Bruce Alderson
Technical Product Leader
Aligning product and engineering excellence with business outcomes · Platform scale · Pragmatic architecture
- White Rock, BC
- 1.604.•••.••••
- bruce.alderson@gmail.com
- linkedin.com/in/bruce-alderson
- brucealderson.ca
Summary
Product leader uniquely positioned at the intersection of technical architecture and business strategy.
Progressed from startup CTO to product leadership at Intuit Mailchimp, managing API infrastructure for a $1B platform portfolio through $12B acquisition. With 25+ years applying ML/AI to real-world problems, from early realtime systems (1998, k-NN algorithms) to modern classification services processing 100M+ datapoints weekly.
Seeking a role that blends product and technical leadership in high-growth companies building large scale products.
Core competencies
- Platform strategy & architecture
- ML/AI product development
- Infrastructure modernization
- DevEx & platform design
- 0–1 product development
- 1–100 scaling (enterprise)
- M&A technical integration
- Cross-functional leadership
- Data-driven product strategy
- Revenue growth & optimization
- Strategic roadmap development
- Stakeholder management
Notable achievements
- Two successful exits: $15M (LemonStand) and $12B acquisition integration (Mailchimp/Intuit).
- Startup to enterprise: Scaled platforms from 0 to 10K merchants and 10M to 100M API calls a day.
- 25+ years of ML/AI: Fraud detection, revenue attribution, personalization engines, industrial control.
Experience
Northbeam
Principal Product Manager
- Led product strategy for Northbeam’s Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) platform, shipping a full UI redesign that shipped over 100 customer-driven improvements across dozens of releases, driving to 100% adoption and positive feedback.
- Managed infrastructure product roadmap across SSO, onboarding, and observability, enabling enterprise-grade identity federation for all customers and reducing time-to-value for new accounts.
- Drove platform reliability and operational visibility initiatives, including system health monitoring and analytics instrumentation.
Intuit Mailchimp
Staff Product Manager
- Led product strategy for a B2C platform portfolio generating $1B in annual revenue, managing product roadmaps and priorities for a cross-functional team of 25 (22 engineers, 1 PM, 2 designers), with teams maintaining 99.9% uptime SLA and improving customer retention from 73% to 80%. Responsible for stakeholder management across director/VP levels in design, product, and engineering.
- Launched ML-powered revenue attribution service processing 100M+ API events weekly, enabling customers across a platform with ~$800M ARR to track store sales and optimize marketing spend ROI, resulting in 15% increase in enterprise plan upgrades.
- Managed roadmaps and priorities for API platform modernization reducing p95 latency from 1200ms to < 500ms across 265 endpoints, achieving 99.9% to 99.99% uptime through improved caching, connection pooling, and circuit breaker patterns, reducing infrastructure costs by 35%.
- Designed event-driven data pipeline increasing ecommerce coverage from 45% to 95% of customers, supporting 7 new integration patterns (webhooks, batch, streaming) and enabling real-time inventory sync for 10M+ products daily.
Senior Product Manager
- Led product discovery and roadmaps for public API platform teams through $12B Intuit acquisition, managing GCP-AWS migration of 265 APIs serving 100M+ daily requests within 2-year deadline and $5M budget, with zero downtime during transition.
- Directed a special growth team, improving the first-use experiences based on measures and VOC to achieve a quarterly 6% increase in onboarding success (from 8% to 14%) by reducing complexity, with an additional 14% growth the following year.
- Developed a product to classify public endpoint abuse and TOS violations, and features to reduce 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
- Built and scaled an API platform from 10M to 100M daily requests, leading team of 20 (17 engineers, 1 PM, 2 designers) to support 60 strategic partners (Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce) and 300+ ISVs, driving $900M in platform-attributed revenue.
- Modernized legacy monolithic API to microservices architecture (Node.js to Go), implementing distributed tracing and real-time analytics; improved paid conversion from 58% to 80% over the year, and reduced infrastructure costs by 60%.
- Launched two new product lines: ecommerce analytics platform (0-1 in 18 months, 10K merchants) and payments infrastructure (6 months to MVP, processing $50M monthly).
- Promoted from Engineering Manager to Senior Product Manager to lead product discovery for a new Payments product family, leveraging ecommerce expertise from LemonStand acquisition; defined strategy for $200M revenue opportunity and achieved alpha status before acquisition.
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
- As technical co-founder/CTO, architected multi-tenant SaaS platform processing $2B in GMV, reduced AWS costs by 90% through database optimization and caching strategies, and led technical due diligence for successful $15+M acquisition.
- Scaled platform from 100 to 10K merchants by building enterprise features (multi-store, custom checkout, inventory sync), implementing ML-based fraud detection reducing chargebacks by 40%, and achieving 99.9% uptime during Black Friday peaks (10x traffic).
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.
- Built a boutique web consultancy to $2M ARR serving enterprise clients (Nike, Microsoft, EA Sports), delivering high-performance web applications handling 150M+ pageviews monthly; achieved 95% client retention through technical excellence and 30% average revenue increase for client campaigns.
- Pioneered real-time personalization engine (2010) using behavioral tracking and A/B testing frameworks, increasing client conversion rates by 45%, technology later adopted by major marketing platforms.
- Founded technical consultancy specializing in high-traffic web applications, growing from solo consultant to team of 8, establishing expertise in performance optimization and early cloud adoption (AWS 2008).
- 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: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C/C++
- Cloud & infrastructure: AWS (15+ years), GCP (5+ years), Kubernetes, Terraform
- API & architecture: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, event-driven systems, microservices
- Data & ML: Real-time processing, ETL pipelines, data classification, TensorFlow
- AI & automation: Rapid prototyping, usage forecasting, model fine-tuning, evaluation rubrics
Education
Undergraduate, Computer Information Systems, University College of the Fraser Valley