Wayne State University

Innovative and proven product leader - Consumer and Mobile Devices Mobile Apps, Software Platforms, Marketplaces

Seattle, Washington

Amazon

Principal Technical Product Manager

Focused on the South Korean market, Coupang is one of the fastest growing eCommerce platforms with over $1.6 billion in revenue, 22+ million customers, and $1.4 billion in venture capital investment.Responsible for establishing, recruiting, and directly managing an eight-person team which includes product managers, business analysts, and product designers supporting 60 software engineers located in Seattle, Washington and Seoul, South Korea.Define and drive the product vision, strategy, and processes for product registration, retail vendor facing platforms, contract systems, and back office applications resulting in the successful deployment of three software platforms and over 100 new product features.Scaled retail product selection by 500% by moving retail vendors from a high-touch support model to a self-service platform (<a href="http://supplier.coupang.com">supplier.coupang.com</a>), using machine learning to remove repetitive tasks, and defining a new product registration methodology.  Proposed and implemented systems to support manage-by-exception strategy allowing internal vendor management and in-stock teams to manage a rapidly growing product portfolio (3M+ products growing 80% YoY) while maintaining profitability with fixed head count.

Coupang

Director of Product Management

Our mission is to transform the lives of accomplished high school students from low-income families by broadening their dreams and preparing them for college success.Owner of the academic curriculum for the junior program, while also mentoring a high school student.  Ensure that the curriculum met the individual needs of the mentees including building confidence in public speaking, competence in critical thinking, and a strong sense of self.Work with mentees to ensure they are able to attend prestigious summer programs offered by universities nationwide.  In 2016, mentees will attend programs such as Girls Who Code, Brown University, and Fordham University.Raise funding in order to pay for mentee summer programs, computers, and other academic essentials.

Minds Matter of Seattle

Director of Mentoring & Academic Planning (Junior Program) - Volunteer

Well-funded start-up with $115M in investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, and Benchmark.  The product is Cyanogen OS, which is a closed-source version of the popular CyanogenMod ROM.Defined, drove, and delivered the company’s current Mod (<a href="http://www.cyngn.com">www.cyngn.com</a>) product strategy to tightly integrate apps and services into Cyanogen OS.  Authored product requirement documents (PRD) and then partnered with design, engineering, business development, marketing, and external partners to bring-to-market new functionality in Cyanogen OS, including integrations (mods) with several Microsoft products (e.g., Cortana, Skype, OneNote, Office, and Hyperlapse), Truecaller, Boxer Email and Calendar, and other tier one partners.Routinely prepared and presented product strategy, metrics, and tactical updates to leadership and the company, including the CEO.  Only non-executive level employee to be invited to the leadership offsite meetings.Successfully launched 8 smartphone devices, including three Micromax devices (<a href="http://www.yuplaygod.com">www.yuplaygod.com</a>) in India and two Wiley Fox devices (<a href="http://www.wileyfox.com">www.wileyfox.com</a>) in Western and Eastern Europe.Scaled the product management team by hiring, mentoring, and managing several junior product managers while leading multiple projects from concept to launch.

Cyanogen

Lead Principal Product Manager

Member of the core product management launch team for defining, developing, and launching the Amazon Fire Phone and Kindle Fire (last 2 generations) tablets.  Responsibilities included driving the strategies, authoring detailed requirements, and managing the implementation of the email, calendar, contacts, phone, visual voicemail, notes, and enterprise security apps and features.Successfully launched multiple consumer products including the Amazon Fire HDX 7/8.9 (2013 tablets), Amazon Fire HD 6/7, Amazon Fire HDX 8.9 (2014 tablets), and the Amazon Fire Phone in the United States (AT&T), Germany (Deutsche Telekom), and the United Kingdom (Telefonica).  Routinely presented new product concepts, strategies, and tactical updates to executive leadership,including multiple presentations to the CEO.Drove alignment to product goals across the design, engineering, marketing, customerservice, legal, product management, and wireless carrier partners.Monitored customer feedback, conducted user studies, prototyped new features, and segmented customer types in order to drive customer product adoption, engagement, and retention.Listed as inventor on two patent applications related to features implemented within the email and calendar apps.Received positive app reviews for email and enterprise features in CNET, Business Insider, and Cruxial CIO.CNET - <a href="http://www.cnet.com/how-to/set-up-and-manage-email-on-amazon-fire-phone/Business">http://www.cnet.com/how-to/set-up-and-manage-email-on-amazon-fire-phone/Business</a> Insider - <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-fire-phone-business-features-2014-6Cruxial">http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-fire-phone-business-features-2014-6Cruxial</a> CIO - <a href="http://www.cruxialcio.com/amazons-fire-phone-5-enterprise-friendly-features-8491">http://www.cruxialcio.com/amazons-fire-phone-5-enterprise-friendly-features-8491</a>

Sr. Product Manager (Technical), Amazon Fire Phone and Kindle Fire tablets

Responsible for all aspects of the sales lead generation platform, including management of all business operations, product vision, strategy, business modeling, requirements definition, and software architecture.Launched over 40 product features/enhancements, including five major platform initiatives resulting in $250MM in 2013 gross merchandise revenue, an increase of 335% in just two years.Regularly interfaced with domestic and international customers located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, and India, along with on/off-shore development teams located in the United States, India, and Japan, to conceptualize and launch software features in support of country specific initiatives and goals.Recruited and directly managed a team of up to six direct reports allowing the group to successfully scale to support the rapid growth of the platform, as well as other adjacent Amazon businesses.

Manager, Product Management , Sales Technology

Interfaced with internal development teams and external customers to devise front-end and back-end technical solutions for e-commerce websites using Amazon Webstore, Amazon Fulfillment, Amazon Payments, and Amazon Web Services. Successfully launched e-commerce stores including Taylor Swift (<a href="http://store.taylorswift.com">store.taylorswift.com</a>), Alternative Apparel (<a href="http://www.alternativeapparel.com">www.alternativeapparel.com</a>), Official Sports (<a href="http://www.officialsports.com">www.officialsports.com</a>), and Thirty-One Gifts (<a href="http://www.thirtyonegifts.com">www.thirtyonegifts.com</a>). Represented the enterprise customer in all product management discussions including the construction of product strategy, business cases, and product requirement documents resulting in the successful launch of more than ten features, such as expanded enterprise APIs, item personalization, and website customer recognition.Recognized twice as Sales Technology Employee of the Quarter (Q3-2011 and Q4-2011) during my first two full quarters with the company.

Solution Architect \ Product Manager

Interfaced with various levels of senior leadership, both technical and non-technical, at medium to large corporations to sell and promote architectures utilizing emerging technologies within the TIBCO software stack.  Customers included businesses in the energy, retail, software, banking, and healthcare sectors.Delivered business cases, management presentations, and custom prototypes for the TIBCO BusinessEvents product, resulting in the acquisition of several large accounts, such as Symantec, FedEx and Gamestop.  Implemented various software solutions utilizing multiple products within the TIBCO technology stack.  Systems implemented included a recurring payments system for the Norton Antivirus product at Symantec and a real-time reporting system for tracking packages for FedEx.

TIBCO Software

Sr.  Product Consultant

Lead Analyst responsible for conceptualizing and implementing rule-based solutions for the Operation Coordination Center (OCC) using the TIBCO technology stack. Developed business cases, management presentations, high-level project plans, software tool evaluations, business requirements and high-level software designs for various OCC projects, such as projects for identifying passenger missed connections and a system for identifying airplane congestion at busy airports.Communicated between various development teams and internal business partners to support implementation and roll out of new software features.Supported development teams by providing business rule design expertise (SME) and implementation of various software features.

Southwest Airlines

Sr.  Analyst

Business rules architect responsible for designing, implementing, and testing new features within SOA-based automotive loan adjudication system.Assisted in the development of business requirements and architectural design for Blaze in funding project.  Project goal was to automate loan funding processing in order to reduce adjudication errors between the adjudicated loan and the actual funded loan.Designed and implemented new testing framework giving the business teams the ability to test multiple scenarios before moving business rules into production.

Sixth Gear Solutions

Blaze Rules Architect

Consumer and Small Business subject matter expert (SME) working across various business units (Legal, Compliance, Fraud, Decision Sciences, Credit Bureau Agencies, and Information Technology) to extract, refine, validate, and implement business rules within Blaze Advisor.Drive future business rules projects to achieve operational excellence and legal compliance across the enterprise.  Interact with key decision makers to prioritize and deliver key business rules projects.Convert existing business processes to business rules framework including real-time purchase authorizations, reactive credit line increase, and reactive rate reduction projects.Worked in partnership with Fair Isaac to design, develop, and launch a Consumer and Small Business credit adjudication system utilizing WebMethods, J2EE, and Blaze Advisor reducing the time it takes to implement credit and fraud scorecards from one year to less than one month.

Dell Financial Services

Sr. Business Rules Consultant

Designed and developed a framework written in Python and Java to organize and execute engineering procedures resulting in an estimated $6 million savings to the company.Managed IT relationship and software life cycle of several software projects written in various languages across the automotive testing domain.Provided analysis of server metric reporting process: Explored and recommended various solutions with the goal of automating current metric reporting processes.Designed and developed prototype Business Objects universes and Business Objects reports.

Ford Motor Company

Prototype Systems Software Engineer / Enterprise Server Hosting Software Engineer

Solicited requirements for a production engineering system within the product test systems domain. Worked closely with engineering customer to ensure software integration into business processes.Designed and developed software to organize and evoke engineering procedures written in various scripting and programming languages.Participated in the development of security procedures in a knowledge-based system. Researched and authored various documents regarding the systems use of Blaze Adviser as a rule based system. Suggested possible improvements to the system that resulted in the creation of an editor for creating rule bases.Documented the static structure of software with UML diagrams using Rational Rose.

Joe BUCHTA

Joe BUCHTA