Chief Product Officer/CTO – Experience Services Platform (XSP)
Digital Strategy/Marketing Services Division of Professional Services Firm
Position Summary:
Our client is a leader in digital strategy and marketing services for leading corporations, government and consumer organizations. Our client is seeking a Chief Product Officer/CTO for its Experience Services Platform (XSP) within the Marketing Services business unit. XSP tightly integrates marketing managed services with pre-built IP/software and a best-of-breed ecosystem to power real-time data management, marketing decisioning support, content, delivery, personalization, audience management and the end-to-end customer experience (CX) spectrum. The Chief Product Officer/CTO will have a proven track record of delivering high-quality products in marketing services, with strategic thought leadership and measurable, defined outcomes.
Title: Chief Product Officer/CTO, XSP
Location:
This position has broad geographic flexibility and can be located in several Mid-Atlantic, Southeast or Midwest cities preferably including Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, NYC, or Washington DC
Work You’ll Do:
Your mission is to create a platform that strives to become the hybrid operating system for XSP. As the XSP Chief Product Officer/CTO, you will lead the vision and own the build and delivery of the XSP technology platform and product suite from an engineering perspective. This suite of products will have it’s own proprietary IP and managed services, and also be able to integrate with other existing marketing technology platforms. You will have ownership of the XSP technology platform strategy, product development, innovation and R&D, product delivery and day-to-day operations leading to business outcomes, including the platform and its supporting owned and ecosystem components. As part of the XSP leadership team, you will get to work in an exciting and engaging agile startup environment where you will shape the vision and direction of a strategic growth area for the Firm and be encouraged to expand your skills, share new ideas and test your creative boundaries.
Specific responsibilities include:
Product Development Leadership
- Partner with XSP General Manager to develop a product roadmap that you will own and be responsible for
- Strategic planning and execution of all aspects of product development including establishing and delivering on a product roadmap that is aligned with product/solution management, managed services delivery leadership and Consulting line leadership
- Provide technical and engineering vision and leadership, including envisioning and creating platform blueprints and executing on developing a platform that will support current and future XSP solution offerings.
- Understanding of the competitive landscape and define what is needed to drive customer experience differentiation at scale at a detailed level.
- Evaluate new potential partnerships for “fit” within the existing landscape.
Operational excellence
- Responsible for overall performance and delivery of the XSP technology platform including achieving product roadmap goals, and managing on-time/on-budget performance of the platform and related product suite
- Build a world-class product engineering team using a combination of US and off shore resources.
- Institute Agile processes to advance rapid delivery of products and learn from user experiences
- As a technology leader, collaborate with related product and technology stakeholders within the Digital team and across the enterprise to understand strategic requirements and define, support and deliver on a roadmap for platform services
- Ensure processes are efficient and well engaged/aligned with various stakeholders in other parts of the organization
- Build strong inter-personal relationships with peers and senior leaders in the Digital practice that can help ensure successful execution and identify new product opportunities.
Marketing Technology (Martech) thought leadership
- Demonstrate deep thought leadership in the Marketing Technology space, in particular customer experience technology, advanced marketing analytics and customer and audience data management
- Understanding of structured and unstructured data and how it can be applied to machine learning to increase cross channel campaign effectiveness.
- Understanding of content creation, knowledge management, production, distribution, management and metrics and key 3rd party software in the space
- Understanding of key campaign management tools
- Knowledge of dashboards and reporting tools to deliver continuous optimization.
- Knowledge of the leading edge vendors in the Customer Experience space with new capabilities that can help build new innovative solutions to real world client problems.
- Demonstrate technology leadership in the domain by encouraging adoption of most relevant tools and solutions within the marketing technology ecosystem, including intimate knowledge of leading vendors and practices in each of XSP’s priority areas
- Foster, select and nurture ecosystem relationships with other vendors, including blueprinting XSP’s connector strategy for joint technical go-to-market .
- Translate technical capabilities into business capabilities that are easy to understand for non-technical people.
Product Innovation/R&D
- Build the strategy for growing and expanding the XSP platform to support business growth
- Foster a work environment that is innovative and responsive to market needs, including developing top engineering and product talent and expand the team to support growth
- Lead and support the product innovation process and team.
Qualifications/Requirements:
- Overall experience of 15+ years in Software Development with a majority in product companies in the marketing, digital or customer experience domain; experienced technology leadership in rapid growth companies preferred
- Experience developing and owning vision, blueprints and architecture to build mid- to large-scale software/SaaS products; related additional experience in professional services, implementation or managed services preferred
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field. Masters’ degree preferred
- Has a solid track record of managing high performance engineering teams, and a proven ability to recruit, coach, mentor and motivate engineers
- Strong leadership and change management skills – at least 10 years experience in managing technical teams with last few years as leading an engineering organization delivering products
- Demonstrated ability to partner and collaborate across organizations to optimize outcomes
- Demonstrated ability to think strategically and translate plans into phased actions
- Extensive understanding and responsibility in project and program management principles, with explicit experience in the application of these principles to developing marketing technology solutions
- Effective oral, written and interpersonal communication skills. Strong presentation skills necessary to communicate, and persuade, a wide range of audiences
- Has experience with scaled systems and understands data and system integration; should also have a good understanding of security from a data and process perspective
- Possesses an ability to thrive in a ‘production’ culture and push the limits of an agile development process, while maintaining a high performance cohesive team
- Has a customer-driven mindset and insatiable appetite for engineering excellence and drive for outcomes.
- Understanding of artificial intelligence/machine learning paradigms and distributed cloud based agile deployment
- Strong collaboration skills to partner with other internal experts
Compensation
As our client is seeking an outstanding individual for this important position, they are offering an attractive compensation package including base salary, discretionary cash bonus, long-term incentives, and excellent health and welfare benefits.
Contact
Executive Connections LLC is handling this retained executive search on an exclusive basis. For additional information, please contact:
Jeff Gundersen – CEO
941-323-8300
jgundersen@executiveconnectionsllc.com
Darcy Bevelacqua – Managing Director
917-520-0261
dbevelacqua@executiveconnectionsllc.com