Richard is available for hire
Hire RichardRichard Kay
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since April 27, 2020
Bio
Richard is an entrepreneurial, highly strategic, and analytical product leader with a strong technical background. His passion lies in building products that deliver meaningful web and mobile applications for scale. He is confident leading multi-disciplinary development teams with the ability to speak the technical and non-technical language. Richard brings five years of consultancy expertise with IBM and BAE systems, and six of senior product management with large projects and tech startups.
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Business Strategy
- Go-to-market Plans
- Mobile Apps
- Product Design
- Product Roadmaps
- Product Strategy
- User Experience (UX)
Work Experience
CEO and Founder
2017 - 2020
Chaperhome
- Formulated the initial concept based on the identified market need for background protection of teenagers and young adults socializing in city centers. Drove acquisition of 2,000+ signed up users, with a conversion rate of 52% from first sighting.
- Established best practice agile product development, running 2-week sprints to manage priorities across UK-based and offshore developers. Feature set included: Geo-positioning, text alerts, community engagement, linked APIs, and interactive mapping.
- Delivered against aggressive deadlines enabling multiple releases from prototype through to commercial release that pivoted according to user feedback. Delivered releases, each one delivering a 20-30% increase in interaction (iOS and Android).
- Organized the feature set including geo-positioning, text-based alerts, community engagement, linked police APIs, and interactive mapping.
- Oversaw all other company activities, including marketing, website creation, branding, IP protection, legal processes, company structuring, and annual accounting.
- Implemented a multi-channel marketing strategy that drove customer acquisition costs from £5 per user to below £2 per user. Channels included newspapers, social media, radio interviews, and magazines.
- Built the Chaperhome website, ensuring this was a focal point for attracting new users and investors. Managed design companies to ensure high-quality user experience and an appropriate ‘look and feel’ that resonated with users.
- Put in place critical company legalities, including the creation of shareholder agreements, IP protection of the brand name and logo across the UK, company registration, user terms and conditions, employment contracts, and contractor contracts.
- Sourced contractors for marketing, legal, design and development, balancing capabilities against cost.
- Engaged in several investor fundraising rounds, sourced seed funding for initial prototype, and launch of the first two iterations. Invited to pitch at several events, including “Pitch at the Palace” and “GC Angels.”.
Head of Pre-sales Product
2018 - 2019
SafeToNet
- Implemented and monitored an agile product development process to improve the communication between the sales and tech teams.
- Implemented and monitored a highly structured agile system for the tech team. This included the creation of 2-week sprints and translating sales feedback into clear, structured stories with pre-planning and retrospectives.
- Introduced new KPI’s that provided trackable weekly units of work and improved roadmap delivery estimates by 70%.
- Opened up communication with the sales and tech team through regular weekly meetings and frequent timely updates allowing feedback to be rapidly adopted into the product improving sales team engagement.
- Advised the commercial and marketing team on strategy and product placements, setting realistic expectations with the tech leads that generated a reliable three, six, and 12-month feature roadmap plan.
- Implemented daily reporting to the leadership team to give visibility of roadmap, timelines, and deliverables. This included a RAG status of all products with clear articulation of any ongoing issues and blockers.
Head of Application Support
2016 - 2017
MarketInvoice
- Created the customer support service through a live chat and ticketing system. I offered first-line support to potential and current customers, feeding this back to the technology, marketing, and sales teams to drive improvements in the product.
- Managed, prioritized, and assigned work for 16 people across four work streams.
- Created the development stories and bug resolution for the company’s online and internal platforms.
- Provided clear information and improvements through weekly reports, acting as the interface between executive management, sales, and technical teams to decrease the backlog by 67% and increase user acquisition by 17%.
- Improved customer satisfaction by 46% by providing technical management and support.
- Utilized customer understanding to provide user insight and highlight product deficiencies, driving improvements in product, marketing and sales teams.
Lead Business Analyst
2015 - 2016
BAE Systems
- Developed website design, created test scripts, apps, customer profiling, user requirements, and concept breakdown into work streams. Responsible for and successfully delivered projects on time.
- Provided full breakdowns of client requirements for existing and new projects and facilitating workshops for new solutions.
- Consulted as a subject matter expert to understand client requirements and create new solutions.
- Facilitated communication between managers, architects, clients and programmers to design the best solution.
- Took current project problems and weaknesses and creating viable and improved strategic solutions.
- Worked as a one-man team inserted into difficult and self-starting situations.
- Defined new processes, frameworks, and templates for client-wide projects and led business analysis.
- Ran quantitative analysis of client metrics to set project benchmarks and new growth targets.
Senior Technology Consultant
2011 - 2015
IBM
- Brought a balanced and strong foundation with business analysis, testing and project management in the financial, distribution, public sector, and large corporate projects throughout the entire lifecycle of each project.
- Led large cross-supplier teams responsible for a product development budget of c. £10 million, focusing on delivering new requirements. Managed releases and coordinated multiple teams of over 150 people.
- Created new strategies to optimize processes and new proposals to complete phases of the product lifecycle for multiple products and teams of over 20 people.
- Ran workshops and facilitated team leadership for supplier teams working across multiple work streams.
- Managed the full breakdown of client requirements for existing and new products and ran workshops to create new solutions.
- Designed and built graphical web interfaces for clients. Presented workshops to create wireframe mock-ups for potential designs, optimizing user acceptance, page navigation, and content access.
- Created end-to-end solutions for medium and large-scale implementations.
- Ran full E2E testing processes for large (£10 million+) products, including test scripts, documentation, and strategy.
- Created and implemented the strategy for functional, integration, performance and resilience testing. Managed test teams for medium and large-sized products (£1 million+).
- Controlled and coordinated defect management for the program, which consisted of multiple teams and suppliers totaling 100+ developers.
Consulting Services
2010 - 2010
NCC Group California USA
- Spearheaded a 3-month placement with a leading global provider of independent escrow, information security assurance, and advisory services.
- Worked with the sales team, IT solutions (including ethical hacking, escrow agreements, and installation and encryption processes), security testing, and website monitoring.
- Led and developed a high profile asset management project.
Project History
Safety App for Commuters
Formulated initial concept based on identified market needs for background protection of teenagers and young adults socializing in city centers. Drove acquisition of 2,000+ signed up users, with a conversion rate of 52% from the first sighting.
WalkSafe is a start-up focussed on security technology, enabling peer-based safety. Built on a product-led strategy, the business secured initial investment and grew its user base from 0 to 2,000+. The business has proven scalability; however, there is no further investor appetite. I am in the process of winding down this business (expected completion Q2 2020). I imposed and delivered against aggressive deadlines enabling multiple releases from prototype through to commercial release that pivoted according to user feedback. I delivered multiple feature releases, which each delivered 20-30% increases in user interaction across iOS and Android. The feature set included geo-positioning, text-based alerts, community engagement, linked police APIs, and interactive mapping.
Education
2007 - 2010
Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Technology in Organizations
University of Southampton - Southampton, England
Skills
Tools
Jira, Skype, Google Docs, MySQL Workbench, Visio, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Project, GreenHat, Axure RP Pro
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Waterfall Development
Other
Microsoft Office, User Experience (UX), QA Testing, Mobile Apps, Websites, Project Management, Product Design, Business Strategy, Go-to-market Plans, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Microsoft Excel, ITIL, CSS3, HTML5, MySQL, Microsoft PowerPoint, Java, PHP, eCommerce, Web Platforms
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