Richard Samela
Product Management Leader | AI/ML/NLP Product Evangelist
About Me
I am a product management leader with over 10 years’ experience aligning scalability and personalized approaches in highly regulated industries. I have a successful record of balancing the needs of healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies while leading teams of 5-11 people. My reputation is being an analytical thinker that can quickly articulate the value proposition. This has enabled my ability to quickly earn trust with customers, stakeholders, and technical teams through empathetic listening and communication which have allowed for an immediate impact to sales.Check out the Richard Samela Store
My Resume
Freelance
Apr 2024 - Present
Product Consultant
- Authored a comprehensive technical product requirements document for an emerging start-up, enabling accurate estimation of development and hosting costs over the first three years; critical for attracting $500k in funding.
- Consulted with Identity start-up to help define product market fit and deliver a roadmap leading to the release of two new products for the suite.
- Engineered a ChatGPT-powered Interview Coach application that provided tailored mock interviews and assisted over 200 candidates, 127 of those securing new positions.IQVIA
Feb 2023 - Apr 2024
Associate Director of Product Management – Analytics
- Delivered a 32% ($5.7M) Year Over Year increase in sales by focusing customer demos on solving problems that create immediate value instead of customer features.
- Achieved year end goal of 70% of traffic on the latest version of the product launch 5 months ahead of schedule by working with the operations team to prioritize rollout on revenue and traffic.
- Created a SSO solution in 6 months by collaborating with two engineering teams to deliver a product that focused on solving google chrome’s deprecation of 3rd party cookies for clients.
- Decreased sales training time 50% by revamping the roadmap strategy to focus on solving customer problems instead of delivering product features.
- Navigated 4 privacy reviews by partnering with the privacy office to ensure the product meets the highest legal and privacy and consent standards.WHELEN ENGINEERING COMPANY
Aug 2019 to Oct 2022
Manager - Engineering Project Management Office
- Transformed a fragmented hardware and software engineering room into 5 cross functional collaborative teams that decreased development time of strategic products by 12 weeks.
- Delivered an IoT solution for first responder vehicles allowing OTA and configuration updates from a central location. This reduced offline time for vehicles from 2-4 to 0 days for routine work.
- Implemented process improvements in scoping products and managing risk through iterative development increased on-time delivery of strategic projects 700% over the last two years.
- Expanded the headcount of the PMO from 4 to 8 members over 3 years which doubled the capacity of hardware products the Engineering department could deliver simultaneously.
- Established a product funnel, roadmaps, and onboarding a new Product Management team within the first 120 days that reducing work in progress by 75% and allowed Senior Leaders to prioritize strategic products and innovation.HARTFORD STEAM BOILER
Jan 2019 – Aug 2019
Business Product Owner, IoT Operations - Consultant
- Overhauled product development practices designed to increase collaboration and communication across internal teams and external vendors to drive customer success.
- Replaced 4 instances of Azure DevOps with a single instance of JIRA.
- Coached product managers and business analysts to write proper user stories and acceptance criteria.YALE UNIVERSITY
May 2018 – Dec 2018
Senior Product Manager - Consultant
- Drove a cross functional team to develop MVP requirements, success criteria, vendors, and strategic brief for replacing Yale’s Identity and Access Management system within the first 120 days.
- Finalized the migration of digital assets for the three Yale museums to a new hosting provider and archival service along with all the display rules saving the university $40K per year.
- Setup new JIRA instance and took on the role of Scrum Master for 3 teams to assist in the transformation from waterfall over to agile.UBM LIFE SCIENCES
Dec 2016 to Jan 2018
Director, Product Management
- Directed a team of 11 direct reports across 4 business units. Managed product managers, mentoring to build skills, overseeing user experience, A/B testing, requirements gathering, SEO, and design thinking.
- Served as the product owner for the entire digital media and mobile app portfolio worth $60M.
- Solved challenge of product location on separate platforms by rolling out an integrated Drupal Content Management Systems (CMS) encompassing 30+ websites.
- Saved $250K+ annually in 1st year of transitioning product management methodology to agile, training product managers, and hiring an internal engineering team to replace offshore resources.
- Implemented NLP, ML, and AI to scan and categorize partner content for a $4M per year increase in Ad revenue.UBM MEDICA US
Aug 2010 to Dec 2016
Technical Product Manager
- Led a team of 6 developers and 3 production personnel in a matrix organization.
- Defined products, wireframes, and created prototypes, and system architecture diagrams for executive sign-off.
- Decreased opt-out rate for campaigns 70% by spearheading development of a Big Data tool to compile 4 data sources to target smaller sets of higher engaged users at a higher CPM.
- Won additional $500K in revenue per year while increasing 90-day active users 35% by using an open source LMS, Moodle, to build an online gaming platform.EDUCATION
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Psychology – Florida International UniversityCERTIFICATIONS
Certified Scrum Master
Certified Scrum Developer
Scrum Product Owner
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