David Adams – Product Executive

Over a long career, the products I’ve brought to life have facilitated increasingly complex online transactions and helped people analyze data to make difficult and important decisions. I’ve harnessed the talents of cross-disciplinary teams: helping stakeholders arrive at consensus on priorities and objectives, designing quick and efficient prototypes and other market-demand experiments, and fostering mutual respect and trust among people from different backgrounds to support rapid product iteration.

Read my full career bio

Interviews and podcasts

Equiem

(SaaS PropTech)
Equiem’s suite of tools helps owners and managers of commercial properties streamline operations and create a five star experience for tenants. I joined the company after it had dominated its native market (Australia) and taken a dominant position in the UK via a savvy acquisition. My mandate is to help the company mature and scale its product organization, successfully integrate the products added through acquisition, and help the company penetrate the United States, the world’s most lucrative market for PropTech.

Chief Product Officer2021 - Present

Chargeback

(SaaS FinTech, Ecommerce)
Credit card disputes cost merchants and banks tens of billions of dollars each year. I conceived and led development of a SaaS automation platform that uses AI and big data to help merchants fight fraud and challenge disputes. I worked closely with pilot customers Nike, PVH, and Dick’s Sporting goods. We’re on our way to a goal of helping our clients recover $1 billion in lost revenue. In the meantime, we doubled revenue every year for four years, and our clients included eight Fortune 500s, several Global 1000s, and dozens of top Silicon Valley SaaS and services firms. In 2021 Chargeback merged with Sift, the leading provider of fraud prevention tech.

Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer2016 - 2021

Benefitter

(SaaS FinTech, HealthTech)
With health care reform coming into force in 2014, employers had no idea how to comply with the new regulations nor how they might offer better, less expensive insurance to their employees under the new rules. After diving deep into the intricate details of the Affordable Care Act, consulting with business owners and HR managers, my team designed and built a suite of cost analysis and benefit design tools, along with an employee marketplace to guide individuals through the plan selection process. All this needed to be done while complying with strict security and privacy practices dictated by HIPAA and other standards. Benefitter is now United Healthcare’s platform for small group health plan quoting and enrollment.

Co-Founder, VP of Product 2012 - 2016

VIP Event Resources

(SaaS Salesforce Automation)
Most of the $325 billion spent each year on meetings and events begins as a detailed proposal painstakingly assembled over a week or more in MS Office. I was brought in by the visionary founder/CEO of a regional event planning firm that had developed in-house automation tools that supercharged their sales with the goal of productizing those tools and bringing them to the global market. We converted some of the industry’s top thought leaders into advocates and champions. In the first year after launch, we onboarded 3 of the 5 top destination management firms worldwide and reduced proposal delivery from 3-5 days to 2-3 hours.

Chief Technology Officer2009-2012

Crimereports

(SaaS Analytics)
When I joined the company, its product, crimereports.com was already widely deployed and popular, a way for police agencies to share crime data with the public and for citizens to monitor crime in their neighborhoods. Revenue was limited, though, and customers wanted more. In the meantime, big-budgeted agencies like the NYPD and LAPD pioneered the use of real-time data to guide decision-making and resource allocation. I consulted with analysists at medium-sized agencies like San Jose, CA and Mesa, AZ, then led the development and launch of a SaaS crime analytics tool, Command Central, which duplicated much of the NYPD’s “CompStat” features, but on an Andy Griffith budget. Public Engines was acquired by Motorola and Command Central is now the backbone of its intelligence-led public safety offering.

Chief Technology Officer2008-2009

Red Hat

(Enterprise ecommerce)
In the early 2000s, Red Hat had acquired a bunch of companies with a variety of open source tools for software development, IT management, cybersecurity, payments, application servers, and other “ebusiness” uses. These operations lacked strategic coordination with each other and with the parent company. As a member of Red Hat’s executive leadership team, I oversaw an initiative to integrate these products and teams into the company’s strategic vision, culminating in the release of the Red Hat eCommerce Suite. I managed a team of engineers, product managers, customer success, DevOps, marketing and other staff across offices in Sunnyvale CA, Washington DC, Raleigh NC, and Guildford UK.

eBusiness Division Head2000 - 2003

Akopia

(Enterprise ecommerce)
Akopia was the maker of the Interchange ecommerce application server, used by over 10,000 companies to manage their online retail and B2B needs. Developed the initial product strategy and design, hired the entire team, ran product, and negotiated the sale of the company to Red Hat in 2000.

Founder, CEO1998 - 2000

ShopSite

(SaaS ecommerce)
Created pioneering ecommerce and SaaS tool, ShopSite, used by thousands of merchants and distributed by a channel of ISP partners. ShopSite was acquired by Open Market in 1998, then spun out in 2000 and is still operating independently.

Co-Founder, Head of Product1996 - 1998

Chargeback / Nike

Benefitter / Dignity Health

VIPER / OvationDMC

Red Hat Ecommerce Suite

Canon Photocopiers

Akopia / Backcountry

Crimereports / Motorola

Mobixa