Mark D. Searle

Accomplished professional excelling in product strategy and hands-on development, specializing in requirements analysis and data architecture.

• Cosworth Electronics, Product Management Director, 02/01/21, 05/01/25, At Cosworth, as head of Product Management, and day to day am I am responsible for the Product Strategy and roadmap and delivery. I lead a team of Automotive and Motorsport Product Managers. Prior to joining Cosworth the organization was run as an engineering project organization and I was responsible for creating the process, transforming the engineering company into a product organization. I also initiated and lead technically a program of cloud, data and AI development. The cloud platform was created to organize data to make it accessible for a range of applications spanning business areas in automotive, motorsport and high-performance sectors.
• Harman, Director of Automotive AI, 02/01/18, 02/01/21, I was responsible for the System Architecture for the Harman Ignite Automotive service platform. My responsibilities included leading teams on a wide range of Product architecture projects including AI services and the in-vehicle voice platform. I was also responsible for the specification and high-level design of the in-vehicle payment platform and the IoT Cloud to Vehicle integration of our Samsung platform.
• Harman, Chief Architect/Distinguished Engineer, 02/01/15, 02/01/18, I was involved in a number of automotive projects in this role. For two years I was involved in creating the vision and specification of a new automotive Service Delivery Platform. The cloud and in-vehicle solution brings many Harman automotive products into a single platform where they can be offered as solutions for the automotive industry. This major platform initiative includes components such as telematic reporting, Analytics and Over the Air Software Updates. My role was to work with the Product Line Managers to help define the vision, translate very high-level requirements into platform level requirements and component specifications and to bring these into the development teams. I was also responsible for the specification and product management of the Vehicle Health Check Service. In addition, I worked with Renault in defining a new software specification process and applying it to a completely new area of remote firmware over the air updates.
• Symphony Teleca PLC, VP of R&D, 02/01/12, 02/01/15, As VP of R&D I provided technical leadership and was involved in customer facing technical sales activities. I was also Product Manager for the InSight Connect product. I was instrumental in creating the vision and strategy for the product, for which we won the Frost and Sullivan award for best Enabling Technology. InSight Connect was an IoT/M2M platform used as the basis of a number of STC marketed products and application accelerators, the most important of which is an automotive product called the InSight Connect Vehicle Relationship Management Platform (VRM). VRM is a J2EE platform. It combined a workflow-based architecture with an advanced graph-based (RDF format) big database. On a day-to-day basis I managed the product technical strategy, assisting on commercial strategy, handling customer RFQ/RFIs and initiating projects. Prior to this I was the Head of the Telecom Expense Management Development team. This was a large offshore team of 60 developers based in India. The TEM product was sold to Tango in 2012.
• Teleca PLC, Head of Development, 02/01/11, 02/01/12, I was appointed Head of Development in the Operator Division of Teleca. We delivered client-server systems into various operators including Tata Docomo. These included a concierge service for Docomo - a client application supporting the mobile user by offering notifications and offers to users based on preference profiles. I designed the RDF-based graph database system for the recommendation engine at the core of the product. My Lithuanian and Polish development teams were responsible for delivery and my main technical contribution was to successfully develop and drive through a knowledge-based solution for the decision-making engine. I also personally developed the Ontologies and coded the database solution.
• SurfKitchen Ltd, Head of Product Engineering/Development, 06/01/08, 02/01/11, I was given responsibility for both Product Development and QA team and formed a new group called Product Engineering. The new group had 32 onshore and offshore developers and testers. The aim was to improve QA process and to establish a new vision for QA. SurfKitchen rolled out the Orange Application Shop (AppShop) infrastructure. This was a major program of product delivery involving 13 operating countries, hundreds of devices from multiple handset providers and hundreds of thousands of content items. I worked with the Executive Committee to bring together the development and delivery teams using agile development methods. I also acted as the Solution Architect for the Server infrastructure of the project and was responsible for negotiating customer requirements for all phases of the system and country rollouts, and for working with the server team to deliver on the features. I worked with Product Management to maintain the integrity of the product roadmap through a Design Council lead by the CTO. In addition, I designed the purchase manager product, which was a billing gateway with a state machine-based protocol between the client and server.
• SurfKitchen Ltd, Head of Product Development, 06/01/07, 06/01/08, A year after joining SurfKitchen, I was promoted to become responsible for all client and server core products, managing a team of 18 developers. I introduced a number of major changes in the product set and related tools. For example, I created a programme for the harmonisation of the various client platform architectures to simplify feature specification. I also lead a major programme of improvements in product quality to meet the requirements of projects involving embedded phone components such as idle screen. This resulted in substantial improvements to both development productivity and the speed of deployment of applications. Also, I lead a substantial initiative to automate client application testing. This resulted in regression test cycle times being reduced from 2 months to less than 2 weeks.