MIKE CHOWLA
resume at chowla.com
resume at chowla.com
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT LEADER
Executive product management leader who combines deep ad tech domain expertise with a strong focus on creating customer value to deliver superior business results. Strategic thinker who blends an analytical approach with extensive market knowledge to build winning strategies.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Product Management
Ad Tech
SaaS
Product Strategy
Innovation
CTV
Product Roadmap
Enterprise Software
Marketing Tech
Analytics
Machine Learning
AI
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Lead Addressability product management team
Lead product organization of 20 consisting of product management, UX, and marketplace quality
- Refocus product and engineering organization on revenue growth, which reversed the prior year's decline and drove YoY company revenue growth
- Create a new product strategy aligned with the corporate strategy that focuses on satisfying latent buyer needs
- Optimize product management process to stay efficient and focused as the organization grew
Lead product management team for header bidding, mobile, video and CTV products
- Build out a new product management team to handle the expansion of PubMatic’s header bidding wrapper SaaS offering (OpenWrap) into multiple new channels: in-app, AMP, pre-roll video, and OTT/CTV
- Steered video roadmap and execution to better serve both sellers and buyers needs resulting in 83% year-over-year revenue growth
- Spearheaded creation of PubMatic’s OpenWrap SDK including the development of concept and strategy. The OpenWrap SDK is a unified auction SDK which resolves in-app publisher pain points and brings them new revenue
- Drove product strategy for new OTT/CTV header bidding offering which established as PubMatic as leading CTV SSP and was a key factor in achieving 55% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth
Head of Product for Rubicon Project’s Innovation Lab, The Garage
- Head of Product for Project Awesome, a new product that improves
the consumer experience of advertising. Managed a global of team of 7 engineers. Conducted customer
discovery and consumer research to determine feature set. Created roadmap balancing needs of consumers,
publishers and advertisers.
Media Coverage: Fast Company, MediaPost, Ad Age, Mashable - Led a global team of 18, including Product Management, Engineering, Operations and Technical Account
Management, for DSP Builder, a Platform as a
Service (PaaS) for RTB ad buying. Successfully shepherded product from an alpha with one customer to a
production offering with multiple customers.
Media Coverage: MediaPost, Ad Exchanger, CMSwire - Managed product for innovative low latency Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, HFC2. Leveraging competitive analysis, established product roadmap to create differentiated offering. Took product from alpha to production offering with multiple customers. Product won Business Intelligence Group's Stratus Award for Hybrid Cloud.
- Led engineering, design and marketing efforts (team size of 6) for development and go-to-market of new a consumer marketplace application on iOS. Oversee development of marketing and advertising plan. Directed consumer research to determine customer need, product roadmap and launch markets.
- Created a staged innovation process for The Garage. Defined project phases and exit criteria for each phase. Build flexibility into the process so a concept’s path to market can be customized to its individual needs. Structured process to optimize for migrating successful concepts into business units.
- Launched a new developer portal company wide, centralizing developer and API documentation which improved developer experience.
Head of product management and product marketing for AerCloud, a platform for building Internet of Things (IoT) applications
- Built business case with financial projections. Successfully persuaded upper management to increase engineering staffing.
- Based on customer and partner feedback, reworked product roadmap to address competitive gaps and additional market segments.
- Defined new pricing structure which encouraged product trials. Streamlined trial setup and standard contract, reducing sales friction.
- Repositioned product as IoT (Internet of Things) data platform to capitalize on IoT market momentum. Reworked marketing collateral to reflect updated positioning.
Lead product management team, set product strategy and create roadmap for StrongView’s cross-channel marketing platform which enables digital marketers to create and execute cutting-edge marketing campaigns
- Product owner for next generation data platform, which enables marketers to generate new insights from consumer behavioral data. Craft roadmap and execute on initial feature set.
- Manage and coach a team of product managers, helping them grow their skills, increase productivity and create remarkable products.
- Instituted new hiring process for the product management group which utilizes candidate scorecards and tag team interviews. Increased new hire quality while reducing the time spent interviewing. Scorecard methodology was adopted by two other groups.
- Create display advertising retargeting integration to enable cross-channel marketing campaigns. Evaluated integrating directly to RTB (Real Time Bidding) ad exchanges versus partnering with DSPs (Demand Side Providers).
- Completely revamp product dashboard, reporting and analytics functionality. Created wireframes, authored product requirements, worked with engineering to balance functionality and feasibility, and managed implementation timeline. Transformed reporting functionality into competitive strength by setting focus on usability and user experience.
- Created and executed on roadmap for evolving subscriber data management functionality into a system that simplifies creation and management of data-driven innovative marketing campaigns. Through interaction with customers, prospects and sales engineers, identified pain points in leveraging marketing data and defined new product functionality address to those challenges.
Led product effort which created a new platform for integrations to AOL Mail, an email service with 30M monthly unique visitors and $100M in annual revenue
- Created AOL Webmail’s Plug-in Program. Developed roadmap, authored product requirements and recruited launch partners. Formulated platform launch strategy. Evaluated financial attractiveness of partner relationships. Directed development of in-house plug-ins by local and offshore teams. Over 3 million plug-ins installed to date.
- Launched completely revamped AOL Sync product supporting 1200 mobile devices including iPhone and Blackberry. Created and executed roadmap for product. Worked closely with engineering, user experience, operations and customer support teams to ensure a successful product launch.
- Conducted comprehensive analysis of customer lifetime value by client type (web, mobile, open access). Determined users of certain clients had up to 33% value higher across the AOL network. Used findings to influence senior management to maintain open access and thus retain high value users.
- Conceptualized social media integrations for AOL Mail with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Created wireframes and product requirements. Worked with engineering team to establish feasibility of requirements.
- Instituted API program with Mail, Address Book and Calendar APIs. Managed partner relationships with partners ranging from start-ups to large mobile carriers.
- Performed competitive analysis for both AOL Webmail and AOL Sync. Defined data collection metrics and analyzed usage data to generate insights for new business opportunities.
System Architect (2004 - 2008)
- Manage all technical aspects of TopSpeed, AOL's web acceleration system. The system is deployed to 20 million customers worldwide, and processes in excess of 15 billion transactions per day.
- Led a team of engineers integrating the large storage service in AOL Web Mail. Designed and implemented integration between AOL Mail and AOL’s storage platform XDrive that enabled users to seamlessly send email attachments up to 2GB in size.
- Developed strategy for integration of European email systems with AOL's email front-end in collaboration with three European partners. Negotiated with international partners to iron out final technical requirements. System successfully deployed to 700,000 customers.
Spearheaded integration of acquired technology into Verity’s industry leading enterprise search platform
- Developed concept and successful business case for building next-generation document classification management system, generating one million dollars in orders on the day it was released.
- Integrated document classification technology (acquired from Inktomi) into Verity's industry-leading intellectual capital management platform, transforming previous single-user system into a far more competitive, powerful, and flexible multi-user system that commanded premium licensing fees from large corporate customers.
INKTOMI, Foster City, CA
Senior Staff Engineer (2001 - 2002)
Technical Team Leader (1999 - 2000)
Software Engineer (1997 - 1998)
Senior Staff Engineer (2001 - 2002)
Technical Team Leader (1999 - 2000)
Software Engineer (1997 - 1998)
1997 - 2002
Chief architect for Inktomi Traffic Server
- As a founding member of the Traffic Server product engineering team (which grew to 35 members) led design and implementation of Inktomi's flagship product, a high-performance internet server.
- Chairman and founding member of division-wide architecture review committee, which reviewed and evaluated all new product feature proposals. As chairman, had signing authority for all new product feature approvals.
- Granted Patent # 7,228,317 for "Method and Apparatus for Accelerating and Improving Access to Network Files" and Patent # 7,243,136 for "Approach for Managing and Providing Content to Users."
- Successfully managed rescue of troubled streaming media product, preventing $40 million liability. Quickly bridged gap between two separate corporate cultures to effectively utilize relevant expertise from recently acquired company. Received the Top Performing Employee of the Quarter award for the effort.
EDUCATION
Master of Business Administration (MBA); Executive Program;
Major in Finance
- Palmer Scholar (top 5% of class)
Bachelor of Science in Engineering, Major in Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences
Machine Learning,
4-course specialization by University of Washington
Machine Learning by Stanford University
Machine Learning by Stanford University
