Matti Kakkori, Product Manager in Carlsbad, CA, United States
Matti Kakkori

Product Manager in Carlsbad, CA, United States

Member since August 12, 2019
Matti is a product management leader with 15+ years in both large organizations and startups. He has managed technology PM teams, re-structured $5+ billion product portfolios, and built and brought to the market several 0-1 products. He has established data and development processes and built and managed teams in product, engineering, design, and data. Matti has worked on products—consumer HW devices, smartphone SW platforms, physical goods and eCommerce, applied AI/ML, SaaS platforms, and GIS.
Matti is now available for hire

Project Highlights

Expertise

Education

Employment

  • Chief Product and Technology Officer

    2019 - PRESENT
    Rehinged.ai
    • Built and led the product, data, and engineering teams to create a simple, elegant modern B2B SaaS application that leverages a custom-built AI NLP platform.
    • Scaled the initial product and engineering team of four to 20+ distributed team members across the globe.
    • Grew the customer base from paying customers to dozens of successful B2B enterprise customers.
  • Chief Architect

    2012 - PRESENT
    Galaxy & Sons
    • Designed and built data-focused web applications leveraging AI and ML.
    • Ran a product management consulting practice targeting mobile and web application space.
    • Contributed to projects including a smartphone technology roadmap for a world-leading semiconductor company.
    • Defined, designed, and managed the development of cross-platform consumer mobile application for iOS and Android.
    • Defined, designed, and managed a mobile insurance software platform development. The platform ran on the web with mobile clients on Android and iOS.
  • VP Product

    2016 - 2019
    Fracta.ai
    • Defined the product strategy and developed a web application prototype that was used to correct assumptions and gather feedback from lead customers.
    • Drove the development of SaaS SW platform that wraps a complicated AI/ML algorithm utilizing geospatial GIS data into an easy-to-use SW product that meets the needs of municipals customers in tackling renewal of aging water infrastructure.
    • Led a team of data engineers and built Fracta’s data pipeline and process to guide customers from messy data to refined ML driven results.
    • Defined and executed a structured agile product and SW development process for the company. Helped evolve the product from Prototype to V4 and grow the customer base from zero to 40+ municipalities.
  • Product Management, Smartphone Experiences

    2010 - 2012
    Nokia USA
    • Led the Nokia smartphone experience definition for Nokia Verizon products with a long term vision of sensor and AI-driven complete product experience.
    • Collaborated across all functions of Nokia North America from the leadership team to SW and HW engineering.
  • Product Portfolio Strategy and Product Range Management

    2008 - 2010
    Nokia Denmark
    • Defined portfolio strategy and product lines for Nokia Live Business Unit with $5+ billion annual sales.
    • Led product strategy to restructure part of Nokia’s sprawling product portfolio, with many hard decisions.
    • Guided the PM function as a product range manager, coordinating activities across sales, marketing, design, R&D and PM in Nokia’s large matrix organization to maintain a coherent product line.
  • Senior Manager, Business Strategy

    2006 - 2008
    Nokia USA
    • Developed a classic business strategy for the Nokia CDMA Business unit - analyzing available markets, M&A, and partnerships.
  • Technology Product Management

    2003 - 2006
    Nokia USA
    • Led the tech marketing team to define technology roadmaps for Nokia CDMA products. Technologies covered from RF/Bluetooth to DRM and multimedia.
    • Worked closely with engineering and SW platforms to build products that meet customer.
  • Various Engineering Roles

    1998 - 2003
    Nokia Finland/UK
    • Worked at various roles in different mobile phone and software business units.
    • Developed game engine software that shipped in 100+ million devices.
    • Wrote and held mobile internet technology training and workshops across the globe, e.g. consulting swiss banks on mobile internet security.

Project History

  • AI/ML SaaS for Water Utilities
    Led product strategy, design, and development. Built the product from prototype to v4 and 40+ B2B customers.

    The project centered around building a complex AI application utilizing GIS and mapping technologies for a startup. A complete end-to-end strategy and development project that included:
    - Developing a well researched customer-needs driven product strategy
    - Coding a quick and dirty mockup to test assumptions with lead customers
    - Specifying and leading the development of an MVP version of the software
    - Creating product marketing materials and launching the product in a large industry trade show
    - Leading the technical sales for the product
    - Running engineering and building a structured agile development process for further improvements
    - Through multiple architecture and technology improvements reaching V4 of the software and 40+ B2B customers

    Some basic technologies used in the project: AWS, Laravel, Django, Mapbox, ESRI, JIRA, Python, Jupyter, etc.

  • AI/NLP Web Product for Market Research
    Led product design and development for a groundbreaking AI/NLP-driven market research platform.

    Led the product definition for an AI/NLP-driven software product that can ingest a huge amount of textual data, analyze and enrich it and then provide detailed insights into perception people and markets have about brands and products.

    The software product is delivered as a SaaS product.

  • Product Portfolio Strategy for $5+ Billion Revenue Business
    Developed a product portfolio strategy to simplify an overgrown but very successful consumer electronics product range.

    The product portfolio comprised of 20+ devices that as whole were very successful and were generating $5+ billion in revenue annually. But overall the marketing message and effectiveness of the product development was suffering from a too complicated offering.

    I created a thorough market and consumer needs-driven analysis on how to re-structure the product portfolio to be more balanced and more accurately capture the market volume and demand.

    The strategy was adopted and implemented as part of a larger restructuring of the business unit.

  • Foldpass - A Creative Collaboration Game on iOS
    Designed and ran the development for a simple turn-based creative game with a design twist.

    Foldpass is a simple turn-based game where users can write short text passages and invite friends to complete the three-line haiku poem.

    The result can then be made into a well-designed poster through an embedded poster editor with downloadable poster packs.

    I led the design, development, and launch of the application.

    The architecture was a Phonegap-based iOS application connecting to a Django back end.

  • MobileCrax - Insurance Application
    Designed and ran the engineering for the web application and multi-platform iOS/Android mobile app development.

    Led the product strategy, design, and development for a mobile device screen insurance product for the Mexican market.

    The mobile application was designed to run on both iOS and Android and was built on Apache Cordova. The backend and the web interface used by customers and the repair was a simple Django/Bootstrap development.

    I wireframed the application and UX in detail and led the engineering project with a development company.

  • Dsider - a Decision-making Platform
    Designed and built a social decision-making platform running in iOS.

    Dsider was an idea of a decision-making platform with a social component. Users could enter criteria that are important in their decision, weigh them, and also include friends' opinions. The weighted algorithm then recommended the choice.

    I ran the UX and product development for the application and managed the off-shored development of the back-end server and the mobile application.

  • Long-term Smartphone Experience Planning
    Led a team planning a comprehensive long term smartphone experience for the US market.

    The project scope was to design a long-term plan (2-5 years) for a leading smartphone experience for the US market.

    The project team was huge with participants ranging from executive office to sales and marketing to HW engineering.

    The project considered various inputs from consumer and technology trends to competitive M&A transactions and developed HW and SW prototypes and mockups.

  • Building an Agile Development Process from Scratch
    I defined and ran an agile development process for a startup growing from 2 engineers to 10+.

    Earlier the company development was more ad-hoc and focused on heads-down coding.

    I established an agile development process when the team started growing. The development team adopted the system of 2-week sprints with well defined epics, user stories and tasks in JIRA.

    The implementation of the agile process sped up the development of new features and products. (Of course, hring a larger team didn't hurt either. ;-) )

Education

  • Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering
    1996 - 2001
    Helsinki University of Technology - Helsinki, Finland

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