I'm a full-stack product manager who's comfortable from the highest strategic level to the depths of the database.

Experience

I’ve made company-wide impact from product, leadership, research, and engineering roles — and I believe this diversity of experience is a key advantage for a PM.

MxU

• VP, Product 2021-2023

  Crafted the product strategy of the SaaS startup for training volunteer teams, grew revenue by 50%, and achieved over 100% revenue retention across our book of thousands of customers.

  Responsible for new features that moved the needle for the business, cutting churn and maintaining a sky-high NPS. Loved taking new ideas all the way from user interviews and discovery, to whiteboarding database schema, to product marketing campaigns. Read more about how I handled discovery and iteration in this case study from Equals.

  Managed the company’s engineering team and efficient COGS budget.

  Wrote a large portion of the web app's Ruby on Rails code, from rails new to shipping well-tested features for thousands of MAUs.

Nitrogen

Held two critical roles during an aggressive growth period for this successful fintech startup, from Series A through private equity acquisition.

• Research Program Manager 2020-2021

  Spearheaded a renewed focus on product research across the company by discovering product insights deep in relational data, and transforming them into reliable, understandable lessons through custom tooling, ETL workflows, and lots of conversation. This discovery and development work spanned SQL, R, custom tooling I wrote in Node.js, and Domo. (A great example of the research we did: my usage analysis led to these market insights and product changes.)

  Empowered high-value account retention by working with account managers to discover and reliably deliver more precise adoption data to enterprise customers, helping secure millions of dollars in retained revenue.

• Engineering Chief of Staff 2017-2020

  Honed a deep understanding of a cross-functional Agile development lifecycle, and designed many of the organizational habits and structures that made it effective.

  Treated the R+D culture as my product. Together with the CTO, doubled the size of the R+D organization, crafted hiring strategy, and matured operations — while keeping a high average tenure.

  Built a strong understanding of security and compliance by managing Nitrogen’s first SOC 2 security audits in 2018 and 2019. I drove the months-long projects to an on-time delivery each year — a process I taught myself along the way. I even lowered cost by 25% while expanding audit coverage the second time around.

  Managed the Quality Assurance team through a transition of that team’s leadership. Over seven months, I expanded the team, created systems to simplify the day-to-day, and as a result, saw their creative capacity soar.

Earlier

• Before discovering my love of SaaS (and teaching myself to code), I spent 10 years in the music industry thriving with the fast pace and almost impossibly high expectations. As a touring drummer, I was endorsed by Paiste, Evans, and Pro-Mark. I also spent time working with nonprofits, launching new education programs and building inbound marketing functions for their continued growth.

About Mike

• I’m a Discerning Ideator — most energized by solving problems and evaluating ideas in complex contexts. I’m a strong intuitive thinker, and I love when new information or perspectives change my viewpoint.

• I’m an awesome fit where there’s still some wet cement, helping chart a course for a new feature, a new market, or taking the product to a new level.

• I built MixNotes, a feedback solution for studio engineers. The landing page is a great example of my microcopy writing style!

• I treat Apple’s WWDC keynote like a holiday, and even wrote up my reaction to this year’s announcements (very interesting strategy behind those releases!).

• My favorite thing to do outside of work is training my Weimaraner mix Marley, who earned his AKC Canine Good Citizen certification. And yes, he's a very good boy.

• A fully-remote team or a hybrid office in the Sacramento area would both be a great fit. I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee currently, looking to move back to Northern California.

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If you got this far, we’d probably work together really well. I’d love to hear from you.

References available on request.