Throughout my career, I have been dedicated to driving impactful product innovation. I have positioned products and driven strategic shifts, transforming visions into leading products in new and challenging established markets. I aligned product strategies with customer needs and market demands, ensuring customer success to maximize customer acquisition and retention.
I have led cross-functional teams, managed product lifecycles, contributed to the successful exits of three startups, and helped established software companies attain and maintain market-leading positions. Additionally, I have developed product messaging, executed marketing campaigns, created collateral, performed sales enablement, and coached teams to optimize outreach strategies.
I have expertise in analyzing market trends, identifying target segments, and synthesizing market data. This enables me to identify emerging trends and deliver market-leading products. My approach involves comprehensive analysis and strategic insights to address market needs, ensuring product offerings align with customer demands and industry shifts. This strategy has driven innovation, facilitated competitive differentiation, and consistently delivered value to customers and the business. This approach has contributed to the successful exits of three startups and helped generate revenue for the firms I’ve worked at.
I have driven product strategy and led pivots for startups and teams in established software companies. For example, I initiated a strategic shift for a video platform vendor by identifying an underserved market need. I enhanced the company's messaging and product offering by leading a phased transformative pivot, introducing compelling, targeted narrative creation and storytelling capabilities leveraging AI. This strategic repositioning leveraged the absence of competing services, capitalizing on a unique market opportunity. The approach focused on providing companies with narrative-creation tools that help frontline employees position, sell, and support their products amid continuous enhancements and evolving use cases.
I redefined the experience of how users develop, manage, and distribute narrative content. I also crafted new messaging and content that positioned the service as a cutting-edge solution for video content operations, establishing narrative generation and product release communication as the company’s market entry beachhead.
This innovative solution automates the extraction of information from media stored in a newly created knowledge network, offering storytellers an experience for creating targeted narratives for specific audiences. It equips product managers, marketers, and creatives with advanced tools for collaborative production, AI-assisted content repurposing and creation, and distributing impactful, targeted video narratives.
Through these initiatives, I contributed to the company's ability to offer a transformative storytelling service that provides product teams the tools they need to repurpose, create, and engage audiences with targeted and streamlined content across diverse enterprise use cases, from product release communications to internal storytelling.
As it takes this capability to the market, the company can solidify its market position with this newly laid foundation for sustained growth.
I have positioned products and driven strategic shifts, transforming visions into leading products in new and challenging established markets. For example, for an event-integration platform vendor I carried out a strategic review through a comprehensive outside-in analysis. I evaluated the client's market positioning and messaging and performed an in-depth evaluation of how its offerings were perceived in the marketplace relative to competitors and existing and potential new customers' expectations.
This pinpointed gaps in the client’s offerings and opportunities for differentiation. It also surfaced messaging and positioning gaps, allowing the client to better align with market needs and highlight the unique value propositions of its solutions.
My strategic planning and execution skills, refined through key roles in established software companies and startups, have prepared me well for various roles when defining and implementing an effective product strategy is essential. My experience in these roles includes:
Comprehensive Product Management Experience: During my tenure at companies such as Zoomit (acquired), Microsoft, Systinet (acquired), HPE, Active Endpoints (acquired), and Informatica, I have demonstrated adaptability and expertise in managing product lifecycles and fostering innovation. The products under my management consistently achieved market leadership positions, demonstrating significant impact and value-add in startup environments and established companies.
Holistic Approach to Product Vision & Strategy: My approach to product management has always been strategically aligned with company objectives, striking a balance between addressing immediate needs and pursuing long-term goals. This balance has driven customer acquisition, maintained high customer retention, fostered innovation, and achieved market differentiation. My contributions and my ability to transform strategic visions into market-leading products are substantiated by my contributions to the successful exits of three startups. Additionally, my leadership in developing the Informatica Cloud Application Integration (CAI) service, delivering application, process, and API integration to customers, was a critical factor in Informatica securing a leading position in Gartner’s Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years.
I led the product strategy, definition, delivery, and go-to-market activities for Informatica’s CAI iPaaS service from its inception to a market-leading offering. The service targets citizen integrators and developers, addressing emerging needs for application and process integration and automation, API creation and management, and system integration delivered as a service. It provides customers with broad integration capabilities and a no-code design experience. In its fifth year of operation, in 2021, the CAI service accounted for 42% of Informatica’s total cloud integration annual recurring revenue, with over 1200 enterprise tenants globally.
To help defend against on-premises data integration customer attrition and drive adoption of cloud subscriptions, I designed and led the creation of Informatica’s Taskflow service for data movement orchestration. This service helped transition long-standing on-premises customers to Informatica’s cloud service and drive subscription revenue.
This allowed 500 on-premises enterprise customers to be migrated to the cloud within six months, increasing subscription revenue. Hundreds more have migrated since. It also delivered new capabilities to 1000+ existing cloud data integration customers, further expanding Informatica’s cloud data management solutions, significantly strengthening Informatica’s overall cloud data management offering, and driving subscription revenue.
These efforts helped Informatica:
Achieve high win rates over competitors it had been losing to.
Achieve and sustain its leadership in Gartner’s iPaaS Magic Quadrant for four years.
Significantly improve its position in the market and strengthen its value to customers.
Drive subscription revenue.
Throughout my various roles, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with Marketing and Sales teams to develop and execute comprehensive go-to-market strategies. To advance customer and field success, I partner with product marketing, sales, services, and customer success teams to gain valuable insights that help enhance customer acquisition and retention and ensure successful product adoption.
This collaboration has been essential in ensuring successful product launches and adoption rates. By working closely with these teams, I have ensured our approaches are innovative and aligned with market demands and organizational goals.
I have established sales processes, developed sales resources, scripts, and collateral, and coached business development representatives to help them set their outreach strategies and enhance their effectiveness. I have also designed and implemented lead sourcing strategies and segmentation and measured campaign and content results. I have managed a consistent outbound marketing cadence and content and implemented lead-sourcing strategies, segmentation, and marketing campaigns focused on nurture, awareness, and lead generation.
I embrace a customer-centric philosophy of collaboration, accountability, and transparency with customers and the field. I engage with customers, go-to-market teams, field teams, and advocates to uncover insights that help drive product iterations. This engagement is structured through regular touchpoints and on an ad hoc basis and aims to ensure visibility and to identify and address product issues in real time.
Customer-Centric Approach in Product Development: I align product initiatives with customer and field needs. Consistently aligning product initiatives with customer and field requirements has been critical in developing products that meet and exceed customer expectations.
My approach centers on consistent, meaningful engagements with customers and cross-functional teams to identify capabilities and product iterations that resonate with customers.
Understanding and Integrating Customer Needs: My commitment to learning and integrating customer needs into our product development process has been vital. This customer-centric approach involves actively seeking and incorporating feedback from customers and field teams, contributing to high customer acquisition and retention rates, as evidenced by the growth of Informatica's CAI service.
Emphasis on Customer Success: I have emphasized ease of adoption that helps customer retention, which is essential for subscription-based business models. Driving product success and ensuring customer satisfaction have been vital to maintaining high customer engagement levels. For example, the CAI service consistently received top promoter scores, a testament to the team’s and my commitment to customer satisfaction and quality.
The impact of this approach was tangible: the Informatica CAI service I led had the fastest customer acquisition rate for any of Informatica’s integration services. First-year renewal rates approached 95% and were close to 98% in subsequent years, and customer support satisfaction scores reached an average of 4.8 out of 5, the highest of any other service. These achievements underscore the effectiveness of a customer-first strategy, significantly contributing to maintaining a competitive edge, market leadership, and sustained ARR increases.
A clear North Star. I believe in establishing a concise and well-defined direction for the product portfolio and individual components. This direction is communicated and validated with key stakeholders, team members, and select customers. My utmost priority is ensuring the roadmap, its iterations, and customer impact are visible and communicated effectively. I work to keep everyone informed and engaged throughout the product's journey, ensuring they are excited to be part of it and that customers and the field feel heard.
In leading product initiatives, I align product and R&D teams to shared goals, product differentiation, and operational excellence. I focus on:
Partnering with cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, services, support, and customer success, to drive customer acquisition and retention and ensure successful adoption within the first year of a subscription.
Advocating for transparency and alignment on product progress and impact, setting clear expectations, and maintaining open communication with stakeholders.
Empowering developers and valuing their input to foster creativity that drives positive outcomes.
Bringing in as many as possible on the journey and creating advocates.
By fostering effective collaboration and communication across teams, I have led the advancement of services and products, drove customer acquisition, and ensured successful product adoption.
My collaborative and hands-on leadership style fosters alignment within teams toward shared goals. By closely collaborating with product and R&D teams, I advance and implement the organization's vision, driving innovations, product differentiation, and operational excellence.
As a product leader, I focus on the following:
Advocating for setting and communicating a guiding 'north star' for portfolio and individual component directions, ensuring a broad understanding across teams and stakeholders, and setting clear expectations.
Being hands-on in product architecture, implementation, delivery, and operations.
Emphasizing visibility and communication regarding the roadmap, its iterations, customer impact, and the resolution of defects or enhancements to keep all parties informed and engaged throughout the product's journey.
Bringing a customer-centric approach and collaborating closely with engineering to identify insights that fuel innovation.
Fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, creativity, and ownership within development teams. This practice has enabled my teams to identify new opportunities leading to innovation.
Integrating customer and field feedback for continuous product enhancement.
Carefully crafting right-sized, componentized, and actionable stories and epics with my team.
Maintaining a vetted backlog and integrating engineering debt into the planning processes.
Prioritizing a consistent user experience and a whole-of-product approach.
Adapting agile methodologies to suit the team's needs best, ensuring visibility, efficient product releases, flawless deployments essential for cloud-based services, and high service availability, resilience, and performance.
Managing product development investments and resources with an eye on P&L and COGS.
Emphasizing tight collaboration between Product Management, Engineering, and Operations, especially during rollouts, to ensure zero downtime.
My leadership experience encompasses guiding and mentoring diverse, distributed, cross-functional teams in Product Management, Services, and Operations. At Informatica, I led a 52-member implementation and delivery team comprising Development, Quality Assurance, Product Management, and Operations professionals across Canada, India, Israel, Ukraine, and the United States. Before Informatica, at Active Endpoints, I managed operations and a 13-person team focused on professional services, education, and support. In this role, I was responsible for overseeing P&L and ensuring effective service delivery.
Gathering and analyzing customer feedback, market trends, and competitive intelligence has been fundamental in informing product decisions and identifying new opportunities. This data-driven approach aids in shaping strategies that are innovative and relevant. Decisions regarding COGS and cost/benefit analyses of investments are data-driven, ensuring informed decisions that drive go-to-market strategies.
I prioritize open and effective communication with stakeholders and partners, a practice essential for ensuring transparency and alignment on product progress and impact. I strongly advocate for setting and communicating a guiding 'north star' for portfolio and individual component directions, ensuring broad understanding across teams and stakeholders, and ensuring that expectations are set. Furthermore, I emphasize visibility and communication regarding the roadmap, customer impact, and the resolution of defects or enhancements, ensuring all parties are informed and engaged throughout the product's journey.
I’ve helped a client develop an AI-based multi-media storyboarding product that automates the extraction of information in existing video and audio content and other narrative forms, creating an immersive and intuitive experience for storytellers to repurpose for their specific audiences. This aimed to tackle an increasingly common challenge: keeping field sales and customer success teams aligned and informed amidst rapid product release cycles. This challenge stems from a broader issue where teams need help to maintain a unified understanding of product stories as they evolve. Lacking this, it is difficult to sell and support offerings effectively.
At Informatica, I led the development and market introduction of the CAI service’s capabilities. The service targets citizen integrators and developers, addressing emerging needs for API creation, application and process integration, and automation delivered as a service - a purpose-built service optimized for simplicity, scalability, visibility, and trust.
Workflow and Orchestration: My area of expertise lies in automating processes. This includes automating application and business processes across multiple systems, with the option to incorporate human interaction. For example, in healthcare, integrating front-office and back-office applications and straight-through processing using API and application integration led to a threefold increase in patient appointments within a year.
Integration: Informatica's event-driven and service-oriented application integration capabilities highlight my integration skills. These encompass event processing, service orchestration, and process management, all built upon Informatica’s robust business process management technology.
Interactive Workflows: I led the development of the Screenflow service to automate user tasks, streamline workflows, and provide interactive data access. This approach significantly benefits front-line employees by offering them real-time, interactive access to essential data without switching between applications, enhancing productivity. Examples include enabling employees to quickly access payment records, invoice numbers, specific customer interactions, or any case-specific information directly within their current application.
I champion a user-centric approach, aligning product experiences to the intended end users and service operators. For example,
Targeting CAI’s User Base - Informatica: The primary CAI users were citizen developers and developers who required integration capabilities to create business solutions. This included a no-code visual designer and a platform for creating app, process, and API integrations and orchestrations, and creating data and process APIs.
Targeting Process Automation Developers – Active Endpoints: We provided an Eclipse-based graphical designer to orchestrate web services and human tasks. The primary users were developers, most of whom were system integrators such as Tech Mahindra and Cognizant.
I allocate a percentage of development resources and time to Skunkworks projects. This drives innovation into the product and efficiencies for the platform and operations. To state a few examples, we evaluated and adopted Prometheus/Casandra for monitoring and traceability; we extended the orchestration engine’s internal event sources to drive additional events and data in our activity and audit logs. We devised ways to partition persistence layers to remove contention and allow for transparently geo-distributing hundreds of tenants. We drove the adoption of Kubernetes for iPaaS platform components and the on-premises component being deployed by customers.
At Informatica, I drove requirements into its shared iPaaS platform, which is intended to support the CAI and other application services. I collaborated with the architecture and operations teams driven by the need to ensure scaling, availability, and resilience of the platform and my service to achieve, for example, sub-second response times and zero-downtime upgrades. These efforts ensured the iPaaS platform was ready to support the CAI service’s customer needs. I also worked closely with legal and security groups to ensure SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance.
My experience working on platform teams for other SaaS products has equipped me with a deep understanding of the intricacies and challenges involved in managing and evolving software platforms.
In addition to my product management responsibilities, while at Active Endpoints I also owned service delivery. I created a team and the supporting infrastructure for this multi-tenant service to support the company's first SaaS cloud offering. We implemented and developed automation to create AWS instances for persistence, compute, load-balancing, monitoring, certificate creation and deployment, and security configurations to support SSO-based interactions between our service and Salesforce. We grew this service to 192 enterprise tenants in 12 months. These were subsequently migrated to Informatica upon the company’s acquisition. We migrated customers to new instances and domains with no downtime.
I have a deep bench of knowledge in technology:
APIs and API management
Application integration
AI integration
Orchestration, Workflow, and Process Management
Identity Management and Security
SOA, EDA, and Enterprise Architecture
SOAP and REST Web Services
XML, JSON
For perspectives from colleagues, I encourage the reader to review LinkedIn recommendations on my behalf.