Technology Strategy leader with outstanding reputation for establishing vision, building and leading global cross-functional teams, and delivering experiences that thrill customers.
For 10+ years I've been having a blast identifying challenges and bringing together the people and ideas to solve them. Whether it's streamlining applications for a billion dollar business, or the successful launch of an entrepreneurial business unit inside a Fortune 100 company, I've seized the opportunity to lead exciting projects and great people. There's nothing more gratifying than being the creative catalyst that bridges conceptual, technical, and structural differences and enables cross-disciplinary teams to excel.
Specialties: Product Conception and Vision, Technology Strategy, User Experience & Adoption, Leading Globally Distributed Teams, Driving Operational Productivity, Alliance & Relationship Building, Innovative Problem Solving, Enterprise Architecture, SaaS, REST API and SDK Development.
Leading a team of product managers responsible for Cisco's Secure Access and Mobility product line including the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco AnyConnect.
ISE is a security policy management and control platform. It automates and simplifies access control and security compliance for wired, wireless, and VPN connectivity. Cisco ISE is primarily used to provide secure access and guest access, support BYOD initiatives, and enforce usage policies in conjunction with Cisco TrustSec.
Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Solution empowers your employees to work from anywhere, on any device, regardless of physical location. Because Cisco AnyConnect supports the most popular mobile platforms, workers globally can more securely access the network with their device of choice, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones, so they can do their jobs in a highly protected manner.
Developed vision and business proposals resulting in Cisco’s entrance into the Enterprise Social Software market with Cisco Quad/WebEx Social. Product manager for successful delivery of core components across SaaS and premise offering including REST APIs, enterprise policy, permission and compliance management. Business lead for industry analyst engagements and key customer accounts, such as General Electric and Duke University.
Key Achievements:
● Produced and presented product vision, roadmap, and business case to executives, resulting in establishment of a new business unit and funding to enable growth from 4 to 200 employees.
● Led business unit engagement for key customers, which included contractual requirement negotiations and multi-party development coordination, and resulted in over 400 thousand licenses sold.
● Drove cross business unit partnerships, including feature and license contract negotiation, and product ownership for agile scrum teams, resulting in sustainable product differentiation in areas of video playback, expertise location, and enterprise policy management.
● Defined and delivered REST based SDK used in numerous third party applications, including General Electric’s collaboration platform and mobile apps for iOS and Android.
● Created best practice for collaboration between product management and engineering, go-to-market, sales, competitive analysis, and outbound marketing teams, which increased messaging consistency by 95% and eliminated over 100 person hours of meetings per week.
Responsible for enhancing customer and analyst perception of market vision leadership for Cisco’s Customer Collaboration product line and driving cross product Web 2.0 platform strategy for Cisco’s voice technology portfolio.
Key Achievements:
● Developed next generation concepts, demos, and prototypes combining contact center, Web 2.0 user experience, social analytics, and expertise-based routing. Spearheaded organizational messaging resulting in development of multiple new products and Cisco’s “Completeness of Vision” rating increasing on the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
● Led globally distributed architecture team that designed and delivered a framework for converting legacy API formats to REST/JSON for Cisco voice technology portfolio. Framework subsequently adopted in Cisco products.
● Drove research activities for customer collaboration adjacencies including establishing third party relationships and defining architecture and business models used in launching our next generation contact center platform.
Responsible for streamlining global engineering operations and customer install and upgrade experience across 7 enterprise and service provider software products. Direct management responsibility for 8 engineers.
Key Achievements:
● Established and managed cross functional team that reduced service provider downtime from 4 hours to 60 seconds for new globally distributed contact center installations, and resulted in multi-million dollar customer savings per upgrade.
● Defined requirements and led team to design and develop a web application, with internal and customer facing components, that streamlined software patch and hotfix development across globally developed product portfolio.
● Reduced sustaining development cost by 80%, shifting $14 million in engineering resources from sustaining to new feature development.
● Increased feature velocity by 300% by enabling legacy software applications, which previously could only deliver major releases, to deliver minor releases.
● Conceived, designed and deployed a scalable web application and social engineering process to drive elimination of a systemic backlog of bugs for a multi-product solution release. Successfully reversed a 2-year increasing trend in unresolved bugs. Drove teams to eliminate over 1400 bugs (94% of backlog) over 3 months. Organic adoption of this application reached 200 projects and 6000 engineers as of 2012.
Webline Communications (Acquired by Cisco Systems November 1999)
– (2 years 9 months)
Recruited as engineer for WebLine Collaboration Server. Quickly promoted to team lead for the 3.0 and 4.0 releases. Managed transition of engineering operations software infrastructure following WebLine acquisition by Cisco. Technical lead for a team of 22 engineers on the 5.0 solution release that successfully integrated 4 products from 3 acquisitions.
Key Achievements:
● Drove implementation decisions and team operations to consistently meet or exceed all delivery expectations and quality goals.
● Lead developer on end user roles capability for multi-tenant service provider deployments and first successful integration of FlexLM licensing software into a Cisco product.
● Automated manual testing steps, resulting in elimination of 10 person years of work per release.
Method and apparatus for exchanging event information between computer systems that reduce perceived lag times by subtracting actual lag times from event playback time
Attended part time while raising 3 kids and working full time at Cisco Systems.
Degree Information: Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies (ALM), Awarded June 4, 2009 Dean's List Academic Achievement Award Degree G.P.A. : 3.80 Concentration: Software Engineering Field: Information Technology
A preview of what LinkedIn members have to say about Paul:
Paul was a fantastic boss. We started out as peers and he got the nod for the management as our Product Line Manager. Working for him was great as he understood all of my issues and roadblocks. He deflected all of the BS coming from management allowing me to focus on the job. I don't think I could say anything greater than I'd work with him again in a heartbeat...pretty much says it all.
I had the pleasure of working with Paul on a complex security platform. Paul's ability to express customer requirements and business cases in clear, elegantly constructed requirements was key to the success of the product. He led the product vision and gave it a direction.
His communication skills are rare and only matched by his patience. He took on product pricing and licensing and was able to articulate to engineers, business partners and customers the why and how and amazingly, everyone understood it and was able to explain it to others.
He is energetic, committed and will be key to the success in any endeavor he takes on. I will seek to work with Paul again, this was a great partnership and I hope to be fortunate enough to be associated with him again.