Experts
Expert Directory index
Chris Lema
Position: Product Development Executive
Overview
20 years of consistent senior-level software management success
Pivotal member of corporate management, software development, and product teams, bringing creative and engineering focus to high level strategic planning and decision-making. Strong experience in both start-ups and turnarounds. Driven by challenge and motivated by the opportunity to add value.
Visionary with global perspective and entrepreneurial drive
Founded three start-ups, turned around another, and provided tech transfer for a fifth. Managed off-shore development to mitigate cost of product development, working with teams in Spain, India, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and Ireland. Built world-class teams that have successfully delivered millions of lines of state-of-the-art code.
Product development strategist with profit orientation
Seasoned executive with proven expertise in information technology, eCommerce, systems management, and hosted application development. Consistently provided leadership in performing market and needs analysis, making critical go/no-go decisions on product development (through entire stage-gate process), and leveraged risk mitigation strategies to manage companies (projects and people) for a profit.
Specialties: Remote & Virtual Teams, New Product Development, Innovation, Web Development, Software as a Service, WordPress
Publications
Building & Managing Virtual Teams: Five ways to Create a High Performance Culture for Remote Workers
Chris Lema, 2.05.2012
Managing remote teams isn't easy. Turning virtual teams into high performance ones is even harder. It's easy to assume that employees working remote will abuse the situation and turn in poor performance. It's not about the employees, but instead about the context that's developed for them by managers who know how to successfully create the right environment for high performing virtual and remote teams. Here are the five changes that you'll need to make.
Creating a Done Done Culture: The 12 Habits of High Performers & What it Means for You as a Leader
Chris Lema, 10.23.2012
It is increasingly difficult to find and keep quality staff. That's because top performers vote with their feet and quickly move on when the culture isn't right. By learning the 12 habits of high performers, you'll discover what it takes to develop a culture of personal accountability and ownership that will not only keep your high performers but attract others to you and your team. Learn what a Done Done culture is all about.
Successive Experimentation in Entrepreneurial Efforts - A Method for Handling Overconfidence & Decision Anchoring
Walden Master's Thesis
25 grudnia 2011
Startups regularly ignore the feedback that's arriving - it's the nature of having confidence in the midst of high pressure, anxiety, and criticism. The paper challenges the lone entrepreneur model as well as the learning modes that come with the 'perfect idea' in favor of the concepts of small teams, affordable loss, and effectual thinking.
Contributing Author
WP Elevation, Building Exceptional WordPress Businesses
I am a contributing author for the WP Elevation blog, writing about the business side of design and development. Previous article topics have included: talk about what you do, networking, onboarding new clients and setting expectations, and leveraging follow up.
Education
Walden University
MS, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
2010 – 2011
University of California, Berkeley
Bachelor of Science (BS), L&S
1989 – 1993
Foothill High School
1985 – 1989
Experience
CTO & Chief Strategist
Crowd Favorite
September 2014 – April 2016
VP Software Engineering
Emphasys Software
May 2006 – September 2014
- Drove adoption of best practices in R&D team
- Increased delivery of new modules by a factor of 100
- Reduced product development team by 75% while increasing productivity 3-fold
- Introduced new products into multiple domain-rich verticals
Director, R&D
AutoTradeCenter
August 2005 – April 2006
- Recruited and hired 5 senior engineers in under 30 days.
- Created one of the first MXML (Adobe Flex) enterprise applications.
- Managed over 15,000 hours of development in 7 months (by 5)
- Designed award-winning new user experience and application from scratch (using VOC)
VP, Technology
Integranova
February 2003 – July 2005, San Francisco & Spain
- Opened a US office for a Spanish-based tech company
- Hired/Recruited Sales, Marketing & Engineering staff
- Delivered over 20 lectures on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for Enterprise use
- Authored and published white papers on programming productivity.
- Reduced programming efforts by 60% at key client locations like Pacific Stock Exchange
- Re-created a 4 year, 15 person software module with code generated in 5 weeks by 1 person
Chief Software Architect
QuantumShift
Nobember 2000 – February 2003
- Saved client more than $2M with newly designed Telecom Expense software
- Reduced sales cycle by 75% with new product
- Successfully managed downsizing (from 200 to 25) over 2 years while increasing revenue
- Replaced 3 year, $10M dev project with 10 month, $1M effort and increased staff utilization
CTO
ICE Wireless
August 1998 – November 2000
- Drove product development thru 4 iterations of products
- Helped sell the technology for $10M to QuantumShift
- Authored a patent on decision making and user interfaces
- Was the smallest software company to have a national agreement with AMEX because of our co-braded software
Director Software Development
Pagoda Corporation
July 1997 – August 1998
- Managed 100 staff in India
- Migrated client/server technology to the web in less than 5 months
- Drove code re-use in companies like Bank of America using CKO
- Successfully sold the company to Continuous for $12MM
Systems Engineer
Berkeley Lab (LBL)
July 1994 – August 1997
- Consolidated over 80 web development teams into a single team
- Built some of the first database-backed web applications
- Worked with partners like Macromedia, Microsoft, Allaire and Borland on their first web strategies
- Developed over 50 enterprise web applications
