Grand old oak tree

Chris Horn

Product Strategy & Development


Download as a PDF or Word file

Summary

Software product manager with 20 years of experience, 9 in product management and 7 in UX/UI design. Member/advisor of 4 startups.

Strong track record of successful project execution — evolutionary and greenfield development, budgets from $30k to $2.75M, across all product lifecycle stages. Thrive in complex, multi-stakeholder domains. Has logged multiple wins where others, before, have failed.

Valued team player who draws out the best from people using a combination of high standards, clear communication, and ability to establish trust. Work across all layers of an organization and all layers of product & technology — from big picture to small details — to solve the right needs well.

Adept at breaking down big challenges, navigating trade-offs, and designing product roadmaps that minimize time to value and maximize system scalability and extensibility. Naturally curious and a quick learner. Skeptical optimist.

Education

Carnegie Mellon University
30 units toward Master of Human-Computer Interaction

Brown University
Bachelor of Arts in Economics

Experience

Director, Product Management
Concourse Labs
Feb 2022 – Present

Product Manager at a Series A cybersecurity startup (cloud infrastructure configuration compliance)

  • Within first 90 days, delivered two buildtime scan capabilities to satisfy executive promise to then-largest customer using competitive research, technical and UX design, development oversight, documentation, and release coordination
  • Helped close two of company’s largest-ever deals with a series of refinements to product usability and reliability, plus hands-on guidance of customer evaluation process
  • Decreased sales funnel drop-out of prospects with better product story, product demonstration, pricing, and consultative engagement – informed by technical expertise and understanding of stakeholder motivations, jobs to be done, and product competition
  • Successfully led a $3M+ implementation/onboarding of a global Top 10 bank customer
  • Closed $500k of professional services revenue using value-based selling
  • Influenced culture to foster honest dialogues based on a foundation of shared understanding, clarity of purpose, plus attitudes of empathy, psychological safety, and positivity
Advisor
FRIDAY
Jan 2022 – Present

Product & technology advisor to a pre-seed web3 privacy and data economy startup

  • Identified, and built shared understanding of, key requirements for web3 data licensing protocol
  • Supported development, go-to-market, and M&A of MyFriday iOS privacy reclamation app
  • Developed automated email processing application using Python, Gmail, and Digital Ocean
  • Helped generate publicity by leading creation of Solana Hackathon submission
Director (Jan 2020),
Lead UX Designer,
Senior Researcher

Secure Decisions – a division of Applied Visions
Sep 2016 – Jan 2022

Leader and Principal Investigator of cybersecurity product research & development

  • Led two government-funded R&D product development projects (Kompar and Samaritan) with combined budgets of $2.75M – hands-on and managerial responsibility for delivery, including research agendas, data analysis, product roadmaps, requirements, technical architectures, sprint/scrum processes, UX design, product content, technical and financial reports
  • Proposed and won Lead UX designer role on STR’s software assurance product team for $50M+ DARPA Automated Rapid Certification of Software (ARCOS) program
  • Drove product website usage from 0→100+ sessions per month through targeted marketing to 400+ security professionals via podcast, email campaigns, and 3 regional and international conferences
  • Validated market demand and product-market fit through research and competitive analysis incl. product presentations, partnership discussions, and pilot program negotiations
  • Managed a five company, six team project with an $18M budget to build a unified threat management system that yielded open source tools and commercial technology
  • Recruited & supervised 2 PhD researchers, managed cross-functional teams of 2-12
  • Defended project funding through 5 sponsor leader changes and multiple decision gates
Consultant
Code Dx
Sep 2016 – Jan 2020

Consulting Product Manager and advisor to cybersecurity startup acquired by Synopsys

  • Defined requirements and supervised development of Triage Assistant functionality that uses machine learning to enable users to save hundreds of hours of work
  • Helped increased revenues by >30% by building spreadsheet to analyze new pricing models
  • Helped generate hundreds of qualified sales leads by representing Code Dx at 5 conferences; presented talks about application security, networked, and provided booth support, including product demonstrations and explanations of value proposition
  • Created content for sales training battle cards, marketing, and product roadmap via detailed product competitive analysis
  • Positioned Code Dx as the “application security system of record” with Gartner analysts and influenced their market definition to align with our product’s capabilities
  • Supported executive decisions about company organization structure, hiring, and employee compensation
Sr. Product Manager,
Product Manager

CommerceHub
Nov 2013 – Sep 2016

Product Manager at rapidly growing SaaS company

  • Led development and release of new Performance Measurement & Compliance (PMC) software system to measure order fulfillment performance, send alert notifications, and track historical data for 30,000 suppliers – increasing accuracy, decreasing complaints, and reducing support/operations costs
  • Successfully delivered PMC system through cross-functional leadership and hands-on work; conducted user research, defined requirements, influenced software architecture, and collaborated with engineering, UX, customer support, marketing, and legal
  • Ensured successful roll-out and adoption of PMC system by leading go to market efforts: market positioning, sales & support training, presentations, videos, and direct support
  • Achieved self-service product functionality in a complex environment by coordinating discovery and upgrade of multiple legacy systems, plus creation of new systems
  • Saved company over $400k by influencing technology choices of CIO, CTO, and architecture
  • Improved product quality across product teams by developing & championing a product development process w/ RACI across product, marketing, engineering, and QA
  • Collaboratively developed business case evaluation framework to structure decision criteria, encourage objectivity, and streamline portfolio management discussions
Lead UX/UI Designer & Researcher
Applied Visions
Secure Decisions division
May 2010 – Oct 2013

Principal design resource within company of 50

  • Key member of R&D contract proposal & delivery team, successfully delivered 8 major projects in tight collaboration with engineering and executive leadership
  • Supported creation of >$3M in new business proposals, including concept generation, proposal writing, graphics and visualization, work breakdown, and networking events
  • Delivered geographically-distributed operator interface for a next-generation computer network defense system for the U.S. Navy using use case development, requirements analysis, workflow & wireframe design, HTML/CSS prototypes, and software architecture design
  • Aligned development teams on $7.3M National Cyber Range program using user personas and workflow use cases
  • Authored research reports and contributed to invention of hardware & software systems for 802.11 WiFi security system
  • Mapped and visualized computer network defense processes and systems of U.S. Navy
  • Designed GUI and verified a web app to navigate and analyze multi-level cybersecurity metrics created by research at George Mason University (GMU)
  • Designed and presented GUI concepts for new RSA Continuous Composite Identity Claim Verification product
  • Co-developed and presented training material for applying principles of information visualization to the design of information security visualizations
  • Developed company-wide design and user testing guide; trained staff on its application
Interaction Designer
MAYA Design
May 2007 – Apr 2010

Design & research staff member focused on complex, information-rich systems

  • Sole interaction designer for web-based logistics tool that enabled client to earn the only Army 2008 Secretary of Defense Performance Based Logistics Award
  • Kiosk design saved client $300k and won ‘Best in Show’ at KioskCom Expo
  • Successfully managed $30k to $550k+ projects with clients including GD and Whirlpool
  • Active in business development and proposal writing; helped win $600k+
  • Developed content and taught a human-centered design training course to engineering staff of client firms; effort later spun out as separate business called Luma Institute
  • Performed project work including study design for inter-rater reliability, contextual inquiry, think-aloud testing, and wireframing
Co-Founder
Brring!
Jan 2006 – Nov 2008

Jack-of-all-trades worked all aspects of service creation while bootstrapping the company

  • Co-designed internal policies & systems to help grow service to 16,000+ subscribers
  • Wrote patent, designed logo, wrote & recorded phone tree, wrote backend Perl code
  • Built internal collaborative infrastructure to allow the team to work
  • Created IVR phone tree by recording audio and programming using Asterisk PBX and Linux
Research Assistant
Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, CMU
Oct 2006 – Jun 2007

Lab member conducting human time perception research with Dr. Coty Gonzales

  • Performed review of dynamic decision making/time perception literature
  • Designed and coded subject task (Java-based game about “stocks & flows”) and conducted experimental sessions
Research Programmer, Research Assistant
RAND Corporation
Jun 2001 – Aug 2005

Member of technical staff that supported multiple research projects

  • Developed agent-based simulation models of military C4ISR systems
  • Identified need and built a grid computing system that spanned the CA and VA offices; grid decreased the time to develop simulation models by ≥50%
  • Wrote report sections describing model, modeling approach, and findings
  • Gave presentation on computational grids and RAND’s Condor grid to ~50 programmers
  • Represented RAND at requirements development meetings for DoD biometrics system
  • Drafted educational material about biometric technologies and their application
  • Statistically analyzed a large volume of survey data in Stata and Excel

Skills

Human-centered design
Systems thinking
Cross-functional team leadership
Prioritization
Meeting facilitation
Empathy
Psychological safety
Collaborative leadership
Software engineering
Negotiation
Goal, question, metric (GQM)
Scientific method
Experiment design
Analytics & statistics
Creative & strategic thinking

Tools

Microsoft Office
Illustrator/Figma
WebSequenceDiagrams
Alchemer/SurveyMonkey
Camtasia
Jira/Trello
Confluence/Wiki
Paper & Pencil
Many others
SQL
Python/Perl
Stata/R/Octave
HTML/CSS/JS
Git
AWS cloud
GNU/Linux
macOS
Windows

Awards

"Effective video presentation" award for IEEE VAST 2012 Mini-Challenge #1 submission "Visual analytics for situation awareness of a large-scale network". Presented at 2012 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).
Creative Commons License