Richard Samela – Product Management Leader Resume
Product & Platform Leader | AI, Data, SaaS, and Regulated Markets
Summary
Product and platform leader with 15+ years translating complex customer, commercial, and technical problems into products that grow revenue, accelerate adoption, and improve delivery. Experience across 0 to 1, modernization, and growth initiatives in AI, data, SaaS, healthcare, life sciences, and IoT. Partners with engineering, data science, commercial, legal, and executive teams to deliver scalable products. Recent work launched an AI-enabled hiring platform to 5,100+ candidates, 60+ companies, 160+ roles landed, and $77K in Q1 and Q2 revenue. Prior work includes $5.7M in year-over-year revenue growth, $3M+ multi-year enterprise contracts, and 10x monetizable inventory expansion.
Selected Impact
Professional Experience
Founder & Head of Product
Vetta | Guilford, CT
Built and launched an AI-enabled hiring platform using outcome-based matching to identify qualified candidates beyond keyword search. Owned product, customer discovery, technical requirements, partnerships, and commercialization from concept through launch.
- Developed a customer-demonstration prototype, incorporated feedback into requirements, and launched the finished product in under three months.
- Acquired 5,100+ candidates and 60+ companies in the first six months, supporting 160+ roles landed through the platform.
- Reduced average time to hire to 13 days through outcome-based matching, compared with reported 40-day Indeed and 61-day LinkedIn averages.
- Generated $77K in Q1 and Q2 revenue while building toward a $250K first-year revenue target.
- Designed a vector-based matching engine using structured outcome extraction and contextual scoring to improve evaluation beyond keyword screening.
- Formed partnerships with Boston New Technology, Startup Grind Boston, and Startup Station to expand employer and candidate acquisition.
Associate Director of Product Management, AIM XR
IQVIA | Bridgewater, NJ
Owned product strategy for a HIPAA-compliant data and AI platform used by enterprise pharmaceutical clients, aligning engineering, data science, commercial, privacy, legal, and client teams around adoption, revenue, and governed AI delivery.
- Drove 32% YoY revenue growth, representing $5.7M, by refocusing the roadmap on customer outcomes, enterprise buying constraints, and high-value use cases.
- Moved 70% of traffic to the latest release five months ahead of plan by prioritizing adoption-critical improvements and tying rollout decisions to account-level revenue.
- Expanded monetizable inventory 10x through AI and ML-driven contextual classification while preserving governance and client trust.
- Created an SSO prototype walkthrough that enabled sales to demonstrate uninterrupted data delivery to enterprise pharmaceutical customers following third-party-cookie deprecation.
- Developed a John Snow Labs NLP demonstration with data science and engineering teams, showing how semantic embeddings could expand the pharmaceutical lexicon and improve contextual classification.
Manager, Engineering Project Management Office
Whelen Engineering Company | Chester, CT
Rebuilt the Engineering organization’s product-delivery operating model, creating cross-functional teams, expanding PMO capacity, and enabling strategic hardware, SaaS, and IoT launches for public safety fleets.
- Restructured a siloed engineering organization into five cross-functional teams, reducing development timelines by 12 weeks for priority hardware and IoT programs.
- Built a formal product management function within 120 days, introducing roadmaps and a structured intake process that reduced work in progress by 75%.
- Launched a SaaS and IoT platform for first-responder fleets, enabling centralized software updates and eliminating two to four days of routine vehicle downtime per unit.
- Doubled PMO capacity from four to eight team members, increasing delivery capacity for concurrent hardware, software, and connected-product programs.
- Established delivery rhythms across engineering, product, and leadership to improve prioritization, visibility, and execution.
Business Project Manager and Scrum Master, IoT Operations, Consultant
Hartford Steam Boiler | Hartford, CT
Improved product delivery practices for an IoT operations initiative, aligning product, engineering, data science, and external vendors around predictive-maintenance capabilities.
- Consolidated four Azure DevOps instances into one Jira environment and coached product managers and analysts on user stories and acceptance criteria.
- Partnered with engineering and data science to deliver an IoT device that identified pre-failure conditions and enabled proactive equipment alerts.
Senior Agile Project and Product Manager, Consultant
Yale University | New Haven, CT
Directed product and agile-delivery work for Yale IT modernization, including IAM planning, digital-asset migration, and agile adoption.
- Drove MVP requirements, success criteria, vendor evaluation, and a strategic brief for a replacement IAM system within the first 120 days.
- Completed migration of digital assets and display rules for Yale’s three museums, saving $40K annually, and served as Scrum Master for three teams transitioning from waterfall to agile.
Director of Product Management
UBM Life Sciences (Formerly UBM Medica) | Norwalk, CT
Led product strategy and an 11-person product organization across four healthcare media and AdTech business units. Modernized platforms, introduced AI and NLP-driven targeting capabilities, and connected product investment to advertiser, audience, and revenue outcomes.
- Promoted to lead 11 product managers across four business units, setting product strategy, strengthening operating practices, and aligning product investment with digital revenue growth.
- Generated $4M in annual revenue growth by introducing AI, machine learning, and NLP-based content classification that enabled more precise healthcare audience segmentation and improved advertiser targeting.
- Led migration of 30+ medical content sites to a unified platform, reducing operational overhead and enabling integrated campaign targeting, shared capabilities, and cross-site revenue optimization.
- Partnered with sales, ad operations, editorial, analytics, and technology teams to translate advertiser and audience needs into monetizable product capabilities.
Education
Bachelor of Arts (BA), Psychology
Florida International University, Miami FL
Certifications
Product Management
Quartz Product Prof., Fundamentals of Managing Products
Product Growth Leaders
Product Led Growth
Pendo
AI for Product Management
Pendo
Agile & Scrum
Scrum Product Owner
Scrum Alliance