👋 Hello, I am Adam Maddox

Experience

• Head of Product, Fergus Nov 2024

  Making it easy to run a trades business.

• Head of Product, Matomo Jul 2023

  Developed the company strategy and created supporting product strategies to align Exec and SLT on where we should play and how we can win. Introduced the concept of a 'Strategy Graph' to create a simple unified view of the company strategy and the supporting dept strategies. The graph was created through collabouration with heads of People + Culture, Marketing, Engineering and Support. This moved strategy work from silo documents to a graph and engaging discussions, resulting in teams having a clear view on how the can support each other.

  Scaled the Matomo product org from 1 Product Owner to 3 teams, hiring a mix of experience levels to gain the most leverage for the hire budget. Introduced Product Briefs centered on hypothesis and experimentation, to shift the mindset from producing features to learnings and outcomes.

  Developed the product team, using the reforge model. Performed assessments to understand competancy gaps for individuals and the team as a whole. This was used to guide an early Product Manager hire and quarterly development goals.

• Product Mentor, Creative HQ May 2023

  Served as Mentor to PickPath.com, providing guidance on how to manage product and software development in an early stage startup.

• Head of Product, Invoice Simple Apr 2020

  Scaled from one to three product teams covering Growth, Feature and PMF expansion strategies. Paired each product manager with an engineering lead, with support from 3-5 engineers and UX design. To accelerate our 'decide with data' pace, we hired a product analyst team which provided insights and data support. To balance our data focus, we hired a user experience researcher, who supported discovery and informed our decisions on strategic direction. Working with the head of engineering, we formed a systems team who is tasked with improving the developer experience, with a focus on DevOps and automated testing.

  With each new team, we gained more focus which lead to more frequent and bigger wins. The Growth Team executed on aquisition and monitization strategies; successfully increasing price by 50% with no convert loss, and building on aquisition optimisations to introduce revenue expansion. The core team established retention metrics, and executed on a constantly improving feature strategy focused on fitness for purpose. Our expansion into Payments required considerable discovery to understand and deliver value, yielding strong 200% YoY growth with well over $500M processed.

  The Growth and Core team contributed 2.7x MRR growth and 2.2x subscription growth. This variation presents the first decoupling of subs from revenue, which was the result of a strategic push in revenue expansion enable through repackaging.

  While it's great to see graphs go up, the best part of the job is coaching the product team and running our weekly creative problem solving sessions. These sessions are an expression of our belief that you can solve any problem with persistance and creativity.

  Invoice Simple is an amazing group of people, and the result, a great product.

• Co-Founder, Invoice Simple Mar 2016

  A fun journey from the first commit on the InvoiceSimple web app, to each MRR growth and scaling milestone, and then the aquisition by EverCommerce in 2020. Today, 400k subscribers invoice over $4B/month with Invoice Simple.

  I attribute a lot of our success to early principles which guided our efforts. We aimed to create a product which never got in the way of the users goals, and to always decide with data. This lead to creating a guest invoicing experience unlike anything on the internet, no account required just load our web app enter a few details and you had an invoice, ready to send.

• Founder, Gastown Labs Apr 2010

  Founded a Vancouver based App Development Shop, specialising in "Making Amazing Apps". We built Apple, Google and Rails apps for our clients in the social and consumer internet space. Enabling commerce, connecting people and a fun 'pickem' game for the Canadian Football League (CFL).

  Running an app dev shop is a great way to work on many interesting projects in a short time.

• Director of Engineering, LCM Jul 2009

  Engineering leader responsible for the feature development and growth of Live Current Media key properties; cricket.com and perfume.com.

  Early adoptor of AB Testing to create a data first approach to growing ecommerce revenue.

  Created a DevOps role and managed a migration to AWS to allow our infrastructure to quickly respond to load spikes while reducing hosting costs.

About

I love making things on the internet and solving problems at scale. I'm an optimist, I believe that anything is possible with a combination of persistance and creativity. I started as an engineer writing code, I now work on strategy and build world class product teams.

Highlight

Helping create and grow InvoiceSimple.com. Bootstrapped to 400k subscribers who invoice $6.5B/month, and process $4M/day in payments. Notably in 2018 we were recognised as one of the fastest growing Canadian startups.

It was a highly rewarding journey from the first commit on the Invoice Simple web app, to each growth and scaling milestone. In 2020, our company was acquired by EverCommerce and I agreed to stay on as Head of Product. With new resources, support and expectations I set about building a world class product team. Scaling our product function and creating data and research teams to empower each Product Manager to do their best work.

Above all, coaching is the best part of being product leadership. Building the relationships and trust required to create a unique path to improvement and seeing the results is very rewarding. The product team achieved remarkable results in 2022; including 3x payments revenue, 2.7x MRR, and 2.2x subscriber growth.

Education

• Product Leadership 2022 Reforge
• Product Strategy 2022 Reforge
• Electronic and Computer Engineering 2002 BE Honors, Manukau Institute of Technology
• Mechanical Engineering 1998 Diploma, Auckland University of Technology

Reading

• Shape Up Ryan Singer
• The Obsticle is the Way Ryan Holiday
• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt
• Playing to Win A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin
• Ego is the Enemy Ryan Holiday
• The Crux Richard Rumelt
• Let My People Go Surfing Yvon Chouinard