Leading Product Strategy, Driving Market Share
General Manager of a $66M ARR high-growth product-led business unit, whose curiosity and competitive drive have been the keys to consistently delivering record growth.
Doug has launched zero-to-one products for startups and scaled mature portfolios for mid-sized companies. Along the way he has managed strategic partnerships, integrated multiple acquisitions, built and developed high-performing product teams, and led cross-functional business units.
- 60% expanded risk coverage while reducing audit costs by 30% through digital transformation initiatives.
- $30M in annual savings delivered through advisory process assessment/improvement projects.
- 15% reduction of global audit fees through control, sampling, and testing alignment/reliance.
About Doug
VP of Product Management Strategic • Business Leader
Increased profit margin by over 20%
Increased customer retention from 65% to 80%
Tripled NPS in six months
Learning Management
Healthcare & Life Sciences
SaaS & B2B Technology
Financial Services & GRC
Travel & Entertainment
Workforce Development
Competency Management
Core Skills
Career highlights include scaling a $32M portfolio to $66M in under five years and doubling a product line from $5M to $10M in one year.
Also launched a SaaS product that hit 50% of first-year targets in its first month, tripled NPS in six months, and drove 5 consecutive years of double-digit growth.
- Product Strategy & Portfolio Management
- P&L Management & Revenue Growth
- New Product Development & Go-to-Market (GTM)
- Budgeting & Forecasting
- Strategic Partnerships & Alliances
- Team Development & Leadership
- Product Management
- Cross-Departmental Collaboration
- Pricing Strategy & Financial Modeling
Case Study
HealthStream
Situation:
A multinational corporation faced fragmented risk management practices, leading to inefficiencies, heightened regulatory exposure, and missed opportunities to align risks with strategic objectives. The lack of a consistent framework hindered decision-making and increased operational vulnerabilities.
The Problem:
Customers feeling nickeled-and-dimed trying to forecast their annual subscription purchase quantities of various products, fearing being charged for unbudgeted overages. Utilization varied. Budget cut pressure risked loss of ARR.
The Action:
Created small / medium / large all-inclusive packages sold in enterprise quantities, a higher-volume, lower-dollar play.
The Results:
Sales Pipeline more than doubled. Large multi-million dollar sales started landing. Customers felt relief from worrying about unbudgeted overages, not to mention managing multiple contracts with varying quantities and/or subscription start/end dates. The solution suites’ sales doubled in the first year since the launch. ARR nearly doubled, while maintaining a neutral cost basis.
Case Study
Change Healthcare
Situation:
High-deductible health plan enrollment tripled year-over-year from 2013 to 2021, marking a period of “the consumerization of healthcare.”
The Problem:
With the paradigm shift from “I have insurance, so I don’t have to pay for care” to “In order to afford care, I have to share in the financial responsibility for my care”, also came significant cashflow issues for providers. Their front-office staff were inexperienced in engaging patients regarding collecting payment or explaining the patient’s financial obligation. Time from treatment to payment was growing, as was the gap between billed and collected amounts. On top of all that, even if the front-office staff was confident enough to engage the patient in financial matters, they were ill-equiped to understand what the insurance-negotiated rates were for the various insurance plans.
The Action:
At Change Healthcare, the nation’s largest claims clearinghouse, I led the creation of a ML-based API solution that could be integrated into practice management software to reasonably provide estimates to patients at the time of care.
The Results:
Collection rates improved. Time-to-cash shortened.
Case Study
Ncontracts
Situation:
Banks and credit unions have a responsibility to understand all current regulatory compliance, and must enact policies and procedures to ensure rules and processes are followed.
The Problem:
Regulations change frequently, and are difficult to interpret. Adherence to policies and the impact those regulations have over policies and governance were untenable.
The Action:
Ncontracts brought me in to lead the launch of their GRC (governance, risk, and compliance software solution). I hired a regulatory expert to be our legal consult and content subject matter expert, while I conducted numerous interviews and design experiments with prospective customers. I even went to a week of training alongside over a hundred credit union compliance officers to immerse myself in their world, and became a certified compliance officer by the NCUA, all while conducting market research and gathering prototype feedback.
The Results:
Ncontracts launched their compliance and policy management solution within a year of inception. Due to the high amount of customer-development throughout that year, I hand-delivered a pipeline of over $1M in first-year orders to sales, half of which were closed within a month of the product’s launch.
Case Study
iTrip Vacations
Situation:
iTrip is a franchisor of property management businesses, and provides franchisees with numerous services like marketing, coaching, and also provides an application for receiving bookings and managing property listings.
The Opportunity:
Principles of supply/demand and the perishability of bookings days, an opportunity existed to manipulate pricing to capitalize on high-demand, low-supply seasons, while conversely winning more business in low-demand high-volume seasons.
The Action:
I identified and engaged a partner who had developed a dynamic price-recommendation system for vacation rental property, and worked with iTrip’s development team to integrate that partner’s API, delivering several new workflows to aid property managers in their pricing strategies and decisions.
The Results:
On the whole, iTrip franchisees saw a 10% annual yield increase, while iTrip the franchisor increased its profits by roughly 20%.
Education, Certifications & Publications
Publications
Published in feature article in AMGA Group Practice Journal (“Does Your Pricing Confuse Patients?”), positioning the company as a thought leader in patient financial transparency.
Education
MBA
Vanderbilt University, 2013
Bachelor’s of Business Administration Systems
Mississippi State University 1999
Certifications
Certified Product Owner Scrum Professional
Issuing Organization: Six Sigma Global Institute
Date Issued: 2023
NCCO (National Certified Compliance Officer)
Issuing Organization: NAFCU (National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions)
Date Issued: 2019
Design Thinking for Innovation
Issuing Organization: Coursera
Date Issued: 2016
Pragmatic Marketing Certified (PMC)
Issuing Organization: Pragmatic Marketing
Date Issued: 2013
Agile Certified Practitioner (ACP)
Issuing Organization: Project Management Institute (PMI)
Date Issued: 2012
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Issuing Organization: Scrum Alliance
Date Issued: 2009
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Issuing Organization: Project Management Institute (PMI)
Date Issued: 2009
Testimonials
What People Say
“Doug is a strong strategic leader with the ability to drive new concepts from product ideation to execution. He’s also adept at leading and managing teams with a current book of business. Doug is able to work at both the creative and strategy level while excelling at an operational level and performing complex financial analysis to look for untapped opportunities. I highly recommend Doug for any team looking to drive and expand growth.”
“I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Doug as a Product Manager or Strategic Leader. He has the critical skills necessary to move an organization forward, and in my experience, partner with finance and executive management, a role I was delighted to play alongside Doug. He is strategic but practical, and financially savvy, but also business-oriented. As Doug is a proactive collaborator, this made our interactions fruitful and frictionless.”
“Doug brings insight and positive energy into the room.”
About Doug
A Bit More About Me
My undergraduate degree was in Business Information Systems, a program that was a hybrid between general business and software engineering. I was recruited from school into software development, and spent about the first seven years of my career developing software and leading development teams.
During this time, I discovered that I was far more curious about why we solve problems than how we solve them, and was encouraged by my CEO, an alumnus of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management to go pursue a mid-career MBA.
Post-MBA I became a product manager, from where the scope and scale of the products, teams, and budgets I manage have grown while I have consistently accelerated revenue growth.
I’m particularly passionate about leading teams to seek to ask and understand customers’ “Why” (the market conditions that lead prospects to pay for solutions) before focusing next on “What” solution(s) best fit the market need, then finally executing a strategy for how we will differentiate to best capitalize on these opportunities to serve customers.
I encourage celebrating “saying no to good ideas”. It is important to me to create a culture where it is safe to ask “why” and to say no to good ideas, in the spirit of remaining focused on fewer great ideas.
Conducting small experiments is also important to me. Because it’s infeasible to pursue all new and good ideas, one must choose to conduct small experiments to explore ideas to innovate or to evaluate whether a new opportunity’s value exceeds the cost of deviating from the current strategy. A good example of conducting small experiments is getting customers and prospects to interact with prototypes and share feedback.
Beyond the Office
Beyond the office, I’m mostly at the pool these days. Though I played every youth sport offered, I was primarily a swimmer on a year-round club team starting at age 5, which is the genesis of my drive to compete and win in business. I flirted with the idea of choosing a school with a collegiate swim program, but when I chose to stay local and attend Mississippi State University, my swim career went into hibernation. Fast-forward more time than I’d like to admit, and I am now father of two club swimmers, and I’m an assistant coach on their club team. I also help organize a group of adults who compete in a summer swim league for grown-ups Thursday evenings each July. That’s me in the royal blue on the left in this photo with our adult summer league swim team from the 2025 season.
And keeping with the the theme of enjoying competition, in the early 2000s I competed in international games championship tournaments. Now, when time allows, I enjoy playing board games with friends and family. My current favorites are Terraforming Mars and Everdell, which is pictured here.
