Chief Product Officer

I joined Corellium, pioneers of an incredible Arm-virtualisation platform, to shape the direction of their digital experiences and blur the line between real and virtual. Their device virtualization platform is designed to assist with Security Research (typically government agencies and defense contractors looking for OS-level vulnerabilities), Testing (MAST / SAST / DAST, DevSecOps and such), Training and more.

Product Design

I originally started at Corellium as the Chief Design Officer and quickly got to work laying the foundations for strong and coherent visual languages for our product design language. I created a new design system and component library, as well as a range of supporting digital experiences that run on it, such as our cloud administration platform and on-site customer dashboard.

The design system is a functionally perfect Figma implementation, with everything built on autolayout and variants with full text, color and effect styles. I've also improved the general experience and interface of our existing product in some areas as we work towards a broader design refresh.

After this was all completed, I was able to hire a full-time Product Designer and contract visual designer who took over most of the day-to-day work. For a short while after this, I focused on building a culture of design throughout the company before moving on to Engineering.

Frontend Engineering

I started the Frontend team for the Engineering department who could take on the important work of delivering stellar experiences to our customers. After bringing on board a few fantastic frontend engineers, we set to work building the future of Corellium's digital experiences on a super modern tech stack.

We started off by architecting a modern tech stack that would allow us to rapidly iterate and ship high-quality improvements and strategic updates to our product and web experience. Our first project was to build out a new, incredibly comprehensive Storybook-based design system on React (Next), Typescript, Vercel, CSS Modules (w/ PostCSS) and Tailwind.

We combined the design system with the same stack to create new, more beautiful microservices experiences for our customers and internal team. Beyond the visual style, the improved tech stack also paved the way for enhancements in security, reliability and developer experience.

We rebuilt our trial request system, which resulted in more proactive measures for fraud prevention (powered by elements of the Stripe API and some custom logic), lowered the barrier to entry for new customers, automatically reported runtime exceptions and collected more analytics for our Marketing and Product teams.

We then moved on to our flagship app currently in production, where we wiped out the backlog of outstanding frontend bugs in a few sprints before moving on to optimization work and active regression prevention. I took on a bunch of IC work during this time to get acquainted with our tech stack and product.

Additionally, we set yearly OKRs for a frontend-team level which included goals such as improving the overall developer experience, empowering other teams through custom tooling and implementing measuring tools for our efforts.

Beyond the code itself, we strived to streamline the approval process for the Frontend team with a round-robin assigning system, reduce bottlenecks in code merging and releasing, promote cross-department transparency and enhance the overall experience for our team and customers through the power of great code.

Once everything was running relatively smoothly, it was time to focus on Data.

Analytics and Data Pipelines

Tangential to the work in Frontend Engineering and leading into the wider Product role was data and analytics - essentially wiring up the different tools and data streams we required from Product, Business and Marketing perspectives to make decisions based on evidence, whether that's growth trends, aggregated user behavioral metrics, funnels and more.

We had an ambitious goal of ensuring that every event could be tied back to a customer (as long as they’re not on an air-gapped on-site instance), as well as being able to track a single customer's entire journey from website to app through multiple channels and experiences.

To achieve this in a scalable way, I designed a simple (albeit increasingly intricate over time) architecture diagram that found the most reliable and straightforward way of capturing the required data from various systems.

I started by replacing our homegrown analytics event database with Segment as a central customer data platform. From here, I worked with some of the frontend team to build out a series of Node-based analytics utilities and wired them into our website, trial request flow, backend and more.

We wired all these up to Segment and sent the events and personas out to our new tools, which included things like Google Analytics and HubSpot on the Marketing side, Amplitude on the Product side, Sentry on the Engineering side (to hydrate user info in automated exception capturing) and Zapier to handle some other bits and pieces. I also wrote software that seamlessly bridges the gap between our billing, CRM and middleware systems.

Once this was in place, I moved back to the Design side of things to focus on the brand.

Brand and Visual Design

We performed an initial brand refresh for Corellium back at Jellypepper, where we focused on the idea of the "magic" behind our product. Since then, the team continues to grow at a rapid pace, we're taking on new segments and broadening our horizons. All this change provided reason to stop and reflect on our current brand and the message it was conveying to our customers and to ourselves.

In 2023, we rolled out a brand new look for Corellium centered around the idea that our product is not some mystical thing — it’s an incredibly powerful utility or tool, closer metaphorically to a surgeon’s scalpel than a magician’s wand. Our new direction focuses on simplicity, purpose and function over flair; promoting concepts of structure, simplicity and precision throughout our experiences.

We rolled out this new brand (internally called “Bare Metal”), then I moved over to the Customer Support side of the house.

Customer Support

I managed the Support team for a time where I focused primarily on process and automation. We started by migrating from Zendesk to Intercom, installing Messenger on the website and improving user identification within our products; all of which set the Support team up with live chat.

We also migrated our Support Center from a hosted knowledge base to a self-hosted instance of Docusaurus, allowing the team to scale their documentation efforts much faster.

The comprehensive and highly technical nature of our documentation meant we were a good fit for Intercom’s Fin agent, so a large portion of my focus was ensuring that we could create a culture of continuous education for us, our customers and our AI helper.

Once the Support team was solid, I moved on to Product.

Product

As the Chief Product Officer, I was primarily focused on creating the product roadmap, driving initiatives, triaging and decomping new feature requests against strategic driver alignment, encouraging a seamless product to engineering workflow, assisting with partnership discussions and board reports, and much more.

One of my first focuses was a new Productboard setup where we could track and triage incoming user and internal feedback; and score and prioritize potential new features. The internal feedback part specifically was interesting — I'm a big believer that people should be allowed to work in their own tools.

There's no one tool to rule them all and it can be disruptive to make them use yours. So, I built a set of automations for apps we use like Pipedrive, HubSpot and Intercom so they can all seamlessly send user feedback directly from conversions, contacts, leads and deals into Productboard without leaving the app.

After a few months, I was able to hire a series of Product Managers to handle the Government, Enterprise and IoT areas of the business. This allowed me to focus on the broader picture and vision for the product and create a tighter relationship with our users, partners and investors.