Daniel Orofino

Eschewing round profile photos since 2012.

Eschewing round profile photos since 2012.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a product manager. I work with technical and business teams to build software.

I have over 13 years of experience working in product management. The last 10 years have been with a SaaS business in education technology called AwardSpring where I was functionally a co-founder. At AwardSpring we built a scholarship and donor management platform for colleges and foundations.

During my time there we built and executed a successful go-to-market strategy for our scholarship management platform, growing the business to nearly 500 institutional customers. Customer churn has dropped 84% with renewal rates topping 95% for 2023.

Finally, we identified a market opportunity to broaden our addressable market and entered the donor management space. Our MVP has seen early traction with numerous prospects and closed deals.

I have experience in management, agile software development, customer service, team building, Azure cloud services, and PCI/SOC II compliance

View a portfolio sample.

  • Define, plan, and release Donor Management CRM MVP as our second product line available to all existing customers. Built staffing plan, initial product vision, go-to-market strategy, and pricing plan. This was the basis for raising our third seed round.

  • Expansion of Development and Product Management teams driving release cadence from every 2.5 months to monthly. Launched key projects including a new custom reporting engine, texting, and enterprise access control functionality.

  • Oversee key Microsoft Azure infrastructure projects, including a web tier refresh, adoption of functions for key background processes, and migration of several services due to deprecation of older services.

  • Responsible for initial SOC II certification working with auditor on process definition, collection, and processes.

  • Involved in M&A discussions to determine potential acquirer fit, review product functionality, and infrastructure.

Chief Product & Technology Officer

AwardSpring
Since January 2022

  • Introduced Review Groups, a key workflow enhancement, that was adopted by 82% of customers.

  • Continually enhanced our core platform to address key customer needs and market gaps. Reduced customer churn by 84% and increased annual retained revenue to 92%.

  • Identified and onboarded Director of Support to offload core customer support responsibilities and create time for strategic planning.

  • Achieved NPS of 68 driven by responsive customer service, platform enhancements, and continued best-in-class usability. Up from an NPS of 6 in 2015.

  • Added processes and tools to support a remote-first organization pre-COVID.

Chief Operating Officer

AwardSpring
January 2018 - January 2022

Vice President, Product

AwardSpring
January 2015 - January 2018

  • Initial release, beta rollout and support, and ongoing development for AwardSpring, a scholarship application, review, and awarding platform for universities and foundations.

  • Launched initial version of an entirely new platform, AwardSpring, in December 2014 to six customers previously using a legacy platform. Application went to wide release on March 31st. After 10 months in production there are nearly 150 clients using the software.

  • Defined feature set for initial go-live based on functionality of our legacy platform, market need, and competitor capabilities.

  • Defined long-term roadmap for entry into our second market, grants. Established application interaction paradigms to meet the needs of both the grant and scholarship market.

  • Worked with agile development team to push out releases ~3 weeks since platform launched.

  • Trained sales and customer services teams on new platform

Technical Project Manager

Cappex
April 2013 - July 2014

  • Develop MVP definition working with existing stakeholders from existing executive, sales, and customer service teams.

  • User story authoring and mockups used during sprint planning for new features and MVP buildout.

  • Project manager for $2MM+ rebuild of our STARS platform, now named AwardSpring. Project released to

    beta on time and under budget.

  • Worked with development team to define database and application architecture for key areas of AwardSpring.

World Traveler

Self
May 2012 - February 2013

Visited 13 countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Antarctica, Falkland Islands, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Turkey, and Japan) over an 8 month period. I learned basic Spanish, as well as an immense amount about the local cultures, commerce, and customs of these areas.

  • Directed domestic and overseas resources responsible for website infrastructure, operations, and software development.

  • Managed website hosting platform for thousands of florists. Responsibilities included prioritization, requirements gathering, systems architecture, and coordination of Development and QA activities.

  • Lead platform modernization efforts for transition to MySQL, Varnish, Memcached, CentOS with zero downtime and continued delivery of key new functionality for the business.

  • Coordinated incident response for any production-impacting issues, including mitigation of a DDoS, restoring functionality after massive, unexpected increases in site traffic, and identifying/resolving Akamai cache issues impacting consumer experience.

  • Transition hosting, operations, and development from 3rd party to internal teams.

  • Responsible for PCI compliance for all web properties including yearly audit with third party QSA.

Product Manager

FTD
May 2010 - May 2012

Education

 

 

 

 

Rochester Institute of Technology
3.7 GPA // Magna Cum Laude // Dean's List 2003-2007
B.S. in Information Technology

Interests:
Travel, Plants and Gardening, Maps, Transportation Policy, Gaming, Web Technologies, Data Visualization