Donnie Berkholz, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

Southlake, Texas, Us

Responsible for shaping the technology vision, strategy and architecture for Sabre's software platforms that power the travel industry. Sabre is a $3bn travel-tech vendor that provides solutions for airlines, hotels, travel agencies & more.Leading our Enterprise Architecture and (as of June 2024) Solution Architecture teams, composed primarily of individual contributors at VP- and Sr. Director-equivalent levels (Executive Principal and Sr. Principal).Key strategic partnerships include Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and DXC.

The insights you need to succeed with your platform. Market research, strategy consulting, and high-leverage evangelism.• Navigating the CNCF Landscape (cloud-native architecture & software)• Product-led growth for open-source software• Leveraging the latest trends in platform engineering• How to apply AI / ML / ChatGPT / LLMs to your product

Durham, North Carolina, Us

Executive leader for product, design, and community, transforming a database-services business into a software company• Directed launch of Percona Platform, the first step in a holistic software+services offering including our first SaaS APIs, resulting in recurring revenue of $10m+ within 12 months• Created a cohesive products organization, shifting toward cross-functional EPD teams• Built a design team from scratch, starting with a new Head of Design• Incorporating PLG into our GTM, through product analytics and tight cross-functional collaboration• Picked up responsibility for all technical alliances including hyperscalers• Led pricing initiative that created a much more natural growth curve for customers and also had a meaningful impact on profitCompetitors / partners include Amazon RDS and Aurora, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Oracle MySQL, EnterpriseDB (EDB) PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Pythian, Planetscale, Neon, Fly.io, Railway, Altinity (ClickHouse).Tech stack included Kubernetes, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Grafana, ClickHouse, Jenkins, AWS, Golang, React, C, C++, Jenkins, GitHub, Atlassian Jira & Confluence, Figma, Miro.

San Francisco, California, Us

Headed products as a member of the executive staff as Docker renewed its focus on developers with bottom-up, product-led growth (B2B2C / B2B2D). Led holistic products group including product management, product design, developer documentation & business intelligence. • Oversaw major decisions & initiatives resulting in 4x YoY revenue growth to $50m ARR (now >$130m) through a SaaS API- and cloud-connected product vision and strategy, as well as shifts in freemium monetization • Built new product strategy from the ground up, focused on key personas and problems to drive business outcomes through a developer-obsessed product strategy and "working backwards" approaches like PRFAQs • Led migration to an experimental, MVP-oriented approach for product discovery with a rolling roadmap to iterate faster, learn from analytics, mitigate risk earlier, and increase predictability • To build a culture of autonomy and ownership, partnered to lead a reorganization across products & engineering. Moved from functional silos and unclear responsibilities to cross-functional, agile product-development teams with shared team OKRs • Improved employee engagement, reducing negative feedback on product strategy/roadmap from 28% of eNPS respondents to 2% and creating an extremely high eNPS of 67 for the Products group • Led definition and pricing for a new "enterprise" tier • Our team managed all partnerships including hyperscalersCompetitors / partners include Amazon (AWS) ECS, EKS, and ECR, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) GKE and GCR, Azure AKS and ACR, Red Hat OpenShift and Podman, VMware Tanzu, SUSE Rancher, JFrog, Sonatype.Tech stack included Docker, AWS, Cloudflare, React, Golang, GitHub, Atlassian Jira & Confluence, Figma, Miro.

Foster City, Ca, Us

Three-month residency with a venture-capital firm focused on scaling B2B/enterprise startups • Advised on trends & opportunities in developer, DevOps & data-science platforms • Consulted with executives in portfolio companies on product, market & developer strategy

Minnetonka, Minnesota, Us

Led an organization of ~200 technologists across 12 countries at a $25bn B2B2C travel-tech company • Established coherent, API-driven DevOps products and oversaw engineering & product management. Transformed slow manual effort into self-service platforms, saving >$10m/yr and accelerating time to market by months • Identified & drove UX reinvention for employee IT experience through design, engineering & launch of a new SaaS product, IT Service Central, adopted by 20% of CWT within a month • Implemented agile roadmaps & "platforms as products" to improve value & deliver on outcomes • Oversaw modernization of IT processes/tools/teams for AWS cloud migration, partnering with infrastructure • Drove via influence to migrate legacy middleware to OSS-based, cloud-friendly solutions, reducing software costs by 60% • Initiated new Developer Experience function and launched Open Source Program Office, improving engagement & productivity and decreasing time to market • Improved service-desk performance to decrease speed to answer by 80% (10min to 2min) while also decreasing staffing by 30% • Removed 30–45 days from application launches & accelerated cycle time from 24+ hours to minutes • Honored 3x with Product & Technology award to Service Delivery organization, and a direct report was recognized as a Carlson Fellow (CWT’s highest honor) based in large part upon our initiativesKey technologies included AWS, Kubernetes, Ansible, CloudFormation, GitHub, Jenkins, ServiceNow, VMware, OpenStack.

New York, Ny, Us

Led global team advising on product strategy, market strategy, tech strategy & solution architecture at an industry-analyst firm (similar to Gartner) • Consulted with product management & marketing at leading tech vendors, as well as investment firms, to advise on product & market strategy in DevOps, cloud-native (e.g. PaaS, serverless, microservices) & developer platforms (incl. APIs). Resulted in meaningful shifts to product roadmap and go-to-market strategy • Engaged directly with 50+ end-user IT organizations on technology strategy. Advised CIOs, architects and directors on serverless, container & PaaS strategy as well as DevOps transformation

Progressively grew responsibilities over 13 years to lead 250+ in open-source product development• Drove governance & architecture as part of leadership council, approving 4 generations of standards• Recruited, managed & mentored 50+ new software developers & interns

Advised on product strategy, market strategy, technology strategy & solution architecture at an industry-analyst firm (similar to Gartner) focused on software development, DevOps & data science • Promoted for high quality of advisory work as well as client sales, engagement & retention • Led 100+ consulting engagements and presentations with product management & marketing at Global 2000 technology vendors as well as VC-funded startups. Topics included cloud (PaaS, IaaS, APIs), DevOps, Big Data, data science, developer & open-source strategy. Multiple engagements resulted in all-new or significantly revamped product roadmaps, go-to-market or developer/community strategies

Rochester, Minnesota, Us

Performed computational & experimental research in biomedical R&D, including software engineering & data science • Engineered drug-discovery pipeline using AI / machine learning & statistical methods in Python & Bash • Published multiple peer-reviewed research papers (see Publications section for details)

Wrote news analysis for a developer audience. Topics included Gentoo Linux, other Linux distributions, and occasional conference coverage. Earned 3 pay increases for the high quality of my work, doubling my initial pay.

Corvallis, Or, Us

Performed computational & experimental research in biomedical R&D, including software engineering & data science • Created & proved value of open-source libraries and tools for computational structural biology, using AI / machine learning & statistical methods in Python & Bash • Published research in journals including the prestigious PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA)

Performed computational & experimental research in biomedical R&D, including systems engineering & data science (AI/ML & statistics)• Built a prototype Beowulf HPC cluster, which served as preliminary data for a successful NSF grant• Won the "Best Poster Award" at ASBMB and BBB national research conferences

Certificates, Entrepreneurship & Business Foundations

Certificate, Digital Product Management

Certificate, Supervised Machine Learning: Regression And Classification

Ph.D., Biochemistry And Biophysics

B.S., B.A., Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Chemistry; Journalism Minor

Biochemistry, Chemistry, Biology

Education record