Charles Myers
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Berkeley, CA, United States
Toptal member since November 6, 2019
With over 40 years of engineering and product management experience, culminating in Agile project management, ownership, hiring, and leading UX and development teams, Charles has designed, built, and managed several leading software products. He has successfully led and united teams on a product direction from inception to end-of-life. Charles can work well within large companies and small teams or business transformations where one leads both product and culture.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Project Management
- Kanban
- Product Owner
- Remote Work Consulting
- Scrum
- Story Mapping
Work Experience
Scrum Master
Capital Rx
- Led teams in sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Facilitated discovery, internally known as epic planning, workshops. Coached teams on how to create good user stories.
- Acted as scrum master for various teams, including DevOps, clinical programs and member portal, Cybersecurity, and IT. Used Scrum or Kanban as appropriate.
- Partnered with product managers to create INVEST user stories and to get to a prioritized backlog.
- Acted as interim director of quality assurance, transitioning knowledge from the previous director of QA and mentoring the new director. Created actionable product quality metrics for company quality council.
- Acted as interim product manager for a few months for the clinical programs and user portal team.
- Integrated team Jira Kanban with Jira Service Management to integrate incident response with ongoing user-story work.
Director of Product Operations
Capital Rx, Inc.
- Transitioned from a contractor to a full-time role to further develop the product process and governance as we began to scale up in staff size. This tripled the size of the product management group.
- Trained and mentored new product managers on the product management process. This was primarily focused on requirements gathering, user story mapping, and quality user stories to meet an MVP and then refine this with our stakeholders.
- Introduced story-mapping and epic planning as a framework for taking a large-scale project, breaking it down into smaller chunks, and then writing estimable user stories.
- Developed an onboarding methodology to bring new software developers and QA staff productive within their 1st week and entirely up to speed in their 1st month.
Agile Coach | Jira Expert
Capital Rx, Inc.
- Worked for Capital Rx that transforms pharmacy benefits management to provide lower medication costs and seamless access. The JUDI platform, hosted on AWS, connects healthcare stakeholders for top clinical care.
- Began as a contractor to introduce the Scrum process to a newly formed and expanding engineering team. Set up sprint rhythm and ceremonies, metrics, and long-term roadmap to support the launch of our Pharmacy Benefits Management service on 1/1/2021.
- Set up Jira and workflows from scratch to support the agile process. This began as two teams and later scaled up to nine teams working on the same project.
Remote Work Consultant
Various
- Developed techniques for an agile engineering team through a business transformation. Used JIRA for Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban and Miro for designs, mindmapping, and storyboards.
- Introduced a product development process and agile, both Scrum and Kanban, engineering methodologies. Developed techniques for brainstorming and remote demonstrations of mobile technologies over Skype to aid the distributed team.
- Managed a Canada-based team of 20 remotely, supporting a global technical sales engineer community of over 50 sales engineers on at Adobe. Developed tracking techniques for sales in progress, impediments, and marshaling resources to achieve the sale.
- Managed a team of agile product managers in Silicon Valley and Ottawa with engineering teams distributed over ten sites in North America, Europe and Asia. We began with a waterfall process and moved to scrum.
- Applied Agile/Scrum principles with JIRA and Trello to areas outside traditional product development and engineer. These include content authors/editors and corporate legal departments, both of which were distributed across North America.
Vice President of Product Management and Engineering
Support.com
- Worked with the management team to re-imagine our agent-focused support offering in a way that leveraged our strengths (decision tree guided paths and experienced work-from-home agents) into a unique consumer offering, top attract new users.
- Developed content standards and a JIRA-based task and time management system for our content team to have a predictable process while managing thousands of content deliverables.
- Fostered a strong Scrum process and blameless culture in engineering.
- Made a set of management structure changes, shuttering our Bangalore office, moving a few key engineers to Silicon Valley. With the addition of a number of contract engineers, we moved to a remote-first way of doing business.
- Hired both permanent employees and Toptal engineering contractors to fill out a high-functioning team.
Senior Director of Product Management
Support.com
- Began as a contract position in March 2016 when their previous product manager abruptly left. Upon arrival, I worked with the other product managers to have an organized backlog in JIRA, instead of a Jira engineering process and PM process in Google Sheets. We eventually got to where we had our sprints planned 2-3 months out.
- Organized a set of cultural changes, such as Scrum planning and grooming, high-level estimations for epics for a roadmap. As engineering was split between Silicon Valley and Bangalore, we also arranged videos of sprint closing so that they could be shared and a global retrospective.
- Advocated for the use of common tools across engineering, PM, sales, and execs. These included the use of Confluence (which was opened up so that all could access), JIRA, Stride (now Slack), and Groupmap for easy retrospective participation.
- Developed a business case, requirements, and competitive positioning for a productized version of the product after seeing strong customer demand for a shared video support tool (based on an engineering initiative). Rather than focusing on video-sharing only, we focused on the agent/consumer support interaction, making support available by streaming video with annotations or MMS image texting. Other industry products have been technology-focused rather than jobs-to-be-done focused.
Principal Consultant and Trainer
280 Group
- Provided training, coaching, and mentoring of product managers and product management teams to help bring them to their full potential and delight customers with successful products.
- Evaluated and recommended a new product lifecycle for a major cable set-top box manufacturer that had unique processes in each of their divisions. A unified product process, while still allowing for both agile and waterfall methodologies.
- Was an interim product manager for a windows data reliability and replication software company after their product manager. Stabilized the product management requirements, process, and backlog so that a new product manager could be hired and thrive.
- Developed a product roadmap and requirements for a future product for an onboard ship management software provider.
- Taught a variety of product management classes, from "Intro to Product Management," "Optimal Product Management" (for the necessary product management skills), "Phenomenal Product Manager" (for the personal and organizational skills to excel at PM).
- Taught the "Agile Product Manager and Product Owner Excellence" class (which teaches the essence of agile and product owner skills, while still being rooted in the why and not just the what), using classic lectures and agile games.
Chief Product Officer
Datalogics
- Brought the engineering group, which was using Kanban with one team and no methodology for other teams into a common process around Jira with both Scrum and Kanban.
- Emphasized showing a full product to customers of Datalogics' ebook technology (from Adobe), building out a sample store and reference iOS and Android apps so that we could appeal to a wider set of customers.
- Introduced a product process based upon 280 Group's Optimal Product Process and ensured that PM and PMM were trained and using this process for new product efforts.
- Instituted a bug prioritization and decision-making process so that issues were handled on a timely basis and that the customer's most important issues were handled well. Much of this was done by creating dashboards that made the state of bugs visible to the exec team so that resources could be focused.
- Initiated a business and product process for new ideas. We reviewed competitive products in both servers and embeddable technology and determined a compelling product. The net was a PDF server, PDF WebAPI, and a product that could do PDF and form manipulation and the rendering of PDF to image.
Project Manager
Benetech
- Led a group of worldwide industry experts to make accessible content discoverable through the use of schema.org vocabularies.
- Established a WordPress site for marketing our effort. See http://a11ymetadata.org/.
- Met the group's chartered goal; we were adopted into schema.org, as seen at https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Accessibility. This role required international coordination, note-taking, and standards authoring.
- Built upon my previous W3C standards activity on the advisory council, as well as accessibility knowledge from advocating PDF compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and other accessibility standards.
Director of Technical Marketing
Adobe Systems
- Technical Marketing was a unique role. We trained and supported our sales engineers and partners, to ensure the success of a technically complex product within a B2B market that was a new area to Adobe. This was a new business area to Adobe and we grew at a CAGR of 30%.
- Led a two-tier organization with a staff of twenty through three LiveCycle release cycles.
- Led root cause analysis of failures on high-profile customer implementations of enterprise products, recommended proactive improvements to processes and programs to ensure customer success and prevent future crises.
- Ensured technical sales consultants, support, professional services, and partners were prepared for new product launches by developing eLearning strategies and train-the-trainer programs.
- Worked hand in hand with global technical sales management to resolve issues blocking sales.
- Educated customers on new features and technical issues and developed partner training programs.
Group Product Manager
Adobe Systems
- Led the marketing and product requirements process for LiveCycle ES to incorporate ten products on individual tracks into a single suite release, ES, which was implemented by a staff of over 300 engineers located in San Jose, San Francisco, Ottawa, Boston, Beijing, and New Delhi.
- Moved the product process of engineering from Waterfall to Scrum as part of the overall team effort.
- Acted as the product manager for LiveCycle Assembler and Reader Extensions, two parts of the suite, as well as managing the team for forms, output, and LiveCycle Designer.
- Forged a partnership with StreamServe to provide a high volume document production engine in PDF and AFP. The direct product manager and I developed requirements and acceptance criteria.
Technology Strategist
Adobe Systems
- Led the product strategy from technology vision to product management and evangelism as Adobe began server products with $10 million revenue in 2000 with Adobe Document Server. The product line has risen to over $250 million annual revenue.
- Mentored product managers through the product concept, product requirements, implementation, and launch.
- Was an active speaker at SGML and document conferences such as AIIM, XPLOR, and ARMA on PDF as an accessible archive format.
- Took on a standards advocacy role for Adobe in the W3C as Advisory Council representative. This started with advocacy for PGML when it was authored, which later became the cornerstone of SVG.
- Drove Adobe Reader Extensions on our servers, from Reader 5.1 and beyond. The initial version was end-of-lifed 4 years later, and I managed that effort with our 500 customers. I drove the digital certificate licensing for versions 2 and 3, which was patented in "Using digital certificates to facilitate enforcement of product licenses," Aug 25, 2009, US patent 7,581,106.
Director of Business Development
Adobe Systems
- Developed Acrobat and Frame business partners, from plug-in developers to search vendors.
- Actively developed and brought to market Adobe's first generation ebook technology, PDF Merchant with great technology and industry partner backing.
- Advocated for PDF as an archival standard in customer and conference presentations.
- Was a key part of the business unit team, leading our product direction presentations.
Transition Director
Adobe Systems
- Managed the transition of two Frame acquisitions, Datalogics and Curo, out of Adobe after Frame was acquired.
- Met or came to a mutually agreed end state on all contractual commitments.
- Managed the two companies through the transiton, handling people's transition plans and maintaining a positive culture to the end.
- Managed the negotiation and business terms of both company spin-offs.
Vice President, Product Manager
Frame Technology
- Led the technical integration work between the two companies after Datalogics was acquired by Frame Technology. The first task was to integrate Datalogics database experience with Framebuilder structured editing to demonstrate company synergy and database publishing.
- Led the customer integration team to achieve major wins, such as the user of FrameBuilder for Pinnacles-compliant semiconductor datasheets for Philips Semiconductor.
- Developed first-hand product experience with product gaps. I then started a business case for the next generation product, FrameMaker+SGML, which was successfully launched and is still an industry-leading product. Collaborated with engineering to develop proper waterfall requirements and led the process through launch.
- Was an active speaker at SGML and other industry conferences, promoting the product.
- Contributed in a number of industry standards efforts such as ATA-100 for commercial aircraft, JCALS for milspec technical documentation, Pinnacles for the semiconductor industry.
Vice President
Datalogics
- Oversaw two-tier organization with a staff of 70 responsible for engineering, consulting, technical documentation, sales support, system management, and customer support.
- Oversaw the implementation of a full product suite for batch document publishing and SGML editing on OS/2 and Windows. Implemented a number of ground-breaking database-publishing systems. such as the IRS, A.C. Nielsen, Moody’s Investor Service, Standard and Poors, Eastman Kodak, Bowne, R.R. Donnelley, and Commerce Clearing House.
- Actively led system architecture and solution sizing as a Digital Equipment reseller and subcontractor to major system integrators as Perot Systems, Syscon, and CSC.
- Personally managed a set of engineers and document analysts who designed the first Milspec SGML tag set for technical documentation, and its implementation with Pager and Writerstation, and the more robust implementation in DL Composer.
- Architected and managed high volume personalized mailing systems. Two examples of this were F.W. Dodge construction, which delivered over 3 million personalized pages per day to construction contractors, and State Farm, where we pioneered personalized marketing messages from your agent to you, with the agent signature for over 13,000 State Farm agents.
- Architected the system for database extract and publishing of Standard and Poors stock reports on a daily basis, over ten thousand in a two-hour period.
Lead Engineer and Manager
Datalogics
- Datalogics began as a custom development shop and transitioned to a product company as I joined. We began at a dozen people and annual revenue of $1M. We developed software offerings and consulting to match, and developed integrated database publishing solutions for major legal and financial publishers. A few customer names include McGraw Hill, Standard and Poors, Moody's investor service, RR Donnelley, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Commerce Clearing House. We grew the company to $13M and were purchased by Frame Technology for our SGML and project expertise. I started as a software developer and took a number of roles as we grew, whether development, support, consulting, training or documentation.
- Developed and debugged our primary document formatting software, Pager. The software was written in wells-structured PDP-11 assembler, and was eventually ported to Vax, Alpha, and Windows and is still used and maintained today, 44 years later.
- Led a team of five developers, developed coding standards, regression testing, and quality metrics to bring Datalogics software to production levels, as it was used in financial and legal printing environments, as well as book and database publishers.
- Developed the overlay mechanism and modified the assembler and linker to be able to create executables to run in Datalogics' own operating system environment.
- Developed drivers for over ten legacy phototypesetters, as well as EDGAR, Xerox meta code. Postscript was implemented by a team member.
- Hired and guided engineers on the team as we built the company from 15 people to 130.
Project History
Support.com Direct to Consumer Support Site with Remote Agents
http://www.support.comLed product management, UX, and engineering for a consumer-oriented self-support community and agent assistance subscription.
Developed processes for a remote-first development team that supported our work-from-home agents with a SaaS solution. The engineering team spanned 11 hours time zone, while our agent pool was 24x7 in four timezones.
Coordinated planning and grooming so that the team had a roadmap for the next three months. This had been in a state of determining the sprint backlog the day before the sprint start and managing this in Google Sheets. We committed to a solid JIRA approach of an estimated and ordered backlog, which allowed greater visibility.
Through multiple rounds of downsizing, led the team to have a clear vision for the future direction of the product line. One key component was the presentation of sprint goals in JIRA (before JIRA added this as a feature). This unified the team efforts and gave a transparent way to work with stakeholders.
Did staff planning and hiring of both employees and Toptal talent as we formed our global team.
Implemented remote team coordination of product planning, development, and retrospectives as we rolled out our agent-based support systems.
Rovi Corp Product Process Assessment and Reengineering (Through 280 Group)
Analyzed existing practices, developed new common processes and tools for all products for product teams over five locales.
Rovi had acquired a number of companies and had a diverse set of practices and tools. I interviewed all of the stakeholders, determined the common and unique parts of their existing processes. After that, we rolled out, with training, a common product process and agile tools, such as JIRA, to be used across all projects. This was followed by the coaching of the product and engineering teams to bring two projects into the new process and management review and to have a single unified process.
He was the sole representative on this project.
Datalogics Agile Product Process and Product Launch
Moved the company from being a product maintenance organization to a unified product process and cadence.
Datalogics provides sales and maintenance of Adobe’s PDF libraries, selling this to a variety of ISVs. Initially, there was a Kanban engineering process and no products in development.
As a remote VP of product, We set up a new product process to conceive and test new business opportunities. This process was then used to bring these products through development and to market.
Concurrent with that, we standardized on one project tracking tool, JIRA, and used it for both Scrum product teams and Kanban maintenance teams. This gave the company future growth direction and a clear way to stay in synch with the stakeholders.
Education
Certificate in Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications
UC Berkeley Executive Education - Berkeley, California
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Purdue University - Indiana
Certifications
ICP-ATF ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Team Facilitation
ICAgile
ICP-ACC ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Coaching
ICAgile
Professional Scrum Master (I)
Scrum.org
Agile Certified Product Manager Product Owner
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM)
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Certified Product Manager (CPM)
Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM)
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Atlassian, Atlassian Suite, Miro, Microsoft Excel, Trello, VersionOne, Recurly, Slack, GroupMap
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Agile, Kanban, Servant Leadership, B2B, B2B2C, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Requirements Analysis, HIPAA Compliance, B2C, Agile Leadership, Test-driven Development (TDD), DevOps
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, iOS
Other
Cross-functional Collaboration, Team Mentoring, Product Owner, Story Mapping, PDF, Publishing, Product Management, Product Roadmaps, Remote Team Leadership, Product Ownership, Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO), Technical Product Management, Remote Work Consulting, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), User Stories, Sprint Retrospectives, Roadmaps, Cross-cultural Communication, Business to Consumer (B2C), Agile Coaching, Sprint Ceremonies, Training Workshops, Scrumban, Scrum Master, Scrum Coaching, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Team Leadership, Mentorship & Coaching, Technical Project Management, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Project Management, Retrospective Techniques, Discovery Workshops, Market Research, Healthcare IT, Healthcare & Insurance, Project Planning, Data Privacy, Engineering Management, Mentorship, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, React, Product Planning, Metrics, Jira Administrator, Training Materials, Training Content
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