About
Diego is a tech and product industry veteran with 20 years of experience working for a variety of startups and thrives on partnering with executive teams to help create and drive the product vision, strategy and execution.
Diego’s experience ranges from being a very hands-on contributor to organizing and implementing Product’s best practices and leading Product, Project, Design, Engineering and QA teams.
Leader & Problem Solver
He brings a grounded, collaborative and hands-on approach to guiding a wide variety of teams and organizations in drafting and implementing a solid customer-driven product vision and strategy - with a total focus on execution. He possesses a keen intuition for product design and usability, and is able to implement a purpose driven product design strategy based on a solid intent driven methodology.
Diego is a passionate and purpose driven product leader excited about exploring problems and creating solutions that impact and improve peoples’ lives, while identifying and aligning value opportunities with a company's vision and objectives. He applies critical and lateral thinking, along with transformational leadership and culture principles to build inclusive and empowered teams.
When he's not studying the art of close up magic, or reading one of the many books in his library, Diego can be found fly fishing in one of the pristine rivers in the Pacific Northwest.
Facts
Years of experience
Startups
Exits
Magic books and counting...
Recommendations
Diego has an unerring sense of being able to derive the business objectives which comprise the focus of the company, and distill those down into manageable product features inside of the engineering organization. Diego’s management style for his direct reports is always mentoring, and he guides them towards making intelligent, rather than emotional. decisions. Diego has a personable style, but is no-nonsense on his approach to planning - and I have come to rely on his intuition and guidance. He has a tireless work ethic, and moves every company he’s worked at forward.
Rob DeMillo
Experienced CTO and Entrepreneur
I was Diego’s manager for 2 years. Diego is a first-class product professional. His commitment, drive and attention to detail make him a valuable member of any product team. He is laser focused on driving results for customers through the delivery of simple solutions to complicated problems, pain points and opportunities. I’d have him back on my team in a heartbeat.
Paul Bofkin
Global Head of Payments Product at H&M Group
Diego is the ultimate team player, and I learned a great deal working with him. He thinks about company first, team second, and himself last. He brings tremendous energy, passion and wisdom to to his work every single day and is tireless in his efforts. He worked hard to build meaningful and productive relationships with everyone on the team - all in the name of building the best possible products and the best possible company.
John Wallace
President at Octerra
As a leader, Diego has a great ability to quickly see and decide what actions are needed to immediately move towards achieving important long-term goals. He could be counted on to drive projects to successful completion. Product definitions are clear, complete and actionable. That he does all this with humor and a friendly manner means I would not hesitate to work with Diego again.
Bruce Wilson
Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services
Diego is diligent, incredibly smart and works tirelessly to ensure we are building the right product for our customers. Diego does a fantastic job of collecting information, questioning conclusions, digging deeper for greater insight and setting priorities based on the information collected. In the short time that I worked with Diego, he was instrumental in helping to turn the Nimble Collective product offering into a truly enterprise solution.
Mike Walsh
Principal, BDM at Amazon Web Services
When Diego joined VenueNext I knew we had a leader that was truly compassionate about our business and our client base. Diego listened to customer feedback and took that into our product. He cares deeply about people and worked diligently to improve our processes and cross-functional communication. He jumped in, learned where our gaps were and started to make a difference. He was a true leader.
Brittany Loui
Senior Director Life Sciences Solutions
One of the biggest challenges of working at a startup is knowing what to do while managing the small number of resources you have. Diego was always really fantastic about listening to the customer need, taking a step back to understand what the needs for the business were, and working with the teams to balance the two. Diego was instrumental in tying together marketing, production, and development ensuring that we would strive for common goals to help the make the product great.
Jason Schleifer
Principal Creative Director at Amazon Web Services
As a product manager, Diego possesses unusually keen insights on user experience, usability, user behaviors - basically everything related to design. Additionally, his vast technical knowledge allowed him to also fill the role of engineering manger - able to balance feature wish lists and roadmap prioritization with aggressive but realistic development timelines.
Steve Cartwright
Product / UI / UX Design Director
The product we’ve built together is a culmination of Diego’s tireless assessment of how a business is run, paired with his innate ability to transform workflow problems into tangible tools that provide solutions to real challenges. Diego possesses the unique ability to engage several different teams who have very different methods of problem solving. He throws himself into a product 100%, and does so with fire. He exudes enthusiasm for the success of the team, displays obvious joy in building a solution that really works, and is one of the most honest, open, transparent, and fun individuals I’ve worked with.
Stephanie Tucker
Creative Director
Diego was a great leader who brought with him a clearly defined idea of product management. He was always honest and open with everyone on our team. He was able to identify and make changes to processes that were holding us back and preventing us from reaching our true potential. While changing the corporate culture, he was also helping me define and focus on my professional and personal goals. I experienced a great deal of professional and personal growth during the time we worked together.
Bill Malizia
Product Manager
Diego is an impressively balanced and seasoned product pro. He is a team player that isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves. He is rooted in confidence and humility. Diego also has a great sense of humor and is deeply loyal to his team. He can passionately defend his perspective and in the next moment abandon it when a better one is offered.
Drew Little
UI/UX Designer
Diego has provided a fantastic product vision and kept everyone engaged with high-value features. In his interactions with Engineers and other stakeholders, he always displayed a deep understanding of the work and priorities. Starting in a new team, Diego quickly adapted defined the group’s mission and mandate clearly. He is an excellent product manager who works very closely with the engineers and other stakeholders without ever letting them wait for clarifications.
Ajit Velhal
Tech Lead Manager
Diego is one of the most disciplined and customer-focused PMs I have ever had the pleasure of working with. His ability to draw people into his vision and get them to execute that vision is solid and second only to the drive and passion he brings to everything he does.
Alex Jakovleski
Director of Product, Data and Customer Intelligence
Diego is without a doubt the best Product Management leader I have worked with (and I have worked with many). He gives his best at every turn and has tremendous amounts of energy along with insight. He is able to translate business needs into real world solutions with the engineering side. Diego made everyones job that much easier and is a great guy to boot.
Bill Rooney
Senior Platform Software Engineer
Diego is one of the best PMs I have worked with in a long time. He is highly knowledgeable about what it takes to bring a product from 1 pager all the way to the customer.
Christian Biermann
QA Director
Diego is an extremely great manager, balancing strong/clear objectives on what we as a team needed to achieve, and always executed with vision. It was very obvious to me that his execution skills were top notch as things were always moving and I was always learning something new. I was also impressed by his broad range of knowledge in software development/Product Management and being able to balance both customer and business needs.
Rena Cheng
Quality Assurance Engineer
Diego is a fantastic leader and product development mind who is able to simplify challenging problems into achievable tasks and get all parties involved moving in the right direction. From an engineering perspective it was very easy and fun to work with Diego and I would highly recommend him for any company seeking to add product development and management into their organization.
Blane Cordes
Senior Engineering Manager
Diego is one of the rare product management professional who understands that without good documentation, products are incomplete and sometimes leave customers confused and lost. Diego is a strong advocate for the customer’s point of view and strives diligently to put their needs first.
John Wallin
Technical Communication Content Strategist
Sumary
Diego Schmunis
- Leadership, culture and team building - Product Manager and Problem Solver - B2B, B2C, SaaS, Consumer, 0 to 1
- Problem-driven & customer focused - Product value & alignment – Process & methodologies – Cross-functional teams - Key objectives & outcomes
Professional Experience
stealth mode (part of redesign health)
Product Manager
2022 - 2023
An online content, learning and community driven platform for experienced adults.
- Collaborate directly with the CPO to drive product vision and strategy - 0 to 1
- Conduct customer research to mitigate product risk areas
- Run user interviews to understand customer problems and translate those into solution requirements
- Perform functional, usability and design analysis to identify UI/UX areas of friction and user experience improvements
- Define subscription model tiers, and paywall restrictions
Rockbot
Senior Product Manager
2022
A streaming media (Music, Digital Displays and TV) platform for brick-and-mortar businesses.
- Formulated and executed Product’ go-to-market plan, strategy, and activities, in coordination with Marketing and Sales teams, to bring to market the fourth, and major release, of the Rockbot platform
- As the company’s first Product Manager, implemented product best practices (documentation and requirements, product development cycles, and cross-functional operating procedures across Product, Design, Engineering, QA and Stakeholders
- Worked closely with UI/UX team conducted customer interviews and research to identify optimization areas to improve first-time onboarding experience for the Music streaming service, setup and troubleshooting
Xandr (Acquired by microsoft)
Senior Product Manager & Team Lead
2020 - 2022
Ad-tech products for publishers and advertisers.
Customer Experience Platform
- Manage the creation of internal products, tools, and processes to enable and support client facing Product teams
- Common component library: standardize and unify our product’s UI/UX while accelerating time to market
- Client facing documentation portal: deploy and centralize training, education, and support documentation
Authentication, Authorization & Identity
- Authentication: improve how users manage multiple account and sign in with SSO/MFA
- Roles and permissions: streamlined how roles and permissions are created and assign across products and clients
- Configuration management: internal tool to configure product and functionality permissions for clients
nimble collective (acquired by amazon)
Director of Product
2017 - 2019
SaaS cloud-based animation production platform empowering decentralized digital content creation.
- Lead product vision, roadmap, and strategy to company’s first GA release and subsequent platform enhancements
- Managed product/feature prioritization while communicating timelines, constrains and trade-offs to Executive team
- Lead complete re-design of front-end UI/UX to minimize onboarding friction and increase user engagement
- Led Product (2)/Project Managers (1), Design (1), Engineering (6) and QA (3) teams defining key objectives and weekly activities
Cont...
Professional Experience (cont.)
Venuenext (acquired by Shift4 Payments)
Director of Product
2016 - 2017
Systems integration, management platform and mobile apps for large venues.
- Drove product vision, roadmap and requirements across multiple clients and verticals while managing client expectations, budgets and timelines
- Realigned product development process from an agency model into a product centric organization
- Led the creation of product-customization tools to allow users to have more control over their deployments
- Led Product (3)/Project Managers (3), Design (4), Engineering (6) and QA (10) teams to deliver products on-budget, on-time and on-quality
product management consultant
Product Management Consultant
2015 - 2016
Advised start-ups in product/market-fit, job-to-be-done, design, MVPs, Agile methodologies & cross-functional team development
Videoo
Next-generation social video player platform allowing brands to engage audiences through interactive storytelling.
- Led design and functional roadmap of video player platform
- Redesigned platform, video player and business rules to simplify workflows and drive increase user engagement
- Partnered with Sales, Marketing and Biz Dev to understand market landscape and addressable brands’ requirements
- Worked close with executive team to define go-to-market strategies and growth opportunities
Other projects: on-demand delivery – retail hardware/software solution - public policy & non-profit
Studionow
Director of Product
2014 - 2015
SaaS cloud-based marketplace for video production and production/asset management platform.
- Drove vision, strategy, and requirement to transition business from brick-and-mortar into a product driven service platform
- Engaged with Biz Dev team to understand and define customer needs, market positioning and go-to-market strategy
- Organized and managed quarterly CAB meetings across top customers to gather input and product alignment
- Worked with Customer Success teams in the creation of internal management tools use to troubleshoot & manage services
- Led cross-organization processes to improve development cycles, communication, and cross-team performance
ask
Product Manaager
2011- 2013
Ad-serving and monetization platform.
- Partnered with Executive team to define new business opportunities and monetization strategy
- Led product development of new ad unit, driving 50% increase in LTV
- Researched and wrote PRDs/prototypes to grow user base from 100K users to 4M+ installs
- Designed and ran A/B test to increase conversion rate and traffic to advertising partners
- Revised business rules resulting in 6% uninstalls decline and install lifetime increase from 60 to 100+ days
- Introduced Agile methodologies which improved sprint cycles by 50% while increasing quality & reducing rollbacks and ran A/B test to increase conversion rate and traffic to advertising partners
Competences
- Leadership principles: trust, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, alignment, outcomes, bringing the donuts
- Communication style: open, direct, transparent, inclusive, disagree and commit
- Product focus: user/problem centric, data-informed, product/market fit, job-to-be-done, MVPs, 20/80 approach, <is>
- Industries: SaaS, asset management, marketplaces, e-commerce, B2B, B2C, consumer
- Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, GSD
- Certifications: Pendo Product-led Certification - Pragmatic Institute PMC Level I, II & III (Foundations, Focus, Build), Scrum Alliance Scrum Master (CSM) & Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Contact
Please get in touch and let me know how I can be of help to you or anyone in your network. I might not always be able to help, but I will always try.