Bruce Alderson
Senior Product Manager
25 years in product development, operations, and business-driven data analysis
- White Rock, BC
- 1.604.•••.••••
- bruce.alderson@gmail.com
- linkedin.com/in/bruce-alderson
- brucealderson.ca
Summary
Highly versatile and experienced senior product manager offering expertise in the full product management lifecycle, high-level strategic planning, and user experience. Proven track record of developing and managing successful products worth up to $1B in annual revenue aligned to strategic objectives, with a focus on data-driven analysis, continuous process improvement, and measurable deliverables.
Deep technical expertise combined with an understanding of the importance of effective project management, end-user satisfaction, and stakeholder management. Collaborative team leader focused on building relationships to produce highly effective teams, increasing productivity, and improving outcomes.
Core competencies
- Product management
- User experience
- Cloud integration
- Strategic planning
- Data & analytics
- Cross-functional leadership
- ML & AI technology
- Product development
- Risk mitigation
- Operational processes
- Software architecture
- Agile processes
Experience
Northbeam
Principal Product Manager
- Grew the product vision and execution for Northbeam’s multi-touch attribution (MTA) product.
- Launched the new 3.0 UI with improved UX and up to 5x faster graph loads.
Intuit Mailchimp
Staff Product Manager
- Oversaw a team of 25 staff to manage a portfolio of products worth $1B, creating product roadmaps and strategic plans and implementing improvements to achieve 99.9% system uptime while increasing customer retention to 80%.
- Served as the product lead for a machine learning service, classifying over 100M datapoints in one week of public API endpoint data, linking customer ecommerce revenue to marketing spend across a platform with ~$800M ARR.
- Implemented a modernization initiative to improve operational excellence for all 265 public APIs, exceeding 99.99% uptime, lowering failure rates by 35%, and reducing the median request time by 40% (from 1200ms to 500ms).
- Introduced new infrastructure to increase data coverage for ecommerce customers by 50 points (from 45% to 95%), enabling the support of event-based data and 7 new types of ecommerce and business patterns.
- Streamlined product installation, simplifying the signup flow and optimizing the authentication process to improve installation success for all core integrations by 30 points (from 50% to 80%), and made partner syncs 600% faster.
Senior Product Manager
- Led a team of 20 staff and managed a portfolio of 265 public APIs and infrastructure products, developing strategic plans and product roadmaps to ensure teams met 100% of KPI targets.
- Managed the public platforms team through a $12B acquisition, spearheading the migration of infrastructure services from GCP to AWS within 2 years while ensuring the project was completed within budget.
- Served as an Integrations Product Director and Engineering Director, supervising 5 product managers, 75 product staff, and 50 engineering staff, ensuring continuity of services and projects.
- Directed a special growth team, improving the first-use experiences based on measures and VOC to achieve a 6% increase in onboarding success (from 8% to 14%) within 3 months, with an additional 14% growth the following year.
- Developed a product to classify public endpoint abuse and TOS violations, reducing spurious and suspicious calls by 75% and improving performance for paid and trial customers by 60%.
- Modernized an email-only solution to include SMS based marketing tools, supporting expansion into a $13B global market, and oversaw a project to improve operational excellence, exceeding the target of 500ms median call duration.
Mailchimp (The Rocket Science Group)
Senior Product Manager
- Managed the public API and infrastructure team of 20 staff to support 60 strategic partners and 300 independent partners, supporting over $900M in annual revenue for the organization.
- Oversaw the creation of the ecommerce engineering group, delivering a beta product within 1.5 years, and created a payments product within 6 months, supporting the organization’s strategic goals.
- Spearheaded a project to upgrade 10-year-old infrastructure, implementing advanced analysis features to enable customers to measure ROI and improve the conversion to paid customers by 22 points (from 58% to 80%).
Senior Engineering Manager
- Led engineering for Mailchimp + Commerce initiative reporting to VP Product, scaling team from 5 to 75 engineers (15 direct reports including managers and tech leads) while shipping bi-weekly releases.
- Drove post-acquisition integration of LemonStand platform, architecting data migration for 10K merchants and $2B GMV, implementing phased sunset strategy completed on schedule.
- Established engineering culture combining startup agility with enterprise reliability: implemented SRE practices, reduced incident response time by 70% and improved deployment frequency from monthly to daily.
- Identified product opportunity in payments space through customer interviews and data analysis, presenting business case to leadership; transitioned to PM role to execute vision.
LemonStand eCommerce
Chief Technology Officer
- Led a team of 12 product, engineering, and design staff for a startup, reducing operating costs by 90% (from $250k annually to $20k) and leading the team through a successful $15M+ acquisition.
- Built new product features for high-profile customers, including new sales tools and advanced trial features, supporting growth from 100 to 10K merchants, who served over 10M customers of their own.
Discovery Software
Architect and CTO
- Chief developer and co-architect of web, mobile, and desktop software for educators and school administrators: system and UI design, implementation, project management, and review.
- Ran software development and IT (systems, strategy, and budgets); senior consultant and technical lead for partner companies, technical and management trainer, and SR&ED technical consultant.
Earlier experience
- Chief Technology Officer, Napkinware Design Services Ltd. 2009–2014
- My own side consultancy, run alongside full-time roles with a part-time team of designers, content people, and developers.
- Created customized interactive media webpages for a portfolio of 166 clients, driving up to $20M in client revenue and generating over 150M page views within launch periods.
- Improved client user experience by increasing positive webpage feedback from 65% to 95% through targeted enhancements informed by voice of customer (VOC) data and iterative development.
- Consultant, Napkinware Design Services Ltd. 1996–2009
- Contract development, often websites for non-profits: a way to broaden skills without competing with work projects.
- Embedded controller for a collision detection system (VxWorks, C++), and embedded protocol drivers (C/C++, TCP/IP).
- Natural-language parser libraries (Perl, JavaScript, PHP), and an online training system (PHP, JavaScript, CouchDB).
- Coached SaaS development managers and CTOs on product management, development standards, and SQA.
- Classroom trainer and speaker: C/C++, software design methods, web design, little languages, regex, and SEO ethics.
- Senior Architect, Triant Technologies 1996–2004
- Designed and built data collection and analysis infrastructure for tracking and tuning semiconductor manufacturing quality: embedded and enterprise systems in C, C++, and Java.
- Worked on early machine learning for semiconductor process control: a process modelling system that learned from statistical sampling, using tiny models.
- Built a Pascal compiler for the Motorola 68030, and data acquisition (DAQ) device drivers for Linux and Windows.
- Joined out of university; roles included software developer, technical team lead, senior developer, and software architect.
Technical skills
- Languages & frameworks: Java, C, C++, Assembly, PHP, JavaScript, ReactJS, AngularJS, Node.js, Perl, C#, .NET
- Web & data: XML, RESTful web services, SQL, MySQL, Apache
- Cloud & tools: AWS, GCP, Visual Studio
Education
Undergraduate, Computer Information Systems, University College of the Fraser Valley