Lancaster University

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Chief Product Officer // Advisor

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Leading Product and Design at this fast-growing bootstrapped scaleup. Profitable for over 10 years, 75 people and counting.

Known

Product Director

Built Product, Design and Engineering functions for a new venture. Initial MVP achieved 70% user retention rates.

HealthTech Startup

Chief Product & Technology Officer, co-founder

Led and managing a cross-functional team of 20 people which delivers 25 new ventures per year in 4 countries. Unfortunately the business was forced into a hard pivot in late December 2019, which meant I had to make my team and my own role redundant.

The team of Product Managers, designers, software and hardware engineers, and entrepreneurs in residence turned ideas into revenue generating ventures. As part of the process, they delivered over 100 workshops per year to up-skill entrepreneurs and corporate innovation teams at ASX100 companies.

The focus of my role was on establishing better product management practices to drive growth of our portfolio, to enable international expansion and develop leaders around the organisation.

Achievements:
-  Streamlined product delivery processes, creating 30% more capacity without additional hires.
-  International expansion of delivery team to new markets in Singapore and Indonesia.
-  Increased employee NPS by 13%, turned Product team into most engaged team at BC.
-  Drove company-wide adoption of OKRs, knowledge documentation systems and new delivery system.
-  85% success rate of turning ideas into revenue-generating ventures.
-  Created analytics tool to quantify startup founder capabilities and development.

BlueChilli Group

Chief Product Officer

Running workshops and courses to help people become better at building, managing and growing products. The Net-Promoter-Score for my courses is above 80% and my instructor rating is 4.5/5.

The curriculum I teach includes:
-  Design Thinking and User Experience
-  Lean and Agile development (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)
-  Metrics, analytics and financial KPIs
-  Defining hypotheses and running experiments
-  Building MVPs, from wireframes to prototypes
-  Product Strategies, Roadmaps & OKRs
-  Stakeholder Management and Leadership
-  Customer Focus, NPS and product/market-fit

General Assembly

Product Management Instructor

Led teams and leaders through change to accelerate growth. Worked in partnership with stakeholders and shareholders, completed projects with over 50 organisations (including Google, Class, Jayride, Mad Paws).

Achievements:

-  Product Strategy & Growth advisory
-  Increased product engagement by 300% through user research & experimentation.
-  Grew a product team by 4x in 6 months, incl. leadership recruiting (CTO, PM, UX).
-  Implemented KPI frameworks and trained leadership in data-driven approach.

-  Agile & delivery coach
-  Drove delivery of 4 new products at Google across 3 countries with an external product design agency. Helped the agency to become a preferred Google partner and earn further work in excess of $1m.
-  Coached a team during a full rebuild of their core product. Structure and process changes reduced time to launch by 50%.

-  Product Management and leadership coaching
-  Coachees landed jobs at HealthEngine, Atlassian, Freelancer, Airtasker & Deputy.
-  Founders raised in excess of $10m.

Testimonials on <a href="http://productrise.com">productrise.com</a>.

ProductRise

Product Management, Agile & Growth Consultant

Led a team of 10, pioneering the expansion into business teams (marketing, finance, recruiting etc.)  by creating and launching JIRA Core. Championed a data-driven approach, using qualitative and quantitative data to drive the JIRA Core product strategy. JIRA Core was central to the platformisation of JIRA, an 18 months project which involved over 100 engineers. The expansion into business teams became a key part of the narrative during Atlassian’s IPO.

Achievements:
-  30% of JIRA cloud customers adopted new product in the first quarter.
-  Exceeded engagement target metrics by 100% and drove new business with 50% of evaluators being new Atlassian customers.
-  The launch got covered by hundreds of media sites, e.g Fortune: <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/keeping-track-cloud-software-reshapes-project-management/">http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/keeping-track-cloud-software-reshapes-project-management/</a>
-  First team to test and adopt new front-end architecture based on React.JS.
-  Delivered one of the top rated talks at Atlassian's customer conference.

Atlassian

Senior Product Manager

Led the market by launching first mobile CRM app. Expanded into enterprise software, working with Fortune 500s like Barclays and PwC to increase conversion and shorten sales cycles using machine learning.

Achievements:
-  Designed, built and bootstrapped a top rated Android app single-handedly.
-  Raised $700k in funds over 2 rounds from 16 Silicon Valley and UK investors, including Citrix and Seedcamp. Full P&L and financial planning responsibility.
-  Built and led a team of 7 across design, engineering, marketing and sales. Managed to retain 100% of staff during a cash-strapped period.
-  Led the board of directors from the first board meeting to post mortem drinks when we liquidated the company.

A product ahead of its time, Unifyo enabled sales teams find more efficient ways to convert leads into customers. Shared the learnings in a post mortem: <a href="https://medium.com/@benfwirtz/ba205ef05cc6">https://medium.com/@benfwirtz/ba205ef05cc6</a>

Unifyo

Co-founder / CEO

Followed my wanderlust to broaden my horizon, both culturally and professionally.

Impact and achievements:
-  Went from Skipper course student to Assistant Sailing Instructor in 3 weeks. Worked on yachts from 60 to 80 foot.
-  Helped Evolution Racing team win consecutive podium places at Airlie Beach and Hamilton Island Race Weeks as part of their pro regatta team.
-  Regular sales person of the day, selling tickets for the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
-  Cleaned bathrooms and kitchen at a hostel.
-  Kept VIPs entertained in the Cirque du Soleil's VIP tent.

Working holiday

Assistant Sailing Instructor and Cirque du Soleil VIP catering

zeb is a consulting specialist for the financial services industry. It is Germany’s second largest management consulting company.

Impact and achievements:
-  Enabled accurate and fast reporting for Basel II compliance of an international direct bank.
-  Developed and iterated on reports directly with clients.
-  Built up and shared expertise for my team in new technologies that were an integral part of the project.

zeb consulting

Banking IT Consultant (internship)

The European Research Centre for Information Systems is an international network of scientists conducting cooperative research in the field of Information Systems.

Impact and achievements:
-  Accelerated development of an internal information modelling software that had diverged into 3 different code branches and products. Single-handedly planned and executed a complex merge of these branches into a single cohesive product experience.
-  Improved the User Experience by merging duplicate features and making UI as well as logic consistent.

Benjamin F. Wirtz