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Michael Bierman

| @mbierm | resume: thebiermans.net | Santa Clara, California

Profile

More than 15 years of product management and design experience of mobile, web, and TV products, platforms, and APIs, with a focus on eCommerce, developer and consumer applications. Ability to identify new product opportunities, reinvigorate and grow product lines, set long-term strategy consistent with brand promise, and champion a product internally and externally. Strong technical skills combined with business acumen applied to identify the problems to be solved and work with all the constituents to prioritize, plan, and deliver.

Bio

Michael was Principal Product Manager for Personal Media at Comcast which included casting photos, videos, and live video streams on TV from XFINITY mobile apps. Prior to Comcast, Michael was at Walmart responsible for Mobile Web Services WalmartLabs. MWS provides APIs for all the mobile platforms at Walmart and has responsibility for the production servers and analytics. He has many years of experience in mobile apps, APIs, web technologies and developer tools.

Prior to WalmartLabs, Michael was at Apigee which are defining the rapidly growing "api-economy". He also has built products for mobile app developers at Nokia and he was the Senior Product Manager for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) at Adobe where he launched SVG and served as Senior Product Manager for the SVG Viewer and guided SVG authoring strategies in Adobe products. Before joining Adobe, Michael was with the Java marketing team at Sun Microsystems, and spent two years as a Product Manager at Microtec/Mentor Graphics working on compilers for embedded systems. Michael was also Senior Product Manager at eBay.

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Professional Highlights

  • Managed web developer products for Nokia covering 85% of the addressable developer market. Created first four generations of Nokia Web SDK with a team spread over three continents. These products were essential components of Nokia's industry-leading mobile developer offerings.
  • Created eBay Blogs to enhance eBay’s renowned community and drive significant natural search traffic through community-created, persistent, rich content. Buyers and sellers used eBay Blogs to enhance their credibility, trustworthiness, and reputation while eBay enjoys increased time on site and transaction volumes.
  • Redesigned eBay’s Product Description Pages to drive a $1.8M annual increase in transaction activity and significant increases in page views via natural search.
  • Managed all phases of the product life cycle on time and within budget for the Adobe SVG Viewer, including market (MRD) and product requirement (PRD) documents and product integration with Adobe’s authoring tools and servers including Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Graphics Server.
  • Developed a licensing and distribution strategy for Adobe SVG Viewer, including third-party distribution with partners such as RealNetworks, establishing more than 166 million seats (38% market penetration) installed over approximately 14 months.
  • Turned 300 support contracts with non-standard terms worth more than $225M into three standard contracts to ensure Sun could meet the contractual obligations to its Java source licensees. Created royalty and support revenue forecasts.
  • Led a cross-functional team to improve the out-of-box experience by simplifying the product installation, increasing customer satisfaction and converting more evaluations into purchases, and saving Microtec more than $250,000 annually.
  • Created the prototype and requirements for Microtec’s first on-line documentation system which, increased usability and reduced the cost of documentation by 23%.
  • Increased Microtec’s support renewal revenue by 15% in one year.

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Employment

Trōv 2016 – 2017

Product Manager

  • Defined and prioritized business use cases and requirements for Promotion codes which navigated complex billing, tax, and regulatory issues spanning 3 countries and 50 states in order to drive trial usage and partnership opportunities.
  • Added Apple Pay / Google Wallet to payment sources using Stripe payment processing while simplifying signup and payment flows and reducing friction.
  • Reduced fraud by up to 38% by improving the quality of data collected during account creation and rate quoting while improving the rate quoting and sign up processing.

Comcast 2014 – 2016

Principal Product Manager, Personal Media

Lead initiatives for casting photos, videos, and live video streams on TV from XFINITY mobile apps. Created new ways of acquiring and retaining users of our X1 set-top apps through features like Personal Screen Saver, improved user flows, and making an amazing experience for sharing media in a 10' experience.

WalmartLabs 2012 – 2014

Principal Product Manager, Mobile Services

Walmart does eCommerce at incredible scale. Mobile Services enabled a dozen mobile applications across four platforms (Android, iPhone, iPad, and mWeb) and three properties (ASDA, Sam's Club, and Walmart). As the Product Manager for Mobile Services, I collected requirements for new APIs to orchestrate internal and 3rd party APIs which enable end-to-end mCommerce, including in-store and multi-channel features, which optimize for mobile clients by reducing number of calls and payload sizes, reducing client resources (battery, CPU, bandwidth, etc.), while keeping as much business logic out of the client as possible. Projects include a Pharmacy make over, Checkout, payment and shipping enhancements, and holiday promotions. My team also has responsibility for Security, Operational Analytics, and Production Support.

Apigee 2011 – 2012

Principal Product Manager, API Tools

Lead cross-product initiatives like Single Sign-On to consolidate eight unique user stores and experiences. Created developer tools such as Console, which enable a developer to make an API request in minutes by providing an overview of all the API‘s methods, parameters, default and required values, contextual help, and authentication. Consoles include a social component: allowing developers to share their API requests and responses with other developers and support engineers via Facebook, twitter or in blogs. Applied agile principals to achieve monthly release cycles that allowed for rapid innovation and predictability.

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Nokia 2008 – 2011

Lead Product Manager, Web Tools

Managed the WRT developer toolchain from a blank slate. The Nokia Web SDK [video], Web SDK Simulator; Nokia Designer, a rapid prototyping tool; Nokia Web Runtime plug-in for Eclipse, WRT extension for Adobe Dreamweaver and WRT plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. These enabled the full life cycle of mobile application development, from concept and ideation to publishing. Challenges included aligning diverse and sometimes conflicting requirements and roadmaps for the many devices and services in Nokia’s portfolio. An innovator in mobile web, Nokia was the Nokia shipped a WebKit-based browser on mobile devices two years before Apple.

Product Management and Design Consultant 2007 – 2008

Advised Silicon Valley startups including Product definition, requirements, and roadmaps. Recommended changes to improve usability, accessibility, and development processes for Assist Guide Information Services and others.

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Habeas 2006 – 2007

Senior Product Manager

Conceived and launched new products based on Adobe Flex, a Yahoo! Map mashup (patent pending). Developed a platform for a new line of business focused on advertising.

eBay 2005 – 2006

Senior Product Manager, Internet Marketing & Community

Launched new products, such as eBay Blogs and redesigned the Product Description pages, to enhance the eBay Community and maximize natural search traffic and decrease eBay’s paid search expenditure.

Product Management Consultant 2001 – 2005

Consulted for a number of companies on a variety of product management and marketing areas including: Adobe, BEA, enScaler, Ideaburst, Open Design Alliance, and Software Mechanics.

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Adobe 1999 – 2001

Senior Product Manager & Evangelist

Managed the Adobe SVG Viewer, a browser plug-in similar to Flash. As SVG Evangelist, influenced the Creative Suite-SVG authoring features and created a vibrant developer community. Represented Adobe at conferences such as Seybold, Builder.com, and FlashForward. Managed a staff to create and evolve a developer a developer network including demos, whitepapers, and authoring guides to educate and inspire SVG adoption. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is the W3C’s XML-based language for scriptable 2D vector graphics that enables data-driven graphics for web, mobile and print, and is now supported in all popular web browsers.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is the W3C’s XML-based language for scriptable 2D vector graphics that enables data-driven graphics for web, mobile and print, and is now supported natively in all popular web browsers.

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Additional Work Experience

Sun Microsystems, Java Software 1997 – 1999

Product Manager, Java Source Licensee Engineering

Marketing Project Manager

Training/Technical Support

Sun Microsystems, SunPro Developer Tools 1990 – 1994

Product Manager

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Education, Certifications, Publications, and Awards

  • Certified ScrumMaster, cPrime 2011
  • U.S. Patent Pending 60/950,102 “Method and Apparatus For Visualizing and Optimizing Message Transfer in Reputation Networks,” Bierman et al., July 16, 2007
  • Bachelor of Arts; California State University, Northridge
  • Dean’s List for Computer Forensics coursework/ Computer Science Program, College of San Mateo 2004
  • Mediation Certification, California Community Dispute Resolution
  • CTM Award; ToastMasters International
  • Cagle, Kurt, foreword by Bierman, Michael; SVG Programming. Berkeley: Apress, July 2002
  • Award for Excellence, Society for Technical Communication Style Guide 1994
  • ISO 9000 Lead Auditor Certification
  • Adobe Customer Briefing Center’s Quarterly Top Presenter and Speaker of the Year awards 2001

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Activities

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