, and funded loans.
Based on discussions with our partners, and assessing their needs, we decided to build a dashboard that would provide them with that information in an effort to reduce the time between application and presenting the small business with a loan offer.
Providing that insight into the process allowed us to reduce the time to offer from four days to three days, and the time to funded loan from 18 days to 14 days. This resulted in an increase in funded loans by 4%.
Referral Program for Payment Aggregrator
Led the design and implementation of a referral program for small businesses where they received a discount on commissions for each merchant that they referred to PayClip.
We had eight weeks to build a referral program that would motivate users to share our product with other small business owners. 40% of our business came from referrals without any existing referral program in place.
We did a round of user research to identify what was most motivating for users, and also the easiest to offer for the business. The winner in both categories was discounted commissions.
We built an in-app referral program that notified users upon login that we were able to offer a discount on referrals if they referred one user. As they referred additional users, that commission rate was further decreased.
Our referral rate increased by 12% as a result of the initial campaign and resulted in a net increase of over $500 million pesos in the first year.
Onboarding Flow for AncestryHealth
https://www.ancestry.com/healthLed the design and implementation of an onboarding flow for a new product offering containing health data, with a 94% completion rate.
I was tasked with building an onboarding flow that could be built quickly and was also flexible enough to allow for quick iterations once new health reports were ready for release. We also had to be able to track start/progress/completion rates without keeping PII health data.
I led a team of six engineers and two QEs (and interfaced with six other teams) who worked exclusively on this feature for three months. We deployed ahead of time and under budget due to creative thinking around how to implement the feature while maintaining a 94% completion rate for the onboarding flow.
Education
MBA in Technology Commercialization
Westminster College - Salt Lake City, UT
Bachelor of Science Degree in Finance
University of Utah - Salt Lake City, UT
Skills
Tools
Slack, Zoom, Jira, Rally
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Product Management, Scrum, Stage Gate Process, User Testing, Incremental Development, Marketplace Platforms
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Banking & Finance
Other
Fintech, Product Vision, Execution, Investments, Team Leadership, B2B Product Management, Startups, Communication, Product Delivery, Finance APIs, Requirements, Backlog Grooming, Product Management, Finance, Product Owner, Stock Market, Trading, Product Ownership, Technical Writing, User Feedback, Beta Testing, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), New Product Development, MVP Design, Roadmaps, Voice of the Customer (VoC), Software as a Service (SaaS), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), SaaS, SaaS Product Management, Product Strategy, Process Improvement, Strategic Planning & Execution, B2B, Writing & Editing, Product Growth, Director of Product, User Retention, Team Building, User Requirements, Backlog Management, Product Roadmaps, Remote Team Leadership, Product Support, Product-market Fit, Go-to-market Plans, Partnerships, Partnership Strategies, Wealth Management, Mobile Payments, Dashboards, Mobile Apps, Business Consulting, Beta Programs, Mobile Applications, Strategy, Waterfall Methodology, New Product Business Cases, Conceptualization, Ideation, Wireframing, Agile Product Delivery, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Feature Prioritization, Task Management, Sprint Planning, Design Sprints, Business Planning, Project Planning, Business Strategy, Communication Strategy, Remote Work, Leadership, Agile Leadership, Operations, Business to Business (B2B), Customer Support, Analysis, Business Systems Analysis, Business Process Analysis, Pricing, Project Estimation, Cost Estimation, Management, Compliance, BSA AML Compliance, Data Analytics, Process Execution, Agile Deployment, Release Management, Inventory Management, UX Strategy, User Needs, Product Leadership, Referrals, Digital Payments, Payment APIs, Web Product Management, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Cross-functional Collaboration, Project Management, User Experience (UX), Product Design, Data Visualization, APIs, Technical Product Management, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), Artificial Intelligence (AI)
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring