Ryan Durfey

Boulder, CO
rdurfey@gmail.com

Experienced Senior Product Manager with over 12 years in technology and cloud services. Specializing in product development for marketing and media as well as data analytics, I have a proven track record of leading cross-functional teams to build and launch innovative products that drive business growth and improve customer experience. At AWS, I led the development of a customer identity management platform and spearheaded go-to-market strategies across global regions. At Comcast, I managed CDN, cloud storage, and video processing products, optimizing costs and operational efficiency. With a strong foundation in business strategy and engineering, and an MBA/MSE from the University of Michigan, I excel at managing complex product portfolios and delivering results in dynamic, fast-paced environments.

Experience

Senior Product Manager (Tech)

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Product lead for customer identity/profile and registration internal tooling including unfied “Builder Profile” service
  • Gained PRFAQ approval and led design and initial development of unified lead registration service covering customer virtual events, contact-us, videos, documents, and customer credit applications
  • Launched an event registration service publishing 65 virtual events across 4 languages and 200 publications across 10 languages and registered 65,000 customer profiles
  • Developed go to market and adoption strategy for ~20 internal marketing teams across APJ, EMEA, LATAM, and NAMER
  • Managed a team of 3 product managers overseeing event registration service, targeting & segmentation, and data warehouse tools
  • Developed proposal to move AWS website domain to aws.com, approved by the VP of Marketing
  • Led product development and launched a new first party visitor identity cookie service and customer journey tracking script
  • Created multiple overarching mental models for digital marketing to help onboard new team members
  • Responsible for weekly, monthly, and quarterly business reviews as well as bi-annual resource planning across multiple products
  • Gained approval for three different product lines through PRFAQ proposals
March 2021 - Present

Sr. Product Manager - CDN, Video Encoding, and Storage

Comcast Technology Solution
  • Owned Product Management for Comcast CDN, Multi-CDN partner resale, on-premise storage, cloud storage and video processing products
  • Managed a team of 3-5 including product managers and technical operations staff
  • Lead product roadmap and go-to-market strategies for all product lines, coordinating with engineering, marketing, and sales
  • Expanded CDN twice totaling over $17MM based on business case and market opportunities
  • Created and managed customer support process for CDN and Storage including customer run books and product dashboards
  • Created and managed customer support process for CDN and Storage including customer run books and product dashboards
  • Built business case and convinced company to convert from on premise Isilon storage platform to 3rd party cloud storage partner to serve customers for reduced costs and great flexibility
  • Developed multiple CDN features including multi-customer tenancy, access control, and logging
  • Partnered with multi-CDN routing provider DLVR and several other partner CDNs including Akamai, Limelight, and Lumen to create a multi-CDN solution for customers
  • Created CDN service monitoring alarms via Splunk raw log and aggregated log searches
  • Created a method for monitoring and alarming on statistical variation in delivery services via Splunk
  • Developed CDN training curriculum including: caching concepts, service orders, troubleshooting, URL signing, and multi-CDN routing
  • Established CDN service SLA and SLA monitoring via Catchpoint and internal monitoring tools
  • Onboarded major customer accounts including MLBAM/Disney, NBC, Roku, Walmart/Vudu, Dish/Sling, Crunchyroll/Ellation
  • Provided training to operations team on Splunk dashboard development
  • Onboarded major customer accounts including MLBAM/Disney, NBC, Roku, Walmart/Vudu, Dish/Sling, Crunchyroll/Ellation
  • Provided training to operations team on Splunk dashboard development
  • Worked with internal Comcast test team to setup DNS infrastructure ping and traceroute testing to improve off-net DNS routing and mapping
  • Learned Golang in order to improve script execution time for troubleshooting and customer support including comparing traffic router tables with company IP data to find missing and conflicting CIDR blocks and checking CDN cache content and configuration settings for customers
  • Created an HLS and DASH cache warming script to pull video chunks onto regional mid and edge tiers for cutsomers
  • Wrote script to check routing table responses against Maxmind geoDB null points to isolate critical DNS infrastructure holes
  • Developed script to clear cache of assets that became stuck due to a bug in the invalidation system
December 2011 - March 2013

Network Operations Center (NOC) Manager - CDN

Level 3 Commmunications (Lumen)
  • Lead a 24/7 operations team of 14-18 managing Content Delivery Network (CDN) NOC
  • Managed builds, upgrades, monitoring, and repair of 18,000+ servers, including 100 server roles, across 100 gateways on 5 continents
  • Overhauled repair processes and documentation lowering the offline servers from 15% to 3% in 9 months saving approximately $11M in capital expenditures
  • Developed team leadership documentation including team vision, mission, and goals documentation
  • Created 3rd party network quality evaluation systems and reporting tools including a daily report card
  • Developed operations documentation for PCI Compliance
  • Overhauled NOC documentation system of 300+ published articles for ease of use
  • Developed vision and requirements for operations tools systems including monitoring, state management, inventory, configuration management, and repair automation
  • Developed monitoring knowledge base for gathering key issue triage and root cause data
  • Took ownership of corporate wiki with 20,000 documents and 4,000 users, deployed new hardware cutting down serve time by 90% and implemented new Mindtouch/Deki Wiki for ease of use
  • Supervised network integration of an acquired video broadcast network, to generate $3.7M/year in savings including hardware upgrade of 120+ global broadcast customers on 4 continents
  • Managed buy in and customer interactions with stakeholders including: Sony, ABC, Comcast, DirecTV, Echostar, Cablevision, Rogers, Bell, Verizon Fios, BBC, Intelsat, Measat, ST Teleport, Sydney Teleport, CBS, Telelatino, BSkyB, and Globecast
  • Decommissioned 200+ global backbone and customer circuits and 45 global off net POPs and the recovered $1M in video and network hardware
  • Managed build of ten global POPs and two sets of core network interconnects
  • Addressed legal import issues in several countries where Level 3 was not licensed to do business
  • Discovered an additional $1.5M/year in project savings through proactive invoice reviews
Mar 2015 - Apr 2021

Education

University of Michigan

Master of Business Administration & Master of Science in Engineering (Dual Degree)
  • MBA program ranked #1 in US by Wall Street Journal, 2004
  • 730 GMAT Exam Score, 97th percentile
August 2002 - December 2004

University of Michigan

Bachelor of Sceince in Engineering
  • Graduated Magna cum Laude including Dean's List / Class Honors
  • Engineering program ranked top 10 nationally
August 1994 - May 1998

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools
  • Splunk
  • SQL
  • AWS
  • Golang
  • Python
  • DNS
  • Apache Traffic Server
  • Apache Traffic Router
  • API Development
  • A/B Testing

Interests

Apart from being a Product Manager, I design and build my own custom computer keyboards from circuit boards based around the "Corne" keyboard design using 36 key layout. I have designed my own custom keyboard layouts using QMK & ZMK. I have also 3D printed several keyboard cases

When not working on technology, I work on houses. I have designed, permitted and built two basement finishes and gut rennovated a kitchen and several bathrooms. I have also designed and built my own sauna and expanded the electrical system for several homes.

Certifications

  • Project Management Professional (PMP)
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • Fundamentals of Engineering (FE/EIT)