Muhammad Farooq

Product leader, engineering background, 12 years of PM experience in E-commerce, Payments, Logistics, Supply Chain, Fintech, Artificial Intelligence, SaaS, Consumer Social and Productivity apps

●  Extensive experience in building products from Zero to One at various stages of a company (seed, growth, established). Launched several successful consumer, enterprise, and SaaS products. Helped grow new product categories into stand-alone businesses.

●  Deep empathy for users: I obsess over understanding user behavior, their emotions and core needs. I love building products that assume meaningful and habitual parts of a user's daily life and have used game design principles to build engaging and fun products even in an enterprise setting. There's nothing that drives me more than to impact people's lives positively through technology.

●  Skilled product operator. Experienced in leading teams of PMs and cross-functional teams (including remote) to deliver high-value results by building an environment of deep collaboration. Proficient at product strategy, roadmapping, ideation, pattern recognition, lateral thinking, customer research, decision making, design, and collaborative technical development. I drive cross-department alignment, remove ambiguity, provide clarity of vision, ruthlessly prioritize, embody rapid learning, foster an environment for diversity of ideas, and demonstrate decisiveness and bias towards action.

●  Deep experience in consumer and enterprise software applications, technical knowledge of AI as well as web and native mobile platform (iOS, Android) development, expertise in e-commerce funnels, social applications, payment processing, logistics, security, and compliance platforms.

●  Clearly identifying risks, failures, and learnings. Setting and measuring the right metrics and running high impact experiments.

●  Skillful at setting the vision and storytelling (listening, speaking and especially writing). Ensuring the ‘why’, ‘what’, and ‘how’ is crystal

clear to all stakeholders. Competent at discussing technical solutions with engineering and translating it appropriately for non-technical stakeholders.

●  Optimistic, humble, curious, ambitious, thoughtful, and always learning. Unwavering conviction in team work and making the world a better place.

Flexport (supply chain management, logistics, shipping, SaaS)
Group Product Manager, Customs, Trade & Financial Services - (July 2022 - Present) - San Francisco

●  Leading two cross-functional teams of 4 PMs to build the best Customs Clearance and Trade Advisory products in the freight world.

●  Created growth focused product strategy for Flexport’s Customs led business that focused on increasing share of enterprise accounts.

●  Launched API strategy and first set of integrations to get shipment documents from any ocean or air carrier automatically for key

accounts like H&M and Nike. This unlocked 200% growth in Enterprise clients in 2 quarters.

●  Improved On time Performance for customs clearance by 7% and reduced cost to serve by over $1million per month by building

automated alerts and outreach to clients for missing shipper documents like Commercial invoice and Packing list.

●  Launched a new operator workflow queue that prioritizes, assigns, and filters work by displaying customs shipments. This reduced the

need to rely on spreadsheets and reduced operating cost by 700 hours per month.

Senior Product Manager, Compliance - (Mar 2021 - July 2022) - San Francisco

●  Led a cross-functional team to build Flexport’s compliance platform for global logistics and reduced 95% of regulatory risks in Flexport’s product and operations that were identified by the legal and compliance teams. This sets Flexport up for meeting regulatory needs ahead of a potential IPO scenario.

●  Launched an automated ‘denied party’ screening product that screens every person and company that uses Flexport’s platform against thousands of global regulatory lists to meet KYC (know your client) standards. This reduced Flexport’s risk exposure from $36M annually to $300K annually and improved operator efficiency by 95% requiring 5 mins/day compared to 2 hrs/day prior to launch.

●  Launched screening products for Dangerous Goods that automates the workflow that screens shipper documents (packing list, customer invoice) for items deemed as Dangerous Goods. This product created automated declarations for such shipments to satisfy US Customs and Border Protection agency’s requirements for air and ocean shipments and reduced Flexport’s risk exposure from $500K annually to $35K by reducing errors in declaration. It also eliminated the risk of permanent career embargo that Flexport briefly faced in 2019 before launch of this product.

●  To keep Flexport Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) compliant, launched a set of customer facing questionnaires that increased the fill rate of questionnaires to up to 70% from 5%. This enabled Flexport to get the highest rating ever for the US government's CTPAT program and also inspired CBP to model its future program requirements after Flexport’s CTPAT products. This product also enabled Flexport to retain CTPAT validation as a forwarder and broker. The automation in workflow and usage of game design principles in the workflow enabled to reduce operator cost by 99% from spending 3 hrs per day to 10 mins per week.

●  Created a standardized template for core global shipping documents like Bill of Lading to reduce errors and improve compliance as well as built a tracking system that included change log to help track changes to the document for compliance purposes.

●  Set foundation for Compliance as a Service platform through which Flexport can offer screening services globally. Screening for Dangerous Goods was the first successful SaaS product launch resulting in $25,000 MRR 2 months post launch.

Ada Support (artificial intelligence, SaaS)
Senior Product Manager, Content Building and Management Tools for Chatbot - (Sep 2019 - Mar 2021) - Toronto

●  Led a cross-functional team to build an enterprise facing content management tools and platform for AI powered chatbots.

●  Shipped Training Optimizer that uses AI to make it extremely easy for bot builders to make a massive improvement to the chat bot’s AI

training by using a high leverage tool. It resulted in Ada’s chat bot containing 80% of customer conversations.

●  Increased ARR by 8%. This was primarily through launching of powerful search features like Conversation Filters and robust security

features like Encrypted Variables. These features allowed us to expand contracts of our existing clients to the highest pricing tier as well

as land huge new enterprise deals (including Zoom and Facebook).

●  Built several product management processes and developed product principles for improving quality and execution across the org.

Store Crossing (real estate tech, marketplace) Co-Founder - (Nov 2018 - Mar 2021) - Toronto

●  Built and launched an online marketplace storecrossing.com that enables Shopify sellers to open a store inside another store. It’s like Airbnb for Retail. These spaces in existing brick and mortar stores can be booked on hourly and weekly basis. It is the quickest and fastest way to open a pop-up shop.

●  Partnered with Communitech in Waterloo to get support in finding product-market fit. Twice reached the Y Combinator interview stage.

Loblaw Digital (e-commerce, food processing, last mile delivery)
Lead Product Manager for e-commerce grocery - (Sep 2016 - Nov 2018) - Toronto

●  Built and launched e-commerce sites for 12 grocery brands owned by Loblaw companies in Canada. Owning end-to-end omni-channel retail user experience, from browsing products to in store pick-up and delivery. Led multiple cross-functional teams and managed PMs.

●  As product manager of Checkout team launched products related to: Payments, Payment gateway set up, Discount vouchers, Cart and pricing calculation, VISA/Masterpass checkout, Order notifications, Workflow Automation for content teams, Product data feed management systems. Key wins: launched discount vouchers that resulted in $21 million online revenue in 2017 and launched fraud protection products that reduced fraud by 41%.

●  As product manager of the Core Platform team launched products related to: Site optimization and increasing growth and conversion, Homepage, Search, Flyer, SEO, Product landing pages, Product assortment, CMS tools, Site performance. Key wins: Improved site speed by 7 seconds by design optimization, enabling image compression and using React JS for web platform.

●  Launched grocery delivery in Canada (powered by Instacart) by building delivery mobile app and white label sites.

●  Scaled online platform from 40 e-commerce enabled stores in 2016 to 500 e-commerce enabled stores in 2018.

●  Hired and managed 2 product managers. Key wins: Built metrics and user-centric product development rituals in each product team.

EventMobi (digital event management)
Mobile Product Manager - (October 2015 - Sep 2016) - Toronto

● Led cross-functional team to build SaaS based mobile applications for enterprise conferences and events across the planet. Launched Multi Event App with focus on attendee’s conference registrations, session information, schedules, profiles, as well as app management dashboard. Key wins: Created a new revenue stream ($2M ARR) with 60% adoption among key corporate partners in 2 months post launch.

Nymi (IOT, wearables, biometrics)

Technical Product Manager – (June 2014 – Oct 2015) - Toronto

●  Owned and shipped multiple releases of SDK that enabled 3rd party developers to create apps for the Nymi Band (biometric device).

●  Drove technical solutions in Linux, iOS, Android for key enterprise partners (Ubuntu, AT&T, RBC) to deliver successful integrations.

●  Redesigned developer tools and forums, and wrote developer documentation. Key wins: 24 Nymi Band apps launched in 6 months.

●  Led Nymi’s hackathon engagements in universities and international hackathons that increased developer interest by 200%.

BlackBerry (telecommunication, mobile OS, hardware) Product Manager – (Jan 2011 - June 2014) - Waterloo

●  Launched BlackBerry 10 OS cards (composers, pickers, and previewers) that allows an app to export its screen to another app. E.g, opening an image app screen from within the Facebook app.

●  Shipped Invocation Framework API for developers of BlackBerry 10 OS. These APIs allow one app to talk to another app on the phone for various use cases. Key wins: API adoption increased by 80% and number of apps increased by 1000% in 6 quarters after launch.

●  Drove alignment between internal stakeholders (leadership, design, engineering, marketing, developer relations) and external partners (Facebook, Evernote) to increase adoption of key apps. Also led aggressive alpha and beta programs to meet deadlines for launch.

IBM (e-commerce)
Software Developer – (May 2007 - Aug 2008) - Toronto

●  Created front-end store categories of WebSphere Commerce (IBM e-commerce platform).

●  Optimized store categories in WebSphere Commerce to display them faster by 18%.

●  Provided L3 technical support to customers including Sony, Sears, and Home Depot for store category issues.

●  Received 4 IBM Thanks awards based on performance in 16 months of internship.

Education:

University of Windsor

Bachelors in Applied Science - Honors Electrical Engineering – (Sep 2005 - Sep 2010)

Specialized in Computer Science and Automotive engineering Recipient of University of Windsor’s Academic Scholarship. GPA: 3.3/4