Hi, I’m Jonathan Spinney—a product management professional based in beautiful Boulder Colorado.

Product management leader | Digital transformation generalist | 20+ years' experience managing self-service API & SaaS products atop scalable infrastructure & business systems | GIS & Location Intelligence expert | ENFJ personality

I have 25 years combined high-tech experience in a range of Product Management, Marketing & Sales Operations, Business Development, Partner & Alliance Management, and Strategy roles and with different sized companies, from large corporations to seed-stage startups. My areas of tech expertise include a wide range of Communications, Cloud, Billing/Payments, e-Commerce, Digital Marketing, Identity Management, API Management, API and SDK design, SaaS and Mobile technologies with expert knowledge of GIS/Geospatial data & software—applied within Telecommunications, Insurance, Financial Services, Retail, eCommerce, Real Estate, Entertainment and Gaming verticals.

I love working on digital transformation challenges, creating ecosystems around API Products, automating business processes, and eliminating or reducing complexity from customer journeys by introducing simplicity at every stage of a customer’s journey by embracing & practicing Lean Startup, Customer Development, Design Thinking, and Pragmatic Institute methodologies & data-informed disciplines. I focus on self-service customer journey stages around how customers Learn about a Product, how they Buy it, how they Get it, how they Use it, how they Pay for it, and how they get Support for it. I’ve become a generalist-expert in designing & bringing new self-service subscription-based Cloud API products and SaaS Applications to market—for any tech Product—from concept and turning them into multimillion dollar businesses—from zero, with a relentless focus on delivering simple, hassle-free customer experiences. I have done this 4 times with 4 different companies over the last 20 years, and I’ve learned lots along the way—I hope we can discuss it. I’ve accomplished most of this working with and leading globally distributed teams, in remote/onsite hybrid working environments since 2007.

On a given day, I help other Product Managers be their best with mentoring & influence rallied around big picture missions, work with internal Engineer partners to deliver best-in-class Products, assisting Sales, Marketing and GTM teams, while I may also be assembling & influencing highly efficient cross-functional teams to deliver self-service value-proposition promises. I also research market trends, craft market segmentations, develop target persona definitions, build inception business cases and cost-benefits analysis documents, define MVP hypotheses, product roadmaps, collaborate with UX and Designers (internal and external), work with outside creative agencies, write user success stories & articles, define pricing models & pricing, form and manage a Product P&L, define subscription agreements—acceptable usage policies—and privacy policies with Legal counsel, develop and execute multi-phased go-to-market strategies with measurable KPIs, brief industry Analysts, or supporting direct sales & channel distribution or supplier partnering activities, and partner with hundreds of 3rd party data suppliers. I also thoroughly enjoy creating presentations and marketing material, public speaking, and briefing customers, partners, executive audiences, board members and investors.

Professional History 

Product Management Consultant, Self Employed, March 2024 - Present

Consultanta growing company specializing in helping Gaming operators comply with local laws and regulations for iGaming, Sports betting and Lotteries using multisource Location, Geofencing, and Device Profiling APIs and SDK products.

I implemented new Aha! tooling, built a Product roadmap, built a business strategy plan with the CEO, implemented product management best practices using Pragmatic Institute framework and assisted outside Design to build a new company website and marketing collateral with GTM digital marketing campaigns and tactics to promote it and drive new business.

Senior Director of Product Management, Maxar Technologies, February 2022 - October 2023

Maxar hired me to build a new 3D, SAR and AI generated data derivative portfolio of base self-service APIs and two vertical SaaS applications that used APIs through a cross functional digital transformation effort. This required assembling a large cross-functional team, working through Corp procurement processes to hire outside expertise to develop a solutions architecture and design for integrating back-office business systems to deliver all offers through self-service. Another key component included rallying CFO teams to support Treasury, Tax and Finance leadership to procure a self-service subscription management & billing solution configuration including Cybersource, Recurly, Vertex, and JP Morgan to transition Maxar from a PO-only business to one that accepts Credit Cards, ACH and Digital Wallet payments with notification automation for all account activities. I also brought in Aha! as a PM tool and Pragmatic Institute for PM training - both adopted company-wide.

Director of Product Management, IoT Solutions, Datalogic, June 2021 - January 2022 (Term Contract)

Korn Ferry recruited me to join Datalogic to help them evolve their Hardware business with APIs, SaaS Applications, and AI/ML at the edge for a wide variety of IoT devices used in the Retail, e-Commerce, Transportation & Logistics, Healthcare, and Manufacturing industries. I was hired for a term contract to help deliver a 5-year plan in close collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, the C suite and BoD. The work was completed, and subsequently socialized company-wide as a new strategy in-person, in Bologna Italy, in December 2021. This resulted in a re-org, and formation of a new software solutions business unit oriented towards APIs and SaaS in 2022. I departed Datalogic in January 2022.

Director of Product Management, Location Intelligence, Precisely, May 2020 - May 2021

I joined Precisely through Syncsort’s acquisition of the Pitney Bowes Software & Data business in 2019. The company was rebranded to Precisely in 2020. My team and I rebranded existing the API and SaaS Products and continued to help over 15k existing accounts process hundreds of millions of transactions daily through four self-service Products we built together at Pitney Bowes. Please visit the below sites to see my work.
developer.precisely.com | geotax.com | mapmarker.com | Geocoding API for GIS

Rebranded all four Pitney Bowes self-service SaaS Products (developer.precisely.com, geotax.com, data.precisely.com and mapmarker.com) within three months to the Precisely brand following a November 2019 acquisition of Pitney Bowes software. This included migrations to new AWS Cloud and business systems to support subscriptions, identity management, billing, account entitlement provisioning, transaction logging, and account usage analytics.

  • $12MM in 2020 total sales (Direct & Indirect) following merger, representing a 212% YoY growth.

  • Increased net new activations by 160% through digital marketing tactics including SEM, Social, and CRM campaigns.

Director of Product Management, Location Intelligence, Pitney Bowes, October 2013 - May 2020

My efforts at Pitney Bowes included bringing three new fully self-service Location Intelligence & Identity API & SaaS products to market through corporate realization and cultural change management processes, resulting in growing a new Commerce Cloud business from $0 to over $30MM in 6 years, with 79% CAGR--all subscription based stream revenue. These three products are used by thousands of end-users and hundreds of application developers, with SaaS business systems processing billions of transactions daily, atop hundreds of E-commerce, location intelligence, and identity APIs, with over two-hundred data sources.

Specific activities included primary and secondary market research, crafting market segmentations, developing target persona definitions, building inception business cases and cost-benefits analyses, changing our API Management definition for monetization, defining MVP and go-to-market hypotheses, managing on-going roadmaps, co-design thinking and production UX and Designers , managing outside creative agencies, defining pricing, forming and managing the P&L, supplying language to Legal for subscription/usage restrictions/privacy policy agreements, developing and introducing a set of go-to-market self-service marketing tactics, briefing leading industry Analysts, and supporting direct sales & marketplace distribution partnering activities with AWS, IBM, and GE.

I received two awards— "Best User Experience" and "Head of the Pack Award"

See this talk from Google Next 2017 - https://youtu.be/4j0lZ4H_rL0

Product Management Strategist Team Lead, Enterprise Mobility, AT&T, December 2010 - October 2013

My efforts at AT&T resulted in 300%+ YoY revenue growth, resulting in $48MM in revenue through five new product launches including AT&T DriveMode, AT&T Advanced Communications Suite (in Partnership with Twilio), AT&T API Platform Geo API, Converged IP Messaging, and a confidential Big Data project analyzing massive amounts of ambient location & subscriber data. I received three awards, and was promoted twice in two years.

  • Daily cross-functional activities included helping a team of Product Managers bring to market new B2B products for some of AT&T’s largest enterprise customers. Specifically, I helped other PMs with research and analysis, customer engagement & advocacy, market assessments and sizing, competitive analysis, ideation, product architecture designs, and business development alliance sourcing, negotiations, and contracting. I also managed outside agencies, suppliers & partners, defined new product features and market positioning.  

  • On a daily basis, I insulated other PMs from challenging cross-functional team interactions with multiple corporate administration offices involved in new Product launches, which included IT, CTO Office, Billing, Pricing, Customer Care, Sales, Sales Operations, Finance, Legal, Public Policy, Privacy, Marketing Communications, Public Relations, and Supply Chain.

My efforts were split 40% on product realization, and 60% on bringing new ideas to MVP test-stage with three AT&T Innovation Pipeline contributions, two of which received $1MM in funding from the AT&T CTO office.  

I received three awards—AT&T "King of the Hill" Award, AT&T Innovation Pipeline Award, AT&T Intellectual Property Achievement Award

GM, Location Labs, March 2010 - December 2010

I managed $30MM alliances with major U.S. and European Mobile Operator and Mobile Device Manufacturers in support of a deployed Family Locator & Safety SaaS Application, which grew to $42MM in annual revenue. I worked closely with outside counsel, inked complex contracts with new partners and added amendments and addendums to large, existing agreements on a global scale. I also helped develop a new line of business for a new multimodal Location-as-a-Service Cloud API, and a first-of-it’s-kind peer-to-peer geofencing Product resulting in $5MM of net new revenue from third party developers.

COO at Start-up and Private consulting, July 2009 - March 2010

I’m happy to discuss this time in my career. I started my own LLC offering private consulting services and also was a part-time COO for a start-up focussed on personal protection in social settings.

VP Global Business Development, Rugged Mobile Phones, Sonim Technologies, August 2007 - July 2009

I led global business development efforts across mobile operator, retail, and direct-to-enterprise paths to market, plus US sales team efforts to tier II and III US rural wireless carriers. Also responsible for executing enterprise applications strategy, inking agreements with supply-chain technology providers and partnerships with brands, content providers, software & accessories suppliers.

  • Built joint business development plans with European carrier-customers (Vodafone, Orange, Sunrise), targeting B2B SMB and enterprise sales resulting in tens-of-thousands of handset deployments across industry verticals including Security, Transportation, Oil & Gas, Mining, Construction & Engineering, Defense, and Local Government. Also Led Sonim's US rural wireless carrier sales effort, resulting in 20+ tier II and III pre-orders valued at over $32MM in 2008.

  • Led new market development in Australia with Crazy Johns MVNO, including a 2-month, in-country sales and lead generation project training 140+ retail stores resulting in $12MM new sales over 18 months.

Director of Product Management, Location & Identity Openwave Systems, Oct 2005 - July 2007

I designed and built a hosted location-as-s-service SOAP /REST API developer offering atop deployed wireless location & mobile identity infrastructure, with parallel responsibility for geospatial platform & Telecom Web Services product management and ecosystem creation resulting in recruiting over 45 3rd party developers and generating millions of dollars in additional application sales atop existing cellular post-paid plans.

Industry Solutions Marketing Manager, Location-based Services, Esri, August 2001 - October 2005

I built ESRI's early industry solutions market & ecosystem for mobile location-based services APIs. Winner of ESRI's Annual Award in Innovation in 2004. We launched one the world's first set of APIs for mapping, geocoding, routing, wireless remote geolocation and place searching in 2001. When coupled with user-plane mobile device location APIs (J2ME JSR-179 and Qualcomm's BREW iposdet stuff (pre Android and iOS)) we built a developer ecosystem with hundreds of Mobile & Web B2C and B2B developers touching millions of consumers and business end-users across multiple industry verticals with the help of NAVTEQ (now HERE Technologies) through four NAVTEQ LBS Challenge sponsorships & partnerships, resulting in the recruitment of over two-dozen vertically aligned and consumer-focused application developers.  

Product Manager, Location-based Services, SignalSoft, August 2000 - August 2001

I PM'd a GIS-based provisioning system for a first-of-its-kind, fault-tolerant, five-nines wireless location SS7 call processing platform. Signalsoft invented wireless location in the 2.5G Voice-SMS-WAP-only era and introduced the first Open Mobile Alliance XML API for mobile location services. Our customers included wireless carriers implementing E-911 and other consumer information services including a local information WAP deck, location-sensitive wireless billing, and a peer-to-peer mobile locator application. Signalsoft was acquired by Openwave Systems, after IPO in 2000.

Consultant & Senior Product Manager, GIS Data Products, The Strategist Group, January 1998 - August 2000

The Strategis Group was a strategy consulting firm, which provided market research reports, customized consulting services, daily on-line news services and continuous information solutions to the broadband, wireless, cable TV, satellite, Internet and competitive telephony industries.

A start-up inside Strategis, I built a geospatial database product from scratch. The database included FCC spectrum license sales maps plus detailed physical coverage area maps for the first wave of US digital cellular deployments. Wireless Carriers, Internet Portals, the FBI, and GM Onstar were customers, among others. I automated the data process after initial build to query, process, and deliver data to clients on a monthly basis without interruption in scheduled delivery. This new data business grew exponentially YoY contributing over $10MM to overall profit. The business was eventually sold to the Daily Mail.

GIS Data Operations Manager, Visual Intelligence, March 1995 - January 1998

Visual Intelligence Systems Inc. is a Houston based remote sensing start-up that built an airborne and street-level remote sensing system from scratch, patented the systems and was acquired by M7 in 2004 - http://visualintell.com

I managed field operations planning, data collection, and geospatial post processing. My team was responsible for collecting 1ft/pixel oblique aerial imagery, LIDAR data clouds, and street-level panoramic imagery. We built these data collection systems from the ground up, patented most of the technology, and collected data for various Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, and Local Government customers.

I received an Airborne Ops Achievement award in 1996.

Education 

Professional Certifications

Academia/Teaching 

Adjunct Professor, University of London, 2001-2010 (Part Time)

Following graduate school, I was invited to teach a post-graduate Geographic Information Science course via correspondence distance learning methods to global students. I was a paid, part-time faculty member and Phd student. I later dropped out of the Doctorate program because I was learning more, faster, in the business world.

References

There are dozens of reviews on my linkedin profile. If you would like to speak to anyone from any company, I will arrange conversations and supply contact information.