Bachelor's of Business Administration, BAA

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Product Manager

Project Management

I’m a Navy veteran, Harvard Alumnus with over 15 years of experience ?managing projects and multinational teams as large as 26, with a concentration on product development and management. ?I’ve managed product development throughout the product life-cycle (planning, creation, go-to-market) in 27 different industries for companies ranging from start-ups to SMB to enterprise organizations across private, public and government sectors.

I focus on driving sales revenue, market share, and profit margins by developing differentiated new products that deliver unique benefits and superior value to the customer. My cross-industry experience has fostered a divergent ?entrepreneurial mindset, which I define as being intellectually curious enough to find out-of-the-box creative solutions to highly complex and sometimes seemingly impossible problems and being passionate enough to love every minute of the journey. Additionally I believe in a highly structured approach to decision making that is rooted in data and analytics.

PRODUCT PLANNING 
>>Increased annual revenue by 302% by shifting to a market-driven model. Performed analysis on market position, competition, and competency synergy in order to redesign the product roadmap and pricing strategy.
>>Decreased COGS by 12.3% by creating a P&L financial modeling system to track man hours and costs for every client, service line, and division which enabled us to eliminate inefficiencies and reallocate resources.
>>Increase annual revenue by 86.7% by performing buyer persona development and designing and implementing a customer journey roadmap focused on driving reviews and referrals.
>>Increased annual revenue 400% by creating a financial decision modeling system that created quantified business cases to track 5-year cash flow impact projections against proposed initiatives. This led to Sales and Marketing resource reallocation (eliminating waste and focusing teams).
>>Designed a C2C SaaS platform with a 1079 man-hour scope, ?utilizing agile project management to scum the team and manage the platform creation from concept, through UX / UI design and into LAMP web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

PRODUCT CREATION
>>UX/UI website redesign resulting in a 300% increase in sales revenue through conversion optimization and customer experience mapping. Redesigned tech stack to improve website load time by 545.38% (7.63 - 1.19sec).
>>Productized software and web development service offering which resulted in efficiency improvements to financial operations (COGS) of 44%. This required building a multi-national cross functional team with SOPs for communication and work-flow for both customer facing teams (commercial specs) and the development/engineering teams (technical spec)
>>Negotiated a joint venture with a billion dollar brand which resulted in securing an exclusive contract for distribution, required extensive negotiations with multiple legal teams, buy-build-partner analysis, new entity formation, and securing a state contractor license for adherence to state regulatory compliance.
>>Created a software and web development Q/A system (including use scenarios) which reduced user issue rates by 12.4% for a multinational development team.
>>Managed a customer satisfaction process improvement project (customer database content segmentation) which resulted in email list growth of 40.74%, while increasing open rates by 40.79% and click-through rates by 7.89%?.

PRODUCT GO-TO-MARKET 
>>Increased organic web traffic by 241.67% for a product launch by implementing a search engine marketing strategy.
>>Managed the buildout of an event sponsorship/trade-show strategy which included a public speaking sales funnel
that increased sales revenue by 307%.
>>Implemented a social media content strategy that increased social media website visitors by 137.5%.
>>Managed (agile) digital advertising product launch that resulted in $1.7M in sales revenue through Facebook and Google ads, retargeting, Amazon and influencer marketing.
>>Managed a new product launch resulting in revenue of $124,000 in 30 days by building a customer acquisition system that consisted of 3 teams (digital lead generation, call center appointment setting, outside sales team).
>>Managed a new product launch with month over month sales improvements of 50% using Facebook and email advertising strategies. The required the creation of new demo trial versions.


Facilitated mastermind groups and provided product development strategy consulting to over 450 business owners across private, public and government sectors on a range of initiatives including P&L strategy, customer experience, product design, marketing (lead generation & branding), sales (team structuring & training), strategic partnerships (joint ventures and co-branded campaigns), HR (structure, incentives, culture), operations (workflow & communication flow), and mergers/acquisitions.

Business Coach

>>Managed operations for a program that controlled international aviation electronics repair and logistics. This included control of budgets, contracts, database admin, technical specs, bid management, inventory, and shipping logistics.
>>Performed Lean Six Sigma operational overhaul on our systems.
>>Served aboard the USS Carl Vinson and participated in the following operations: Osama Bin Laden burial, Somali pirate conflict, Haiti earthquake relief. Additionally, I served as the Search and Rescue Swimmer.

Program Manager

Managed 35 sales employees across 5 states resulting in a 97% increase in sales and a 47% increase in funding.

SALES DIRECTOR (FOUNDING TEAM)

Managed strategic partners growing our affiliate network by 467%

MARKETING DIRECTOR (FOUNDING TEAM)

Find out detailed information about Christopher Friend, Product Manager in San Diego, CA

Christopher Friend: Product Manager in San Diego, CA

Christopher Friend