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Matthew A. Downs

Summary​

  • Results-driven and motivated product manager with a proven track record in developer products, platform engineering, and SaaS applications. Experienced technical leader, agile coach, solutions architect, and technical writer. Adept at bridging technical and product teams with business stakeholders and customers.
  • Skilled communicator and facilitator with a well-rounded ability to craft customer narratives and translate complex visions into product requirements and elegant solutions.
  • Strong command modern web technologies, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, SDLC, and Enterprise SaaS. Experienced working on cross-functional, cross-cultural teams, as well as independently managing projects.
  • Proven ability to drive product delivery, conduct market analysis, improve business processes, and design user- focused solutions at both small, fast-growing companies and large enterprises.

Experience​

Foursquare​

Senior Product Manager, Developer Products​

Aug 2023 – May 2024​
  • Created vision, strategy, and roadmap for developer products, including APIs, SDKs, documentation site, and admin UI. Enable teams on key initiatives through providing focus and clarity while encompassing product analysis, customer feedback, market trends, and business objectives.
  • Launched Personalization API and Movement SDK self-service developer offerings leading to immediate growth in developer sign-ups and Enterprise opportunities.
  • Improved developer experience through streamlined onboarding, enhanced interoperability between products, and strengthening documentation.
  • Delivered cross-team initiatives from requirements to release, collaborating across departments, including Design, Security, Privacy, Legal, Product Marketing, Data Science, Analytics, Customer Operations, and Sales.
  • Leveraged customer interviews, data analysis, and observability tools to understand usage trends, audience composition, and product performance for data-driven decision making. Authored requirements and oversaw deployment of MixPanel and Segment for objective-focuses analytics and executive dashboards.

Rapid (formerly RapidAPI)​

Technical Product Manager, Platform Engineering​

July 2022 – May 2023​
  • Crafted, prioritized, and maintained the vision, roadmap, and backlog for the internal developer platform and cloud infrastructure management team. As a Product Manager, Scrum Master, and interim Engineering Manager on a high-performing engineering squad, I facilitated effective value delivery through requirements definition, leading Scrum events, guiding day-to-day priorities, backlog refinement, and launch planning.
  • Improved deployment frequency and system reliability by reducing deployment failures through a streamlined CI/CD pipeline using GitHub actions and ArgoCD.
  • Authored PRDs and technical documentation based on surveys and interviews with internal developers and stakeholders, planned and oversaw project execution, rollout, and adoption.
  • Planned and guided execution of OpenTelemetry instrumentation and deployment across 30+ microservices, trained R&D teams on observability using Honeycomb, Sentry, Coralogix, and Prometheus/Grafana.
  • Improved operational efficiency and incident response time through rollout of incident management tools and processes, including FireHydrant, PagerDuty, and Pingdom.
  • Broadened application configuration management capabilities through launching new features for internal platform tools, enabling teams to manage service configuration and application secrets in Kubernetes, leveraging GitHubActions, Helm, AWS, and ArgoCD.

Veeps / Live Nation Entertainment​

Principal Software Engineer​

March 2021 – May 2022​
  • Established frontend patterns, architecture, and documentation to accelerate delivery of a green-field, global- scale React and Phoenix Elixir LiveView web application for e-commerce and live streaming concerts, including developer tool selection and configuration for PETAL stack.
  • Sourced, hired and managed a direct report, fostered strong inter-departmental relationships while also collaborating with product owners, designers and consultants, including mentoring engineers through pair- programming, code reviews, unit tests and cooperative quality assurance testing.
  • Streamlined development environment and built design system by effectively leveraging modern tools and practices, such as GitHub actions, Jest, Babel, esbuild, TailwindCSS with SASS, eslint, stylelint, and Prettier.
  • Reported directly to CTO and CPO on a small, highly-collaborative team to turn ambiguous requirements for complex problems into robust, consumer-quality solutions.
  • Integrated and utilized business analytics and observability tools, including Segment, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Sentry, Grafana/OpenTelemetry, and Pub Nub.

Eventbrite​

Staff Software Engineer, Incubation & Strategy​

March 2019 – March 2021​
  • Lead front-end developer and Scrum Master on a focused agile team that launched a brand-new subscription product in one quarter. Drove team success with key decisions on system architecture, data structures, API design and pragmatic application of Scrum. (EB Studio team)
  • Facilitated Scrum events and authored requirements on a globally distributed team yielding strong delivery, team cohesion and accountability on highly-visible strategic initiatives.
  • Mentored junior team members who demonstrated strong gains in agile processes, business acumen, communication, and technical strategies.

Senior Software Engineer, Incubation​

Jan 2018 – March 2019​
  • Lead front-end developer and Agile coach on a small team addressing strategic business initiatives for the Field Operations team, yielding lower-cost deployments of RFID technology through new tooling. (Onsite/RFID team)
  • Lead Node/React developer on an interdisciplinary team that successfully launched the company’s first point-of- sale system with RFID tickets and Square integration (EB Pay team)
  • Responded to urgent business needs with quick, creative, scalable solutions to improve customer experience.
  • Mentored new junior developers from boot camps and internal promotions with one-on-one sessions, pair programming, and constructive code reviews.

Demandbase​

Senior Software Engineer/Product Manager, Marketing Solutions Platform​

Jan 2015 – Dec 2018​
  • Architect and product owner of a cross-browser JavaScript library for delivering, collecting, and integrating advertising/marketing data streams.
  • Lead engineer and product manager for Enterprise SaaS platform integrations into strategic vendor applications ( Adobe, Salesforce, Marketo, Google, and Oracle) leading to millions in new revenue from enterprise clients.
  • Selected by management as Scrum Master and process liaison to drive and train teams on newly adopted agile practices across the Engineering and Product departments.
  • Design, develop, deploy APIs, microservices and JavaScript libraries for partners and internal users enabling intake of billions of records per month across thousands of websites. Senior Solutions Engineer/Consultant, Strategic Services May 2012 – Jan 2015
  • As the inaugural member of the professional services team, lead client implementation projects, provided technical consulting, training, documentation, and integrations for customers and partners of all sizes.
  • Defined service offerings and customer engagement framework. Built custom solutions from requirements through deployment helping to secure millions in new business and renewals.
  • Applied agile methodologies to build JavaScript libraries and easy-to-deploy, reusable integrations into business systems, including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, Marketo, Eloqua, WordPress, and Drupal.

BigMachines, Inc. (acquired by Oracle, 2013)​

Senior Implementation Engineer, Professional Services​

December 2009 – May 2012​
  • Configured and coded SaaS application functionality, rapidly developing and deploying enterprise-grade, integrated solutions.
  • Trained business users and system administrators on the BigMachines platform, conducted training sessions and produced high-quality documentation leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Collaborated with small and large teams to solve real-world business problems for major high-tech and software companies, as a technical liaison between project managers, end-users, and engineers.
  • Contributed innovative and successful ideas for product improvement, customer satisfaction, architecture standards, and quality assurance.

Intuit, Inc.​

Software Engineer​

June 2008 – December 2009​
  • Owned product features and improved customer experience on a customer-driven, business-aware agile team, maintaining steady iterations and releases.
  • Accelerated development by improving processes and communication; Coordinated with marketing team to contribute to steep growth in users.
  • Collaborated on initiatives for architecture improvements, standards compliance, and user studies.
  • Submitted original ideas for patent review for interfaces, features and financial/healthcare products.
  • Utilized 10-20% unstructured time for innovation-driven engineering activities. Ohio Northern University, Office of Advancement, Communications & Marketing Web developer, Copywriter September 2007 – May 2008
  • Key contributor to building and maintaining public university website (Drupal, HTML, CSS, SQL)
  • Contributed to large-scale redesign and new CMS implementation: analyzed usability, content, and structure of established site; designed and administered usability survey; incorporated feedback into design specifications.
  • Translated customer-generated requirements and information into high-quality published copy for internal information and external marketing websites.

Cooper Tire and Rubber Co.​

Software Developer Co-Op​

August 2005 – August 2007​
  • Lead developer on fast-paced, customer-driven team on key applications for improving business processes for LEAN manufacturing organization (ASP/VB .NET/Oracle).
  • Analyzed and validated business requirements with internal clients; co-authored design documents and feature requirements for logistics and manipulating factory machinery.
  • Designed and built Crystal Reports, Oracle stored procedures and accompanying web application features.

Education​

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science with Honors​

Ohio Northern University​

August 2003 - May 2008​
  • Minor in Business Administration
  • Minor in Marketing

Certified Scrum Master​

Scrum Alliance​

April 2016​
  • Certificate ID: 507609
  • Instructor: Adam Weisbart

Permaculture Design Certificate​

Urban Permaculture Institute​

March 2011 - June 2011​

Skills​

  • Product Management: requirements gathering and definition, product analysis and observability tools, user research, market research, prioritization, product lifecycle management, cross-functional communication
  • Technical writing: user stories, use cases, test cases, requirements, business processes, Markdown, Confluence, technical and product documentation.
  • Technical consulting: solutions development, business analysis, user training, developer advocacy, marketing tech, integrations
  • Agile/Scrum facilitation: Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, SAFE, BDD, TDD, retrospectives, Jira, Asana, Trello, Retrium
  • Software development: ReactJS, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, SASS, TailwindCSS, Boostrap, webpack, esbuild, Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress, Code Climate, git, Elixir, Phoeniz LiveView, NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, Rack, Python, Django, AWS, MongoDB/Mongoose, PostgreSQL, MySQL

Interests​

Music (organ, synthesizers, guitar), gardening, composting, SCUBA diving, fishing, hiking, camping, skiing, collage, travel, fermentation, Permaculture

References​

Executive, Senior manager, direct manager, and peer references available upon request.