David Facer
Provo, UT · 801.420.8220 · david.facer@davidfacer.com · davidfacer.com
I’m a 10,000-hour professional in product management — and then some. Over twenty years, I’ve owned the full cycle: understanding markets with depth, building products users love, and delivering them in architecturally sound ways that organizations can sustain.
Product management is a microcosm of macro business strategy — a discrete instance of the raison d’être of the business:
- Identify a market with unmet needs.
- Devise solutions to the needs.
- Deliver the solutions to the market.
Firms grow in complexity and diversity by selling new and similar products to current markets, and by adapting existing products to adjacent markets. Product management formalizes the discipline of:
- Identifying and understanding a specific market, with depth.
- Designing & developing products that solve the market needs in delightful ways.
- Positioning, pricing, and delivering the products that serve customer utility and firm sustainment.
This is why the Product Management function is one of the most expansive, complex business functions to define and model — it converges most business capabilities of the firm. Strong product managers consistently find themselves at the center of enterprise architecture efforts, lifecycle transformations, and M&A activities, because when operating properly they lead the function responsible for translating strategy into delivered customer value, integrating inputs from across the enterprise into coherent outcomes.
Practice Areas
Enterprise Architecture & Platform Architecture: Data, APIs, AI
Disciplined product managers learn to drive consistency in architecture from the bottom up. At West Corporation, I led Business and Enterprise Architecture work supporting a multi-year transformation. At inContact, I owned the platform’s APIs and partner integrations with Salesforce, Verint, and Qlik, and invented work-item routing — generalizing voice, email, and chat routing into a single abstraction — an architectural breakthrough that became a tipping point for NICE’s later acquisition of inContact. At HP, I productized algorithms out of HP Labs into a public REST API consuming over a million calls a day. A decade later, the company brought me back to rebuild the same platform’s data ontology for multichannel and social on Snowflake. Current consulting work extends the same discipline into AI-native architecture: specifying multi-tenant RAG retrieval and evaluation requirements and designing for trace observability so AI systems are trustworthy, not just fast.
Organizational Transformation: SDLC, PDLC, CXLM
At West Corporation, I decomposed a delivery function still running six-sigma waterfall discipline, redesigned matrixed processes across three divisions and two business units, and built the governance artifacts that the PMO adopted as its own standard. I owned the CXLM initiative end-to-end, through C-suite presentation, for enterprise customers including American Express and DirecTV. Release velocity quadrupled; quality defects fell 75%. I have since run a scaled version of the same discipline at Finch, building a product function from scratch, and at NICE InContact, redefining product operations under acquisition pressure. My AI-Native SDLC Maturity Model — independent capability dimensions, CMMI-style graduated scoring — is the same demand for improvement applied to the newest lifecycle problem the industry has, and is in active use by practitioners beyond myself.
M&A Execution: Positioning, Diligence, Integration
I have sat on both sides of the table, twice each: acquired at Power-Glide (by K12, Inc.) and at Finch; acquiring at West Corporation and at NICE InContact. At Power-Glide, I built the deal from MOU through the technology and provenance documentation that let K12, Inc. trust what it was buying, then executed the integration myself over the following six months. At West Corporation and NICE InContact, I ran diligence on architecture, tech stack, and technology provenance, and built the integration plans — and estimates — that followed, running technical and human integration as two tracks at once.
Career Chronology
Market strategy & alignment; business architecture; AI-native architecture; organizational transformation; AI SaaS product management; RAG/eval/observability design; AI-Native SDLC development; SMB methodology right-sizing.
Enterprise architecture; data architecture & ontology; M&A acquisition integration; SaaS platform application/data architecture; multi-channel communications integration; platform API ownership; telephony & WFM integrations; GTM & sales readiness.
Market strategy & alignment; business architecture; product management function; ML & AI product ownership; full-funnel demand-gen orchestration; display advertising product expansion; Google Ads / DSP product strategy.
Industry & analyst advisory; board-level strategy input; market positioning & strategy.
Enterprise & business architecture; SDLC/PDLC decomposition (L1–L3); CXLM; SAFe rollout; Six Sigma/Lean/Kanban; PMO governance design; M&A integration.
SOA architecture; CI/CD; Agile XP/Scrum hybrid; cloud/SaaS platform transition; business model transformation (services-to-SaaS); multi-tenant platform architecture.
Waterfall-to-Agile organizational transformation; R&D productization; public REST API platform (SOA); developer platform at scale.
Platform architecture innovation; work-item routing abstraction design; stateful real-time routing systems; platform APIs & partner integrations (Salesforce, Verint, Qlik); developer relations / partner enablement; Agile process ownership.
SOA platform relaunch; M&A positioning; M&A due diligence; M&A technology provenance; acquisition integration (sell-side).
Agile product development; product line turnaround; revenue recovery; SOA; ASP (pre-SaaS era).
Education
BS/BA, Marketing, Finance, Economics · University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT · May 2005