My name is Jeff Bower and I’ve been called a lot of things during my career, but one of my favorites is a “seasoned professional.” Sometimes that seasoning is salty, bitter, or spicy - but it’s often exactly what your organization needs to complete their recipe. My specialty is filling in the gaps and finding a unique niche well beyond any job description. Some organizations are engineering heavy and don’t recognize the importance of sales and marketing. Others have a customer-focused product house but fail to comprehend the need to validate assumptions and pass information to other groups in a coherent fashion. Others have a great idea, but lack the technical skills to build what they need.

However, the most commonly overlooked function is operations. It’s not sexy, it’s not revenue generating, but it’s necessary. This is where I truly shine, enabling data to flow between disparate systems and organizations and aggregating it in a meaningful way. Without a data warehouse to connect feedback from the multitude of third party systems present in nearly all companies there is no way to correlate a marketing campaign with a change in the sales close rate or the introduction of a new feature into the platform with revenue generation. Pulling all of this data into a common core location and generating automated dashboards is often the key to linking the various functions together so they can work in synergy to make the company successful.

The key to making a startup work is to have someone with a holistic vision across the organization. Having an individual who can understand the needs of sales, engineering, marketing, product, and support can help coalesce those disparate goals into a single direction, guiding those goals into more meaningful metrics. Marketing shouldn’t care about ad impressions if the conversion rates are low. Engineering shouldn’t be wasting time on features when there are serious bugs to fix. Product needs to understand how people are using the product and perhaps push new features out on the roadmap to rework those that have the most support tickets.

I am currently open to a new position, either full time or contract as a short or long term consultancy. My preference is for a startup or small company poised for growth and I’m flexible with the salary/equity mix. My skills necessitate a close relationship with a core cross-functional team, either with or as senior management. Job title is unimportant, I’ve never been able to stick to the position I was hired for and have grown to fill the gaps in any organization I’ve worked with.