Brendan Toch
Husband & Father, Entepreneur, Product Manager

About Me

I value sustainability, simplicity and beauty and lead with genuine action toward these values.

My journey has taken me from the University of Oregon, to Product Management in the tech industry, and through the demanding world of fatherhood. The experiences of this journey defined me, and I built a diverse skill set and perspective.

Here I share a summary of my skills, as displayed through my exeperience at a large company, my personal projects, and hobbies. I value high quality output which I believe can be achieved through iterative improvements and learning each iteration to drive innovation. Do your best, and trust that in the end, it all works out.

Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.

- Gandhi

Education

  • Bachelors of Science
  • Majors in Business Administration and Economics

Certificates and Awards

  • As the Product Manager for this tool, I worked closely with the business stakeholders and Product Owner to define the strategy to simplify the agent workflow while increasing sales with intelligent cross-sells and add-ons
  • The agent sales tool was awarded Business Intelligence Group's 2021 Sales and Marketing Technology award
  • Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
  • Process excellence training, using process documentation techniques and statistics to increase efficiency of your process.
  • Certified Scrum Product Owner
  • Trained on the agile product development methodology of scrum and the role of the Product Owner.
  • Product Owner responsibilities include agile prioritization of small components of work that deliver value.

Experience

I worked in the service industry in college where I learned the importance of the customer. In 2006, I became a Business Analyst with the public technology company Symantec, which eventually became NortonLifeLock Inc. (and now Gen), a leader in consumer cyber security.

As a Business Analyst, I gained experience identifying and solving customer pain points in our organization. I focused on improving our customer experiences. I was inspired by The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi. An easy customer experience drives both retention and new acquistion.

In 2013, I continued to gain experience as the Product Owner for a Scrum team. Our team focused on identifying probleam areas in the customer experience, and examining using root cause analysis techniques and delivering requirements to fix.

In 2016 my role became more focused on the acquisiton and integration of LifeLock into the Norton customer experience. As a Product Manager in this role, I helped make sure the Support Organziation would be prepared for the changes in the customer experience, and ensured the voice of customer insights the Support organziation collected where used to deliver the right experiences. I helped to make sure that our Online and Live Help experiences delivered value as the company evolved to offer new products and services that needed support.

In 2019, I worked as Senior. Product Manager responsible for the tools our support and sales agents used to help millions of customers. Our team delivered an award winning inside sales tool that improved the ability of our telesales agents to make phone sales. We delivered the foundation of the multi-year roadmap for an agent experience that delivered a comprehensive set of features to easily help customers with most use cases.

Product Management

  • Save costs and increase revenue by defining agent and customer experience requirements, and business rules for the award winning inside sales order tool, Romulus.
  • Build multi-year feature roadmap that is resilient to changing priorities.
  • Share a clear vision of the desired customer experience through strategic requirement definition.
  • Manage product backlogs and tasks for programs or projects in the agile software management tool, Jira and roadmap management tool, Product Plan. Maintain detailed project documentation using Confluence.
  • Prioritize the correct requirement using analysis of customer and system telemetry.
  • Communicate the business users' critical needs with on the ground interactions and relationships, and thoughtful user story definitions or mapping.

Process and Communication

  • Document requirements and processes clearly in centralized knowledge repositories to create a shared understanding within my teams.
  • Develop templates and automation so all team members couild create high quality and organized content.
  • Build a long lasting processes for how the organization should respond to high severity events impacting business continutiy.
  • Conflict and change management training to recognize emotionally important conflicts and use awareness to create safe communication.
  • Positive langauge communication training to find ways to say yes by creating mutual value, giving options and redirection.
  • Mindfulness practice to help keep focus on what is important with actions and communication.
  • Analzye and present information using Microsoft Office tools:
    • Executive presentations with PowerPoint.
    • Detailed corporate process documents with Word.
    • Bespoke worksheet to calculate and communicate Household Employee witholdings and pay with Excel.
  • Relentlessly look for ways to make improvements in the outcomes of a process using data informed (Lean Six Sigma) techniques and intuition.

eCommerce and Sales

  • Represent a customer Support organization to define requirements and validate solution of custom built enterprise eCommerce platform, including integrations with existing enterprise platforms for license and support.
  • Define requirements for various components of a modular software delivery platform to provide a seamless experience using integrated specalized systems.
  • Experience with eCommerce payment technologies including fraud and refund risk management.
  • Create strategic programs to optimize add ons offers to customers. Help with the design of information campaigns to address top support issues and improve retention rates simultanously.

Web Development and Design

  • Design, implementation, and management of multiple websites.
    • Coded sites using mix of html, css, and javascript technology
    • Wordpress installations: styling, configuration and content management; plugin installations and configurations.
    • Opencart open source store platform: installation, styling, php template customization and product catalog management.
  • Product photography to create detailed images for online display.
  • Image editing using Adobe's Creative Cloud - Camera Raw, Photoshop and other tools - to create engaging experiences.
  • 3D Modeling with Autodesk Fusion 360 for parametric design modeling for 3D printing and other manufacturing processes.

My Projects

Hobbies

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