David Facer
Provo, UT · 801.420.8220 · david.facer@davidfacer.com · davidfacer.com · LinkedIn
A 10,000-hour professional in product management and enterprise architecture. Over twenty years, I’ve owned the full cycle: understanding markets with depth, building products users love, and delivering them on architecture that organizations can sustain. I practice enterprise and platform architecture from the product seat and run AI-native enterprise architecture as a matter of course.
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 breadth makes Product Management one of the most expansive and complex business functions to define and model. It brings together capabilities from across the firm and requires a working understanding of nearly everything the enterprise does. Enterprise architecture offers a complementary perspective: it describes how those capabilities are structured, how they interact, and how they support the firm’s strategy.
Product managers often play a central role in enterprise architecture, lifecycle transformations, and M&A because their work connects business strategy, enterprise capabilities, and customer needs. They translate strategy into delivered customer value by aligning decisions across the enterprise around what the firm will offer, whom it will serve, and how it will deliver.
Practice Areas
Enterprise Architecture & AI-Native Governance
Architecture kept in slide decks and spreadsheets drifts from the systems it describes. I founded an AI-native enterprise architecture methodology that closes that gap: EA OKF, a TOGAF® 10-compliant specification built on Google Cloud’s Open Knowledge Format, keeps the architecture as schema-validated, Git-versioned files in which every artifact resolves to a typed edge. Spreadsheets, ArchiMate views, and reports are generated from that corpus on demand, never edited back into it.
Validators and gates refuse ill-formed artifacts at build time, and AI agents work under a ratified charter with human-in-the-loop authority, so the only work that happens is aligned, typed, planned, visible, and authorized. The practice prioritizes ideals over guardrails: failure modes are infinite, but the ideal is finite and can be described. Telemetry tells us the delta. Toyoda over Taylor.
Enterprise SaaS Platform Architecture: Data, APIs, AI
Disciplined product managers learn to drive consistency in architecture from the bottom up. Excellent products require consistent architecture from the application layer up through platform and technology, data and business, and the enterprise architecture overlay.
I own API surfaces end to end (data, real-time, and integration), with the throttling and billing instrumentation that turn an API layer into a governed, metered platform. I design data ontologies that carry platforms across generations of storage, integration, and reporting, and I invented work-item routing, a single abstraction that routes any tracked item regardless of channel or type. Today I bring the same discipline to AI-native products: multi-tenant RAG retrieval, evaluation, and trace observability, so AI systems are trustworthy as well as fast. Throughout, internal and external consumers are held to the same platform standard.
Organizational Transformation: SDLC, PDLC, CXLM
Strong product managers are champions for their customers. I constantly demand improvement in my products and the teams that produce, sell, and support them.
I lead lifecycle transformations from baseline to target: decomposing SDLC and PDLC, running gap analysis, and building the migration roadmap and governance that move an organization to a modern operating model. I build product functions and delivery models from scratch, including CI/CD practices that still run in full continuous delivery, and my transformations have quadrupled release velocity and cut quality defects by 75%. My AI-Native SDLC and PDLC maturity models apply the same demand for improvement to the industry’s newest lifecycle problem.
M&A Execution: Positioning, Diligence, Integration
M&A is the ultimate expression of core Product Management discipline: selling to the ultimate customer, or making the ultimate build-vs-buy transaction. M&A sits at the same convergence point as product management itself (market, architecture, and delivery lifecycle), compressed under deal pressure and a closing date.
I have sat on both sides of the table, twice each, owning positioning, diligence on architecture and technology provenance, and integration planning and execution. I set specific targets (what ships, by what date, in what condition, across how many phases) and run integration as two tracks at once, technical and human, knowing the second is reliably underestimated. A deal that drifts past its own milestones converts slowly from a value-creation event into a liability.
Career Chronology
AI-native enterprise architecture; AI governance & authority modeling; chartered AI agent operations; enterprise ontology & governed vocabulary; business architecture; market strategy & alignment; change management; AI SaaS product management; RAG/eval/observability design; AI-Native SDLC development; experimentation design; SMB methodology right-sizing.
Enterprise architecture; data architecture & ontology (Snowflake); M&A portfolio rationalization & platform integration; omnichannel platform integration (Brand Embassy); AI-powered knowledge management integration (MindTouch/CXone Expert); third-generation omnichannel reporting platform; SaaS platform application/data architecture; multi-channel communications integration (data & voice); platform API ownership; telephony & WFM integrations; multi-geography PM leadership (Prague & Utah); GTM & sales readiness.
Market strategy & alignment; business architecture; product & portfolio management function built from zero; SaaS product architecture; ML & AI product ownership; build-vs-buy decision frameworks; predictive-AI full-funnel demand generation (search & display); Google Ads / DSP product strategy.
Industry & analyst advisory; board-level strategy input; market positioning & strategy.
Enterprise & business architecture (TOGAF ADM: baseline, target, gap analysis, migration roadmap); architecture & delivery governance; Strategic Value Matrix portfolio prioritization; SDLC/PDLC decomposition (L1–L3); CXLM; SAFe rollout; Six Sigma/Lean/Kanban; PMO governance design; M&A integration.
On-premises-to-SaaS migration architecture (Cisco); multi-tenant platform architecture; operating model design (product management, SDLC, CI/CD, XP); SOA architecture; services-to-SaaS business model transformation.
Public REST API platform (SOA) at 1M+ calls/day; R&D productization (HP Labs); high-volume imaging platform architecture; developer platform at scale; Waterfall-to-Agile organizational transformation.
Enterprise API architecture (data, real-time, interface integration); API governance: throttling & billing instrumentation; data architecture & ontology (second-generation storage, integration, reporting); work-item routing abstraction (inventor); stateful real-time routing systems; partner integrations (Salesforce, Verint, Qlik); Product Portfolio Management & universal backlog; enterprise CI/CD & XP rollout; partner enablement.
SOA platform re-architecture & relaunch; integrated LMS & gradebook; K–12 curriculum product development (400,000+ learners); M&A positioning, due diligence & technology provenance; acquisition integration (sell-side).
Early Agile adoption; “4 in a box” cross-functional delivery (product, development, QA, UX); weekly release cadence; product line turnaround; revenue recovery; Pragmatic PM; SOA; ASP (pre-SaaS era).
Education
BS/BA, Marketing, Finance, Economics · University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT · May 2005