The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 25 Software Product Executives of 2021. These accomplished individuals are the driving force for software innovation, improved user experience, and the genesis of company revenue growth and continuity. In their roles, they are leading high performing teams in developing products that streamline operations, facilitate communication, interpret data, and enhance overall corporate performance. They have also notably led successful launches over the past year in response to evolving market demands for features such as consumption-based pricing and real-time insights, demonstrating an ability to adapt quickly and ensure their companies’ relevancy in the years to come.
Across CRM and sales engagement, marketing insights, supply chain visibility, human resources management, data security, and other areas, these executives have been developing some of the most successful and effective software products on the market. Their experience in product design, development, and delivery has spanned both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies. Through a steadfast commitment to deeply understanding user needs and building best-in-class solutions, they have risen to their current leadership positions and represent some of the brightest minds the software industry has to offer. Please join us in recognizing the accomplishments of The Top 25 Software Product Executives of 2021.
1. Ajay Awatramani
Company: Cornerstone
Title: Chief Product Officer
Ajay Awatramani joined Cornerstone in 2020 as the Chief Product Officer. Cornerstone is a premier people development company, offering solutions that help organizations and individuals around the globe navigate new and changing work environments and realize their potential. The company provides solutions for comprehensive recruiting, personalized learning, modern training content, development-driven performance management, and holistic employee data management and insights. In his current role, Awatramani leads product strategy, development, delivery, and alignment as the company doubles down on its vision to accelerate innovation and strengthen its world-class people development solutions.
Prior to Cornerstone, Awatramani led B2B product, strategy, and go-to-market as the head of product - B2B in the Digital Experience Business Unit at Adobe. Awatramani joined Adobe via the acquisition of Marketo in 2018, where he served as the vice president of product. He joined Marketo in 2015 from Oracle Corp., where he served from 2005 through 2015 as a director of product management for the Sales Performance Management business. Awatramani began his career as a software engineer at Siebel Systems in 2000. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Mumbai, India, and a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of Southern California.
2. Alok Tyagi
Company: DealerSocket
Title: Chief Product and Technology Officer
Alok Tyagi is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at DealerSocket. Founded in 2001, the San Clemente-based company is an industry-leading automotive CRM and dealership training provider that serves auto dealers. Tyagi joined DealerSocket in 2020, bringing more than 25 years of hands-on product and technology leadership experience. His experience spans establishing product strategy, product management, design, and development of market-leading global enterprise software products. Tyagi frequently engages customers, often introducing new SaaS and cloud products. His specialty is re-innovating existing product portfolios that spur revenue growth and improve customer experience.
He is a champion of digital transformation in every industry, and regularly advises various start-up companies and mentors entrepreneurs. Previously, Tyagi was the chief technology officer at RealPage, a senior advisor on the product and technology council at Mainsail Partners, and chief product and technology officer at GTreasury. Tyagi has extensive experience leading CRM product organizations at industry-leading companies like Oracle, Peoplesoft, JDEdwards, and Sage. Tyagi received a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Colorado and studied computer engineering at the Regional Engineering College in India.
3. Amritansh Raghav
Company: Outreach Corporation
Title: Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering
Amritansh Raghav is the Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at Outreach Corporation. Founded in 2011, Outreach is a sales engagement platform that accelerates revenue growth by optimizing interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. Raghav joined the Seattle, Washington-based company in 2019. In his current role, he builds tools to empower companies to have a deeper connection with customers and increase revenue through sales engagement. Armed with a passion for solving business problems, Raghav helps to create innovative technologies and engaging product experiences.
With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Raghav’s knowledge spans working in small startups to global companies, garnering a diverse wealth of knowledge that ranges from cloud infrastructure and operating systems to real-time networking and developer platforms. Previously, he was the senior vice president of engineering and product at Fuze, a cloud-based video conferencing solution that connects people and organizations across devices. Before this, he was a program manager at Microsoft, and prior to joining Microsoft, Raghav worked as a principal group manager at Office Communications Group and as director of PM at Skype. Raghav received a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from IIT Varanasi in India and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Binghamton University.
4. Krishna Panicker
Company: Pipedrive
Title: Vice President of Product
Krishna Panicker is the Vice President of Product at Pipedrive, leading an international team of 100+ people in Tallinn, Lisbon, Prague, London, Riga, and Tartu. He has a passion for building consumer-grade experiences and a curiosity for what drives demand. At Pipedrive, he is responsible for product management, design, customer and market research, as well as the marketplace of 250+ integrations. Over the past year, Panicker has led a number of new award-winning product launches, including a new, intuitive UX; Insights, an interactive platform for tracking sales data and trends; cloud-based SmartDocs and eSignatures that enable fast and secure creation and management of sales-related documents; and LeadBooster 2.0, a comprehensive lead generation and management toolset, which has been Pipedrive’s most successful launch to date.
Panicker joined the company in 2019. As a leader, he is a charismatic visionary who is very knowledgeable about the smallest nuances of the CRM market but also sees the big picture. Panicker is a respected product thought leader with over 20 years of experience, with previous roles at Microsoft, Skype, and Blink. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer systems engineering from City University London.
5. James Coomer
Company: DDN
Title: Senior Vice President of Products
James Coomer is the Senior Vice President of Products at DDN, responsible for the technology direction, roadmap, and performance analysis of hardware and software solutions for DDN and its enterprise division, Tintri. Coomer engages with organizations that are exploring the extremes of IO performance across a range of industries from life sciences through to finance with use cases from cloud and enterprise big data to artificial intelligence. A creative technology leader, Coomer has expertise in all things data including AI, HPC, enterprise applications, cloud, analytics, AIOps, and more. Having worked on several strategic acquisitions, product development, and product marketing strategies, he has extensive technical knowledge and the ability to visualize, strategize, and execute a product from start to fruition.
His leadership has coincided with DDN’s emergence as the leading supplier of intelligent infrastructure for enterprise applications and AI. His vision and commitment to delivering customer value have driven DDN to deliver products that provide simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency to workflows and IT environments at any scale and that have garnered DDN awards and recognition across the product line. Coomer holds a master’s degree in physics from Lancaster University as well as a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Exeter.
6. Alexa Maturana-Lowe
Company: Fivetran
Title: Director of Product Management
Alexa Maturana-Lowe is the Director of Product Management at Fivetran, responsible for the Core User Experience. In this role, she has global responsibility for all customer-facing user experiences across the entire Fivetran product, support, and services suite. Maturana-Lowe was hired as the company's first product manager and has been with Fivetran for almost three years. In her capacity as a product leader, she has driven key strategic initiatives, including moving from subscription to consumption-based pricing, introducing pay-as-you-go with a credit card—driving significant increases in adoption, and launching Fivetran’s second use case for developers to embed Fivetran pipelines into their applications to onboard their customer data—leading to millions in recurring revenue in its first year.
Prior to Fivetran, Maturana-Lowe worked as a product manager at an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup called UnitedMasters, assisting musicians in promoting their work, and before that at Pandora, helping to automate and drive insights for the ad buying experience. Maturana-Lowe received her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and government from Claremont McKenna College.
7. Priya Rajagopalan
Company: FourKites
Title: Chief Product Officer
Priya Rajagopalan is the Chief Product Officer of FourKites, the #1 global supply chain visibility platform. She oversees an 85-member team across product, user experience, and carrier operations. Since she joined FourKites in 2016, the company has grown from 30 employees to 530, the number of customers has increased from less than 10 to over 500, and the FourKites product portfolio has expanded from over-the-road tracking in the U.S. to multimodal tracking in 176+ countries, next-generation yard management, and comprehensive predictive analytics powered by machine learning.
Previously, Rajagopalan held global product leadership roles at TiVo Corporation with responsibility for metadata products in 70 countries, and at Flexera Software where she ran a suite of ERP-adjacent applications. In her prior career in consulting, she advised leadership teams at technology firms such as Hewlett-Packard, Emerson, 3M, and ADP. Rajagopalan believes strongly in giving back to the community. She volunteers with several organizations, including Cradles to Crayons and tutoring groups dedicated to helping children in low-income areas. Rajagopalan was named one of SDCE’s 2021 Pros to Know. She has a Master of Business Administration degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Madras in India.
8. Alok Srivastava
Company: Conductor
Title: Chief Technology Officer
Alok Srivastava serves as Conductor’s Chief Technology Officer, arriving with more than 30 years of experience leading technology teams. Srivastava leads the technology practice for Conductor, the world’s leading organic marketing platform, which delivers help to marketers as they create powerful marketing content to drive high-quality traffic to their site and track their organic performance. Conductor ranked at the top of the 2020 Forrester Wave for SEO platforms and is rated #1 on TrustRadius and G2 by enterprise marketers. Its forward-thinking customers include global and emerging enterprise brands such as Citibank, Visa, and Casper.
Srivastava has served as a CTO and in other C-Suite roles at leading organizations like Oracle, Delphix Corporation, and most recently at LiftLab. Srivastava received a Master of Business Administration degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and received his Bachelor of Science degree in electronics engineering from IIT in India. He holds 38 U.S. and worldwide patents in data management, distributed systems, and data virtualization technologies.
9. Jeffrey Breen
Company: Protegrity
Title: Executive Vice President of Product and Strategy
Jeffrey Breen is the Executive Vice President of Product and Strategy at Protegrity, a global leader in data security whose software helps the world’s most recognized brands protect their most sensitive data everywhere it is stored and used. Breen leads the company’s technology innovation, product management, and engineering teams globally. Since joining Protegrity, Breen has driven significant technology innovation throughout the company’s product line including the recent release of version 8 of the Protegrity Data Protection Platform, which extends the platform to protect data in public-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments such as AWS Redshift, Snowflake, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
Prior to joining Protegrity, Breen led the data science and engineering team at Boston-based asset management firm GMO, where he and his team helped investment teams identify and exploit new insights and signals through natural language processing and other machine learning techniques. He is also an active investor and advisor to startups such as Starburst Data, Manifold, ModelOp, FiVerity, Rise Financial, and Finch as well as a limited partner in Mendoza Ventures’ flagship pre-seed fund. Breen was recognized with Teradata’s Consulting Excellence Award and with the Forrester Research 4C2Q1S Award for Quality during his time at those firms. He has also held leadership roles at Think Big Analytics, Atmosphere Research, and Yankee Group. Breen received his Master of Science degree in astronomy from the University of Virginia and bachelor’s degrees in physics, astronomy, astrophysics from the University of Pennsylvania.
10. Riaz Raihan
Company: Alida
Title: President of Products and Engineering
Riaz Raihan is the President of Products and Engineering at Alida. He leads product strategy, product management, R&D, engineering, artificial intelligence, product design, value engineering, CoE, and cloud operations for the company. Raihan’s award-winning team builds world-class customer experience (CX) software and is ranked #48 for product and design across 60,000 companies worldwide by Comparably. Gartner recently placed Alida on its Voice-of-Customer Magic Quadrant. With two decades of product leadership experience, Raihan is a veteran of Cisco, SAP, Infor, and Accenture.
Previously, Raihan was president and GM at Cisco’s IoT business unit in San Jose, California. He led a team of 1,500 technologists that created SaaS products by harnessing the power of IoT, cloud, and AI/ML. Raihan spent a decade at SAP as SVP and COO. At Infor, he led digital engineering globally. Early in his career, he worked at Accenture and Ernst & Young, advising C-suite executives at F500 corporations. Raihan is passionate about youth STEM education. Since 2004, he has served as a volunteer teacher for Junior Achievement, a global non-profit organization focused on youth education. Raihan holds engineering and Master of Business Administration degrees (summa cum laude) and is a graduate of Stanford University’s management development program. He is a member of MENSA.
11. Dan Leibu
Company: League
Title: Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Dan Leibu is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of League. Founded in 2014, League is a technology-focused health company powering the digital transformation of healthcare. Employers, pharmacy retailers, healthcare providers, and payors use its award-winning platform to deliver integrated and personalized health experiences that drive consumer engagement. Hundreds of thousands of consumers across the world use digital health platforms powered by League to access, navigate, and pay for care.
Before joining League, Leibu was the chief technology officer at Kobo, where he developed a broad eReading platform that helped change the way the world consumed literature. He also made it accessible to a wider audience by entering the market with the world’s first eReader priced under $200—forcing the industry to follow suit. Leibu first met and worked with League founder and CEO Mike Serbinis at DocSpace, where they pioneered cloud storage technology that was sold to Critical Path—a messaging service that ran one-third of the world’s email. Leibu became vice president at Critical Path where he oversaw the tech team that developed and hosted a messaging platform used by telcos and enterprises across the globe. Leibu received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Concordia University.
12. Josh Koenig
Company: Pantheon
Title: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
As Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pantheon, Josh Koenig is focused on making the Open Web a first-class platform for delivering results. Having played an integral role in the conception and growth of Pantheon’s SaaS Platform, which enables web teams to design, innovate, and deploy websites quickly, Koenig's work combines the ideals of open source with the pragmatic utility of the agile approach.
As a very early Drupal adopter (user #3313), Koenig was part of the team that drove the first high-profile public Drupal use case with the Howard Dean campaign in 2003. He went on to found the Drupal Dojo, an online learning community for developers, and to co-found the premiere Drupal agency in San Francisco, Chapter Three. At Pantheon, Koenig drove the product vision for a platform that reaches over a billion unique visitors per month, powering tens of thousands of websites across the globe. The web is the cornerstone of modern campaigns, causes, businesses, and brands, and Koenig’s mission is to liberate web teams from the confines of enterprise monoliths and the drudgery of infrastructure operations to focus on surpassing strategic goals and driving impact online. He received his bachelor’s degree from New York University.
13. Eric Cornelius
Company: iBoss
Title: Chief Product Officer
Eric Cornelius is the Chief Product Officer of iboss. Founded in 2003, iboss is the Boston-based cloud security company that provides network security as a service, delivered in the cloud, and as a complete SaaS offering. Cornelius joined the company in February 2021 and is part of the team in Irvine, California. In his current role as CPO, he oversees the strategy and development of iboss’s best-in-class cybersecurity solutions. Cornelius brings to iboss nearly two decades of experience in the cybersecurity and computer science fields, having also spent several years in critical security roles with the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Army.
Before iboss, Cornelius spent over eight years at Cylance, most recently as CPO. Previously, he was the chief product architect at BlackBerry, deputy director of the Control Systems Security Program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a cybersecurity researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, and began his career as a computer scientist at the U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory. Cornelius is the co-author of Recommended Practice: Creating Cyber Forensics Plans for Control Systems as part of the DHS National Cyber Security Division, Control Systems Security Program, 2008.
14. Henrique Pinheiro
Company: Plusoft
Title: Director of IT and Data Protection Officer
Henrique Pinheiro is the Director of IT and Data Protection Officer at Plusoft, a Brazilian company focusing on human experience (XH). Passionate about technology and how it can transform businesses’ and people's lives, Pinheiro has been working at Plusoft for over 20 years, 16 of them in leadership positions. Throughout his journey at Plusoft, he actively participated in the structuring and management of product teams (R&D, operation, roadmap, and cloud infrastructure), making it possible to make 100% of the products available in the SaaS model and change the revenue to a recurring model. He was responsible for the implementation of the company's information security area and took the lead in ISO 27001 certification and recertification, which attests to Plusoft's high security standards.
Pinheiro is one of the co-founders of inPaaS, a company acquired by Plusoft, created to facilitate the development of systems using the no-code and low-code concept, thus reducing the complexity of development and supporting companies in their journey of digital transformation. He has a degree in information systems from Ibirapuera University and a Master of Business Administration degree in IT strategy management from Fundação Getulio Vargas.
15. Manish Bafna (tie)
Company: RFPIO
Title: Vice President of Technology
As the Vice President of Technology at RFPIO, Manish Bafna set out to change the manual RFP response process. As a former technical product manager, he understood firsthand how manual RFP response impacts productivity and he was inspired to use AI and machine learning to build a better way. An experienced technical architect of products implemented at Fortune 500 companies, Bafna excels at building complete software and has worked extensively on machine learning and full-text search engines.
With over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, Bafna previously worked in leadership positions at Owler, Exterro, and was a consultant at Headstrong where he developed various enterprise applications from the ground up. Throughout his roles, he has developed expertise in systems architecture and in the design of applications and mapping client requirements to technical requirements. Bafna received his Bachelor of Engineering Degree in information technology from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore.
15. Andrew Katz (tie)
Company: mParticle
Title: Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Andrew Katz is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of mParticle, the largest independent customer data platform. Along with his brother, Michael, and colleague Dave Meyers, Katz created mParticle to help brands make business personal. mParticle enables businesses to easily manage the immense growth of data volumes moving to and from sources, systems, APIs, and applications. As CTO, Katz has made it possible for mParticle to support customers like Airbnb, Burger King, Spotify, and Postmates in using mParticle to deliver great customer experiences and accelerate growth. With Katz at the helm, mParticle’s technology and engineering teams have been able to develop a single API that allows teams to holistically manage customer data by solving the core challenges around quality, governance, and connectivity.
Prior to founding mParticle, Katz served as the former co-founder and CTO of interclick, acquired by Yahoo!, where he continued on as the vice president of engineering for the genome product within the company. Early in his career, Katz was the CEO of mStyle, a company that built a proprietary multi-tenant mobile billing and content delivery platform. Katz received his Bachelor of Science degree in business administration and entrepreneurship from Babson College in Massachusetts.
16. Blagoja Golubovski
Company: Simpplr
Title: Vice President of Product Management
Blagoja Golubovski is the Vice President of Product Management at Simpplr. In this role, he leads product management and UX at Simpplr, driving and building beautiful products to solve for customers’ pain points. Golubovski works collaboratively with key executive stakeholders to ensure a unified vision is deployed through coordinated strategy internally and in the marketplace. He is responsible for Simpplr’s product innovation, design, and development.
Golubovski is an industry veteran with an over 20-year career spanning technical and product management. In his past experiences, he has helped design and promote software to improve customer and employee experiences for varied verticals including fintech, promotions, advertising, and semiconductors. He speaks at industry events and customer forums and is widely recognized as an expert in enterprise software technology. Golubovski has also served in engineering, technical, and product management positions at Vindicia, IPextreme, Silicon Graphics, STMicroelectronics, and Aphex Systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from California State University, Los Angeles.
17. Jason Mills
Company: Expensify
Title: Director of Product and Customers
Jason Mills is the Director of Product and Customers at Expensify, the world’s premier preaccounting platform. He’s currently focused on setting strategic priorities at the company, and his most recent projects have resulted in the release of major features such as bill pay and Expensify.cash, with more exciting initiatives on the way. A 10-year veteran of Expensify, Mills has held a number of leadership roles spanning sales, business development, customer success, and product management.
Before joining Expensify in 2011, Mills held various consulting and analyst roles at Goldman Sachs, ING Bank, and other global firms. He received his Master of Arts degree in international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and his Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
18. Sigfús Magnússon
Company: Men&Mice
Title: Chief Technical Officer
Sigfus Magnússon is the Chief Technical Officer and former Vice President of Product Management at Men&Mice, a network management software company providing flexible and scalable DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (IPAM) solutions for enterprise and SME customers. Magnússon is responsible for translating the company’s vision into a product roadmap and has a singular talent for balancing business objectives with customer needs and internal resources. Magnússon oversees the Product Management team, working closely with developers and customer care professionals in creating and maintaining a robust and ambitious, but achievable product roadmap.
His 30 years of experience in the DDI industry with hands-on involvement in nearly every step of the product lifecycle positions him perfectly to lead at Men&Mice. He knows his team’s value, allowing a wide range of input and funneling it into the product vision, and makes every member feel heard and given agency, even if their ideas aren’t accepted as-is. Magnússon leads through discussion and iteration, developing a creative atmosphere and ensuring that the end result is a product that aligns with all three primary directions: business vision, customer need, and employee participation. Prior to Men&Mice, Magnússon was the VP of user services and computing services at the University of Iceland.
19. Steve McNally
Company: BlueMatrix
Title: Head of Product Management
Steve McNally is the Head of Product Management at BlueMatrix, a SaaS solutions provider for the global investment research market. Founded in 1999, the New York-based company is a leading force in today’s industry standard for the authoring, distribution, presentation, and analysis of investment insights. In his role, McNally oversees the innovation and development of the entire solution suite. He leads the product team in bringing the company’s vision to fruition, ensuring it aligns with the needs of its client base.
Throughout his 15-year tenure at BlueMatrix, he has led the charge on brand-defining innovations, including the award-winning content authoring platform, Creator V4, used by some of the world’s biggest investment banks. McNally brings in-depth insight into use cases of investment technology. Previously, he worked in sales for an options trading platform and before that in architectural design. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in finance from Iona College in New York.
20. Greg Ludke
Company: TeamSnap
Title: Vice President of Product and Head of Corporate Strategy
As the Vice President of Product and Head of Corporate Strategy at TeamSnap, Greg Ludke works to make sure TeamSnap’s sports management products lead the industry in streamlining communication, registration, rostering, scheduling, and more for sports teams, clubs, leagues, associations, and tournaments. He helps set and orchestrate the vision of building an ecosystem for delivering a great experience across the youth sports community.
Before joining TeamSnap, Ludke worked at Intuit for eight years as a product manager for TurboTax, Payroll, and QuickBooks Online with a primary focus on designing and building help experiences for customers and agents. Before Intuit, Ludke was the development manager for Resort Technology Partners in Vail, Colorado, a small software firm creating integrated point of sale, access control, and scheduling solutions for four-season resorts like Vail Resorts, Aspen, Jackson Hole, Whistler, Squaw Creek, Atlantis Resort, and Boyne. Ludke has a passion for sharing and teaching others design thinking and product management, serving as a mentor with BoomTown Accelerator, MergeLane, and the Colorado University New Venture Challenge. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Marquette University.
21. Ioana Dayagi Stamate
Company: Vindicia
Title: Head of Product
As Head of Product for Vindicia, Ioana Dayagi Stamate leads the company’s portfolio of subscription billing and churn management solutions. Vindicia, an Amdocs company, supports B2C businesses that rely on subscriptions and recurring revenue with leading SaaS-based solutions that drive revenue at every stage of the entire subscription management lifecycle.
With more than 20 years of experience, Stamate brings the enthusiasm and vision of a seasoned product manager and leads the design and roadmap of Vindicia’s solutions. Prior to Vindicia, she held various leadership positions at Amdocs in product management, pre-sales, and delivery. Before that, she worked in the IT group of Elbit Ltd. Stamate’s expertise in customer care, ordering, and billing products has enabled her to oversee initiatives for Tier One telcos around the world. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering and industrial management from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
22. Jonathan Sussman
Company: Jebbit
Title: Vice President of Product
Jonathan Sussman is the Vice President of Product at Jebbit, a no-code SaaS platform to create interactive experiences that capture first-party data at scale. In this role, he is responsible for driving the product’s vision, roadmap, and execution. Sussman oversees product management, user experience, solutions engineering, and analytics. In 2020, Sussman led the charge in transforming the Jebbit business from a sales-led to a product-led model. Notably, he shifted Jebbit's customer acquisition strategy by introducing a free version of the Jebbit software. This change impacted all aspects of Jebbit, the biggest being the transformation the platform went through, making it easy for anyone to build and launch their own quiz.
Before joining Jebbit, Sussman held a number of product leadership roles at B2B SaaS startups including Adelphic (acquired by Viant, Inc.) and Nanigans. Before this, he led a team of product managers at AT&T and Yahoo. Sussman also ran his own tutoring company in New York servicing hundreds of clients and employing 25 tutors. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
23. Geoffrey Byers
Company: ParkHub
Title: Chief Product Officer
Geoffrey Byers is the Chief Product Officer at ParkHub based in Dallas, TX. He prides himself on deep knowledge of human-centered design, organizing chaos, and democratizing the genius at ParkHub. Place a group of brilliant thinkers in a room and you get great ideas. Byers’s passion is bringing those ideas to life. He is a designer, strategist, and leader focused on creating awe-inspiring journeys for the physical, digital, and service experience worlds. This means he excels at making things, works hard to make the right things, and makes sure that they happen at the right time. ParkHub is the leading B2B parking technology company serving over 500 professional sports teams, event venues, universities, and recreation sites in the U.S. The company’s products provide contactless payment options, integrations with major ticketing and parking reservation providers, real-time operational insights, and robust performance analytics.
Byers has over 10 years of experience delivering enterprise SaaS products with organizations ranging from pre-seed startups to Fortune 100 companies. These include leading strategically significant products and teams for Siemens, IBM, Intuit, Capital One, and various startups in the Dallas ecosystem. Byers received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in industrial design from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
24. Shri Iyer
Company: SimpleLegal
Title: Vice President of Product and Design
Shri Iyer is the Vice President of Product and Design at SimpleLegal, a modern and intuitive legal operations management solution supporting over 27,000 users and processing $3.4 billion annually. SimpleLegal’s products enable corporate legal teams to streamline their processes, increase productivity, and make better business and legal decisions. Since joining in 2019, Iyer built and scaled the product function at SimpleLegal and quintupled the product team in less than a year, launching embedded document management that eliminates the disorganization of legal documents for customers. As a member of SimpleLegal’s Executive Leadership Team, Iyer is dedicated to finding new ways to scale revenue, improve the core product experience for customers, and deliver innovation and efficiency.
Armed with over two decades of experience as a global product leader in B2B and B2C industries, Iyer is active in the product management community, educating others through his blog and mentorship. Prior to SimpleLegal, Iyer was the senior director of product at RiseSmart, launching several products including their flagship product, RiseSmart Insight, which won the prestigious HR Tech Award for the top HR product in 2017. Previously, he held leadership positions in product and engineering at Oracle. Iyer received his Master of Business Administration degree from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, his Master of Science degree in information systems from the University of Phoenix, and his Bachelor of Science degree in financial accounting from the University of Mumbai.
25. Trishaala Chengappa
Company: CustomerGauge
Title: Global Vice President of Product Management
Trishaala Chengappa is the Global Vice President of Product Management at CustomerGauge, creator of the Account Experience category and ranked #1 for B2B VoC by Gartner. CustomerGauge excels at collecting feedback and signals at the account level, and distributing this information in real-time to front-line employees so businesses can proactively retain and grow accounts faster.
Since joining the company in 2011, Chengappa has held multiple roles in customer success and product management before taking on the role as Global VP of Product Management in 2019. In her current role, Chengappa leads the team responsible for defining the product vision and strategy, designing customer-focused experiences, driving roadmap execution, and overseeing the entire product lifecycle. Chengappa’s team has a proven track record of developing industry-leading B2B CX solutions for clients like DHL, Anheuser-Busch, Heineken, SugarCRM, and more. Driven by her passion to advance the enterprise B2B customer experience market with disruptive innovation, Chengappa believes in customer-centric development that drives business results. Prior to joining CustomerGauge, Chengappa was responsible for Corporate Communications at Henkel India. She received her undergraduate degree from the PSG College of Arts and Sciences and her postgraduate degree from Christ University, Bangalore.
