Winning Hardware/Software Product/Project Manager Here

San Jose, CA  95125   • Home (408) 294-9050    • Cell (408) 821-1631    • Email: danpai@sbcglobal.net

Technically sophisticated and dedicated product development manager with expertise managing the full product development cycle including requirements gathering, prototyping, architecting, developing, and quality assurance management.  A true leader, specializing in working with cross-functional teams in high pressure environments to deliver sophisticated products on time.  Demonstrates superb communication skills by keeping all customers, team members, and stakeholders in sync throughout the product lifecycle.  Highly motivated with unlimited entrepreneurial spirit having started a computer company at 18 and having worked for two startup companies.  Qualifications include: 

• Designed over ten products, including military-grade cellular signal capture hardware, silicon reference designs using various microcontrollers, and EDA tools for front-end hardware design acceleration.
• Negotiated features and delivery dates with key customers and assisted in writing business plans, MRDs, and SOWs.
• Published over 20 documents, including application notes, user manuals, white papers, training material, and trade articles.
• Trained FAEs, sales representatives, and presented to internal and external customers nationally and internationally.
• Transformed an entire document suite, including product specifications, on-line help, user manuals, and other collateral, to HTML for easy worldwide access.
• Sold enterprise software to large corporations (such as Intel and Cisco) in a bad economic downturn, and provided pre- and post-sale support for both semiconductors and EDA software.

4/03 – 8/03 and 7/05 – 12/05: Contract Senior Technical Writer at Macromedia Inc., San Francisco, CA (www.macromedia.com)
Macromedia develops rich media and web publishing tools. Key accomplishments:

• Wrote JavaDoc help documents for online API language reference for ActionScript 3, the language used to build Flash movies.
• Wrote client and server API and GUI documentation for a “webcast” product called FlashCast.
• Participated in team writing of user manual for Flash MX 2004.

11/00 – 4/05: Co-founder & Director of Product Development at Product Acceleration Inc., San Jose, CA (www.prodacc.com)
Product Acceleration is a startup company that builds EDA tools to accelerate FPGA design. I was hired on at PAI as the product/ project manager, and was promoted to director of product development after 3 years.  When funds got tight, I took on a consulting job as a Senior Technical Writer for Macromedia in 2003, documenting their flagship Flash MX and other products.  Key accomplishments:

• Managed concept to production of three EDA tools: 1) Symbol creation tool for DxDesigner; 2) Wire uncrossing tool for FPGAs on PCBs; 3) Xilinx FPGA pin assignment tool.  The first product was written in VB and the second two were written in Java.
• Reduced the overall time to develop software from concept through production while increasing the quality of results by
  • providing Visual Basic prototypes for ongoing customer and development team review
  • developing a suite of HTML documents that covered the product specification, project schedule, user manual, and help
  • automating testing and builds and continually refining the software development process
  • automating customer support, requests, and issue tracking using website forms linked to a CRM website.
• Worked with customers to understand marketing requirements and prioritized feedback for the development and QA teams.
• Educated engineers at various trade shows, including the International Cadence User Group and Xilinx FAE/Sales training events.
• Penetrated and sold enterprise software to Intel, Nokia, Cisco, and other accounts in the worst economy of my career.
• Defined a patentable software process for FPGA pin assignment that was recently submitted for approval in late 2004.

4/98 - 6/01: Applications Engineer at ST Microelectronics/Waferscale Integration Inc., Fremont, CA (www.st.com)
Waferscale was bought by ST in September, 2000. Their main product was a SoC with flash, a CPLD, and JTAG.  Accomplishments:

• Provided pre- and post-sales customer support to hundreds of customers with thousands of issues by
  • developing embedded reference designs using several microcontrollers, including Intel, Motorola, Philips, and others
  • debugging hardware and software issues requiring in-depth knowledge of the silicon functionality and the software
  • increasing customer knowledge through application notes, user manuals, on-line training collateral, and trade articles
  • providing hands-on product training for internal and external customers
  • giving technical presentations to potential customers in various national and international conferences
  • developing a customer support database for tracking customer issues using MS Access
  • participating in national and international trade shows as a technical liaison for question answering.
• Helped define new products and the user-interface for the development software.

12/95 - 4/98: Hardware Design Engineer at Applied Signal Technology (AST), Sunnyvale, CA (www.appsig.com)
AST builds signal capture hardware for military contracts, requiring a top-secret security clearance. Accomplishments:

• Designed a signal acquisition PCB with 4 cellular processing daughter boards. The motherboard had a DSP chip (TMS320C50), which provided AGC and two Altera CPLDs to handle the board control and interface to the ISA bus and the daughter boards.
• Designed the electronic portion of a military-grade chassis with a VME bus backplane.
• Programmed FPGAs and CPLDs for various classified projects.
• Tested several modems using various signal reconnaissance protocols.

6/91 - 6/93: President/Owner of Custom Micro Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Custom Micro Systems built custom computers based on customer requirements. I established and ran the company.