Chris Brookins

Creating products that customers love

Boston, MA, US

About

Software development and product management executive with deep experience in agile product design and development for B2B SaaS, PaaS, open-source software, embedded and packaged software, web services and developer APIs. Specialties include building distributed or co-located teams for services with high quality requirements such as help desks, knowledge bases, contact centers, messaging platforms, developers tools, and IP PBXs. Lead teams responsible for product management, back and front-end development, design, ux testing, documentation, quality engineering and marketing communications. Experience delivering solutions for SMB or enterprises.

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Work experience

July 2019 – present
Appcues
VP Engineering and Product
Lead the Appcues product, engineering and design teams to deliver tools that empower non-technical customers to create frictionless, product-led experiences for their end-users. Companies such as IBM, Toast, Salsify and Segment use Appcues to grow their business faster.
November 2016 – December 2019
Rekener ( A Brainshark Company )
Advisory Board Member
Rekener believes that scaling recurring revenue isn't just about driving more volume down the pipe - it's about closing the customers who will grow fastest and churn the least. Today's services make it challenging to see a customer holistically from lead to engaged account. Rekener solves this by breaking down your business' organizational and data silos to reveal the best opportunities to fuel your business.
January 2018 – May 2019
Help Scout
Chief Product Officer and VP Engineering
Lead our distributed product and engineering teams to deliver tools that make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. More than 10,000 businesses in 140 countries rely on Help Scout to communicate with their customers in the most human, helpful way.
June 2015 – December 2017
Help Scout
VP Engineering
Leading a fully distributed engineering team to craft a help desk and knowledge base SaaS for companies that insist on a delightful customer experience.
April 2014 – June 2015
Acquia
SVP Engineering
Responsible for building, scaling and operations all of Acquia's SaaS, PaaS and open source products including Acquia Cloud, Acquia Site Factory, Acquia Network and Acquia Lift.
September 2012 – May 2015
TechStars
Mentor
Mentored the product and technology leads at several startups at in TechStars Boston classes
August 2008 – April 2014
Acquia
VP Engineering and Product Management
Lead software engineering, design, quality, ops and product owner teams to design & build all of Acquia's services including Acquia Cloud and Acquia Cloud Site Factory PaaS, and the Drupal Gardens and Acquia Network SaaS. Also lead teams delivering open-source packages and Mac and Windows tools for Drupal including Acquia Commons, and Acquia Dev Desktop.
October 2004 – July 2008
Vertical Communications, Inc.
Senior VP Development
Transitioned a distributed 80 person engineering dept to a Scrum/Agile process. Lead the development and defined the product roadmap of the TeleVantage IP PBX and Wave ViewPoint, a next-gen personal productivity and contact center agent application suite.
February 1996 – September 2004
Artisoft, Inc.
CTO, VP Development
Lead the technical direction and development of Artisoft's products including TeleVantage, a software based IP-PBX, Contact Center, Voice Mail, and IVR platform targeted at small to medium organizations and enterprise branch offices.
March 1993 – February 1996
Stylus Innovation
VP Development
Invented and led the development of Visual Voice, the 1st Windows ActiveX IVR toolkit for the development of telephony applications such as touch-tone data retrieval, faxing, voice mail, voice recognition, etc.
March 1989 – March 1993
Easel Corporation
Senior Product Manager
Product manager of the EASEL 4GL, one of the 1st GUI development languages. EASEL (also OEMed by IBM) was used by the Fortune 500 to provide Windows or OS/2 GUIs to mainframe applications and client/server databases. Also was product manager of Enfin, a SmallTalk development tool for Windows.