👋 Hello, I am Adam Maddox

Experience

• Head of Product, Invoice Simple Apr 2020

  Scaled our product function to cover 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 and more wins. The Growth Team could execute 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 a focused effort, 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.

  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 July 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 increase our ability to respond to load spikes and reduce hosting costs.

My Story

I started out in Auckland with studies in Mechanical Engineering and then Electronics and Computer Science. Then onto a consulting role at IBM where I helped create an early touch screen app for the AirNZ self checkin kiosk, gaining experience in project management and software development.

Next was a move to London and creating Ruby/Rails apps and services in Notting Hill. A notable creation was a Ruby AWS music file transcoder for a UK digital music provider. Then a move to Vancouver, where I joined Live Current Media and worked on scaling high traffic Rails sites as a Director of Engineering.

In 2010 I founded an App Development shop in Gastown which became popular for "Making Amazing Apps". This provided the connections which lead to helping build and grow Invoice Simple and in 2020, an acquisition.

Building, growing and selling an internet product, was a key life goal. With that achieved I'm now looking to expand my experience and knowledge in Product Led Growth, Product Strategy and Product Management Leadership.

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

• The Obsticle is the Way Ryan Holiday
• Ego is the Enemy Ryan Holiday
• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt
• Shape Up Ryan Singer
• Competing Against Luck Clayton M. Christensen
• Let My People Go Surfing Yvon Chouinard