Customer-focused product leader, with experience across digital media, retail, mobility, and customer experience. Experience at large companies and small, extensive experience on 0 -> 1 product development. Proven leader, with ability to work across functions (sales, marketing, support, engineering) and working directly with users and customers.
I am a quicker learner who loves to dive deep on new topics and am always looking to learn new skills, new markets, and new technology.
Amazon Mayday. Led product for Amazon Mayday. We brought the Apple Genius Bar to the customer’s living room by bringing together remote support, screen sharing, and video chat on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Fire Phone. Author of the “Kindle Connect” PRFAQ. Responsible across device software, desktop software for support agents, and the support agent experience. First time an Amazon employee came into visual contact with customers. Achieved average response time of 9 seconds for calls on Christmas Day. Jeff Bezos called Mayday the “greatest feature we’ve ever made.”
Building Mayday was a phenomenal opportunity for me and is what cemented my love for the cross functional nature of products and working to build value for users. In our case, we had to balance end consumers and support agents.
We faced early challenges from prank calls, particularly from young men. While we were able to handle it form a volume perspective, prank callers disproportionately gave poor feedback for agents and significantly impacted agent morale. We quickly moved to add features to rate limit calls and dismiss feedback for short calls.
Co-inventor on US Patent 10,089,633. See Mayday in action.
PartnerHero Operator CX. VP, Product with a team of product managers, product operations, and product marketing focused on building a better CX operating system for small teams focused on quality, insights, and assisting CX agents. Led the strategy and development of Operator, creating a suite of related products from existing quality control software, acquired conversational analytics software, and built new generative AI assist tool on top of OpenAI APIs. Over 90 internal customers adoption rate. Generative AI product, Assist, decreased AHT 50% and increased CSAT 30% in early usage with ~20 partners.
Planned and led first ever company product summit, bringing together product, engineering, design, and operations leaders from across the country.
PartnerHero was acquired by Crescendo AI and is likely deprecating or integrating most of their software into Crescendo’s product.
BrandBox. VP, Product for innovative new store concept for Macerich malls, with first location at Tysons Corner Center in Virginia. BrandBox made it easier for a digitally native brand to try physical retail be significantly lowering the cost and commitment to design, launch, and test a physical store. Our goal was to be able to design and launch a fully customized store in 30 days or less.
Responsible for designing and operationalizing the physical design system (based on visplay retail fixture systems) and a digital portal focused on retail analytics, security, and experiment planning.
Launched first location with Winky Lux, NAADAM, Nectar Sleep, Interior Define, DKNY, and UrbanStems.
We planned to scale the concept to at least 10 additional Macerich locations.
Level AI. Ran business operations for an early stage start-up at the time, Level AI, which is focused on the conversation analytics space. This was a bit removed from my typical experience in product, but valuable in helping me understand sales and sales operations better.
I sourced the company’s first enterprise deal ($1M+ ARR) and built out the initial sales team to 4x business development representatives, 1x Enterprise AE, and 2x Sales Engineers to drive a 20X+ growth in ARR. We kept the bar very high on our hiring process.
Established all initial CRM, sales pipeline, sales reporting, compensation planning, and market segmentation. Built initial customer success and technical account support functions.
“Jim delivers results with little direction and oversight. He faced some significant challenges with a lack of dedicated resources to support him and changing strategies and he delivered.”
Charlie Kindle,
Director @ Amazon
“I could always rely on Jim to be informed about all the different operational factors that could contribute or detract from the success of the product. His ideas were pragmatic, well-informed, and useful.”
Saad Ansari,
now Staff Interaction
Designer & Manager @ Google
“I've been in a number of meetings where Jim has had to handle contentious business debate, and his points are always clear, empirically supported and thought provoking. Most importantly, Jim is diligent and trustworthy.”
Veronica Antonova, Product
Manager on Jim’s Team
@ Westfield Labs
