I help websites and product organizations define and achieve success.
A little about me.
Since 2011, I have focused on providing product management and product consulting services primarily in SaaS and Ecommerce. I also have experience in a variety of industries including healthcare, wellness, tech, automotive, retail, and biotechnology.
I live in Irvine, California.
I have provided product management services for dozens of companies, from pre-revenue startup to Fortune 50.
Here are some of the better known ones.
Click a logo for a brief description.
Tap a logo for a brief description.
- Amgen’s bioinformatics team was looking for a way to quickly create web-based tools for scientific research.
- Interviewed team members and designed a solution for rapid development of data visualization tools to analyze gene variants. Managed development and delivered functional prototype within six weeks of project kickoff.
- Amgen embraced the new viewer and used it as a foundation to create additional tools for other scientific applications.
- Best Buy's online checkout had significant technical debt and the customer experience was unintuitive, leading to development delays, reduced revenue, and increased support costs.
- Led the complete technical and UX overhaul of online checkout, including collaborating directly with stakeholders, SMEs, UX, and engineering teams to identify the most important UX and technical issues to address.
- Completed the project's goals, including over 100 UX improvements by the pre-holiday deadline, resulting in a $150M revenue lift and reduced support costs. The Baymard Institute rated the new checkout experience as 9th best among the top 100 U.S. ecommerce websites (up from 87th place in their previous study).
- Estee Lauder wanted to create and communicate a cohesive product vision, strategy, and roadmap across the flagship brand’s 36 international markets, and improve site performance.
- Aligned product teams, led planning sessions with global brand partners and stakeholders, and guided a performance overhaul for the US site.
- Improved communication and collaboration between regions and global brand. US performance improvements contributed to +6.75% RPV, +5% CVR, +4.4% ATB, and +1.6% AOV.
- Ford's electric vehicle software teams wanted to improve the consistency, predictability, and efficiency of their product delivery.
- Provided System of Delivery coaching for Ford product directors, counseled product teams, and created training sessions on lean agile practices, customer-centric tools, and OKRs, among others.
- Achieved a 47% average reduction in cycle and lead times and a >20% velocity increase within six months, while enhancing product teams' understanding of agile practices.
- The Home Depot wanted to demonstrate upcoming features and to survey participants’ opinions at their annual managers meeting, but lacked the time and team to develop an effective solution.
- Partnered with Jack Morton Worldwide to design a solution that integrated with their event planning. Managed development and design and trained event staff responsible for presenting the application.
- Completed development ahead of schedule. Managers responded very favorably to the application and their completed surveys helped shape corporate decision-making.
- Intel wanted to launch an international web-based promotion for their chips that could easily be updated by non-technical staff.
- Created a unique promotional application and 120 promo variations with dynamic videos and content in 26 languages including Russian, Chinese, and Arabic.
- The promotional application won first prize in the "Inventive Media" category at the Business Marketing Association’s ACE awards and helped extend Intel’s marketing reach internationally at minimal cost and effort.
- Suzuki needed to upgrade their antiquated U.S. motorcycle website, suzukicycles.com, with a new enterprise-level architecture and custom CMS, but they lacked the means to design and develop it themselves.
- Worked directly with Suzuki to define scope, managed the entire SDLC, and delivered the final website ahead of schedule and on budget.
- The website greatly exceeded Suzuki's expectations, increased site traffic and engagement, and automated 90% of their content updates.
- Target wanted to improve participation and conversion of their baby and wedding registries for web and mobile, which accounted for over $150 million in combined annual revenue.
- Analyzed information from customers, web analytics, A/B tests, Foresee, Tealeaf, and OpinionLab to identify and implement over 40 opportunities to increase participation, conversion, and the user experience.
- Increases to participation, conversion, and overall user satisfaction exceeded product goals by 100%.
- Taylor Corporation needed a new shared B2B E-commerce platform that integrated their numerous diversified systems for their 1,200 vendors.
- Worked with leadership to create the platform’s vision and direction for Search, Product Listing, Product Details, and Cart; coordinated backlog and dependencies with multiple development teams; and guided the UI/UX team through user personas, use cases, and usability sessions.
- Successfully launched the new platform, ensuring a seamless user experience across systems and helping achieve business objectives.
- UnitedHealth Group needed a website to promote their new LifePrint service, but lacked product direction as well as design and development resources.
- Led discovery and proposed several website ideas based on UHG’s needs and constraints; managed development of the approved idea and delivered the completed product.
- The pilot launch exceeded UHG's expectations and led to two significant website additions.
- Verizon wanted to create a social website, Broadband Beat, to attract younger customers, but they lacked a product strategy and development resources.
- Partnered with Doremus to define product scope, led development, and delivered the platform on time and budget.
- The new Broadband Beat website strengthened Verizon's brand and increased awareness of its services for their target customers.
- Wells Fargo’s WellsDiversity team was spending too much time maintaining and updating their intranet site, causing delays in communication and burdening engineers as well as non-technical staff with tedious tasks.
- Researched and implemented a new content management system, configured a dozen key page templates, and provided training on the new system for non-technical staff.
- Staff were able to implement changes to their site in minutes instead of days and engineers were freed from the toil of developing and deploying content-based changes.
Here’s how I can help address some common product challenges.
- Conduct customer research and market analysis to understand the needs and pain points of your target audience.
- Align your product vision and strategy with your company’s overall mission and objectives.
- Review and update your product vision and strategy to adapt to market changes and customer feedback.
- Conduct regular competitive analyses to stay informed of industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitor actions.
- Create value proposition canvases to identify your product’s unique value proposition and communicate it effectively to your target audiences.
- Continuously innovate and evolve your product to stay ahead of the competition.
- Use a prioritization framework such as RICE or WSJF to quantifiably evaluate and rank competing initiatives.
- Clearly communicate priority rationale to stakeholders and ensure alignment across your organization.
- Regularly reassess priorities based on new data, feedback, technologies, and organizational goals.
- Establish partially asynchronous backlog grooming to improve story vetting while minimizing team disruption.
- Identify, assess, and address risks and dependencies.
- Reduce story sizes, limit work in progress (WIP), and encourage thematic sprints to improve focus.
- Help establish open communication and maintain transparency among all your team members.
- Define clear roles and responsibilities for each team member.
- Foster a culture of trust, empathy, and mutual respect across your product organization.
- Engage stakeholders early in your product development process and maintain regular communication.
- Set realistic expectations about product capabilities, timelines, and resources.
- Manage scope creep by evaluating new requests against your product vision and strategic goals.
- Implement rapid prototyping and experimentation to quickly test assumptions and iterate your product.
- Actively and regularly engage with customers to understand their needs and validate solutions.
- Establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure product-market fit and make necessary adjustments.
- Implement a system for collecting, organizing, and analyzing customer feedback from numerous channels.
- Use customer input to quickly validate hypotheses, identify patterns, and inform product decisions.
- Establish a closed-loop feedback process so customers are informed of the changes made based on their input.
- Develop targeted marketing and user acquisition strategies to reach your audience.
- Optimize the onboarding experience to ensure new users can quickly see the value of your product.
- Monitor and optimize retention, engagement, and referral metrics to drive sustainable growth.
- Help implement rigorous testing processes, including automated testing, manual testing, and user testing.
- Work with UX to establish clear design principles and guidelines to ensure consistency and a delightful customer experience across the product.
- Conduct user research and usability testing to identify and address usability issues.
- Work with engineering to define a scalable product architecture that can accommodate your organization’s growth and expansion.
- Implement a clear hiring and onboarding process to grow your product teams effectively.
- Foster a culture of continuous learning and development within your product organization.
- Establish a clear process for identifying and prioritizing technical debt.
- Work with engineering to determine the optimal allocation percentage to reduce technical debt.
- Help evaluate the cost and benefits of migrating to newer technologies or systems and create a plan for managing the transition.
Some kind things people have said about me and my services.
“John has been an excellent product leader at Avantage and instrumental in helping us successfully scale from one to six product teams in just a few months. In the highly regulated and complex industry of international sports betting John was able to ramp up quickly to help us define and drive our product vision and strategy.”
Andre Kostadinov (avantage entertainment)
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doug malmgren (taylor digital)
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audree goodew (zipnosis)
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marc seeberg (Virgin Pulse)
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rachel wright (best buy)
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Chris barrington David (target)
More recommendations viewable on my LinkedIn page.