James Conway, Product Manager

Top skills

Additional skills (10)

I have over twelve years of experience delivering products and services to clients in complex industries. I focus on building a deep understanding of customers’ needs and working cross-functionally to deliver solutions that meet those needs. I am seeking new challenges to grow as a product manager and lead in delivering great products with awesome teams.

Appfire - Comalatech
Senior Product Manager and Product Owner
DIGITAL & IT
May 2019 - February 2023 (3 years and 8 months)
Spain
Portfolio included flagship app for adding workflows to Confluence content. Enabling over 1,500 customers worldwide to ensure compliance with quality standards.
o Increased annual portfolio revenue over four years from ~ $6million to $13 million.
o Responsible for both product management and product owner activities.

Strong focus on understanding customer and user needs through discovery and analytics:
o Interviewed seven major customers (including Apple, Oracle) ahead of major release. Used insights to design API capabilities, prioritise delivery roadmap and refine messaging.
o Conducted user testing with 10 Confluence users that had not used my product. Identified and documented six key friction points with video explainers for incoming product designer.
o Built SQL queries and dashboard to understand feature penetration in legacy platform add-on. Used insight to propose priority capabilities for development.
o Continually engaged sales and support teams to identify emerging customer needs. Followed up to determine if existing capabilities could satisfy need or if a new capability was required.

Took ownership of strategic migration initiative following departure of two team members; improved end-to-end customer experience to maximise retention of customers affected by platform retirement:
o Coded tool in Python to parse customer usage data and output pre-filled template to inform customer calls. Trained support team to manage migration queries.
o Raised migration success rate from 54% to 91% in 6 months through root cause analysis, managed implementation of improvements with engineering, engaged Atlassian to secure essential fixes.
o Oversaw development and continual improvement of dedicated public documentation portal.

Worked cross-functionally with engineering, design and marketing on ideation, implementation, and release of new and improved features to achieve product vision:
o Identified opportunity to deliver new capability by leveraging public API of a peer vendor. Presented business case to product strategy board and led iterative development of feature.
o Drove development from concept to release of new capability to accelerate customer support; used in ~20% support cases to understand customer configuration and advise on solution.
o Reduced technical debt and improved user experience through prioritising the rebuild of three key configuration screens with new frontend stack.
o Refined and prioritised backlog in Jira as part the Agile product development process, used both Scrum and Kanban frameworks depending on team size and priorities.

Led market research and competitive analysis for the product strategy board:
o Built tool in Python to monitor platform and competitor pricing changes. Used insights to inform portfolio pricing strategy for three annual price reviews to maximise revenue generation.
o Engaged the Atlassian ecosystem through user, partner, and developer communities to build Comala brand and compile market research.
Product management Customer Journey product owner Product roadmap
IBM Consulting
Technology Strategy Consultant
CONSULTING & AUDITS
October 2013 - December 2018 (5 years and 2 months)
London, UK
• Product owner for delivery of a bespoke AI "chatbot" for defence contractor employees. Managed budget, schedule, and a team of three software developers on- and off-shore.
• Led ten digital strategy projects for clients across private, public & third sectors. Analysed org structure, capabilities, and desired outcomes. Produced vision, strategy, and implementation roadmaps.
• Delivered parallel projects for separate clients, managed expectations of different internal stakeholders through clear status reports, tracking of evolving priorities and progress of deliverables.
• Analysed design and build processes to optimise technical information structure for end-users. Improved plan certainty and increased 'right first time' activities for a major UK defence programme.
• Produced Operations Manual for a five-member technology alliance at the largest UK water company, clearly setting out to employees across the alliance how they would work together to achieve goals.
• Developed an Excel spreadsheet to quantify variations in 150 finance processes across 45 countries and automatically generate consistent presentations for executives at a global pharmaceutical.
Technology strategy Business architecture Project management Stakeholder management Workshop facilitation Business analysis
Hyder Consulting
Graduate Civil Engineer
CIVIL ENGINEERING
September 2009 - September 2013 (4 years)
Guildford, United Kingdom
Responsible for outline and detailed design of water and sewer network schemes. I developed and managed design team information systems and processes, and assisted the project director with reports to the client.

Check out James's recommendations

Check out James's education

Master of Science
University of Exeter
2009
Master of Science (MSc), Urban Water Systems
Bachelor of Engineering
University of Exeter
2008
Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Civil Engineering