Phillip Wood, Product Manager in Salt Lake City, UT, United States
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Phillip Wood

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
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

Inventory Management System
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%.
Lender Reporting Dashboard
Led 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.
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.

Expertise

Work Experience

Senior Product Manager

2018 - PRESENT
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

2017 - 2019
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

2016 - 2017
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

2009 - 2016
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.

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%.

PayClip is a credit card processing system that allows all merchants to accept credit cards with various device types that connect to a phone.

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.com

Led 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.

Our partner lenders had no visibility into how many applications they were sent from Lendio, how long they held applications before returning an offer, or the stage that those loans were in once the offer was sent back to Lendio.

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.

PayClip is a payment processing tool that small businesses use to accept credit card payments using a phone or a stand-alone device that has a cellular or wifi connection.

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/health

Led the design and implementation of an onboarding flow for a new product offering containing health data, with a 94% completion rate.

AncestryHealth is a new DNA based product that offers users a look into potential health issues based on certain markers in their genetic makeup.

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.
2011 - 2013

MBA in Technology Commercialization

Westminster College - Salt Lake City, UT

1997 - 2001

Bachelor of Science Degree in Finance

University of Utah - Salt Lake City, UT

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