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Fergus O'Donoghue
International Product Management Leader - Amazon Artificial General Intelligence: Information
Fergus O'Donoghue is a seasoned leader in product and technical management, with expertise in corporate venture capital, M&A, and emerging market entry. With a unique background in business and engineering, he brings a results-driven approach to investments, acquisitions, and complex media technology projects. O'Donoghue is currently the leader of Alexa AI's strategic investment function, where he manages external and internal investments with a focus on long-range planning. Prior to this role, he led product and engineering teams dedicated to making Alexa smarter through search and machine learning approaches. O'Donoghue has formerly held leadership roles at Microsoft, where he worked in Xbox Engineering, and Take-Two Interactive Software, where he was the Director of Strategy & Operations Improvement. He is known for his expertise in voice platform product management, talent acquisition and evaluation, incubation business development, and strategic planning. O'Donoghue is a dual Irish and American citizen with a background in Accounting from Boston College, and has experience in new media advertising and games industry business development.
Highlights
10 Years at Amazon = Red Badge. And It Is Still Day #1.
Wow, what I thought would be a “fun and intense short stint”, turned out to be an amazing run thus far. Since Amazonians love numbers, here are a few that will make them feel the warm and fuzzies: I’ve have held 5 “Individual Contributor” roles and 6 “People Manager” roles where I was fortunate to lead 150 different Amazonians across 16 different job families including Product Management (16 Folks), Engineering (32 folks), Business Development (5 Folks), International Product/Program Management (22 folks), Strategic Marketing (7 Folks), and many other functions. I had 8 Managers (2 of which are still here) and helped grow Amazon by being a Bar Raiser and interviewing about 300 people. Regarding the growth I’ve seen, only 2% of current Amazonians were hired before me, and in Boston that is 1%. Plus, I was able to get 3 Patents thanks to my incredible SBQA team.
I don’t know if there is another company in the world that would have allowed the above to happen so, for that, I am grateful to Amazon and Alexa for how it allows its folks to grow and contribute in so many ways for our customers.
Also, this was not done in isolation so I’d like to give a special thanks to: Alf Tan who helped me get my foot in the door and taught me how to do Games BD; Lenny Simon, Joshua Dodson, Tyler (Coop) Cooper, Kaley Davis, Deepesh Mohnani, Thomas McCabe, & Robin Burrowes for teaching a “n00b” the ropes; Kes Nielsen for being the Bar Raiser who took a chance on someone with no formal BD background; Steve Rabuchin for supporting me on complex first-of-a-kind deals and helping me find out about Alexa when I said we wanted to move back to Boston; Bill Barton who hired me back into Product with the Alexa Information Domain and threw me in 2 Bezos reviews in my first 6 months and allowed me to hire up an amazingly strong engineering team anchored by Dan Spector, Nicholas Larusso, & Michael Erickson and who asked Simon Reavely to be my technical guardian angel so I would not do something stupid; Jim Cuff who helped me scale my leadership abilities; Rohit Prasad who took a chance on a new AI investing role I pitched and then allowed me to sit at “the big kids table” to learn about AI with the Alexa AI science/leadership team (Prem Natarajan, PhD, Spyros Matsoukas, Nikko Ström, Manoj Sindhwani, Shehzad Mevawalla, Anand Victor); Kal Mos and Jason Rodrigues Sundram who taught me the ropes of local commerce when I wanted to get back into product; and finally to Vishal Sharma and Kevin Davis who are strong advocates for Alexa’s international customers.
Who knows what is ahead, but it sure will be hard to replicate the intensity and fun of the prior 10 years!
Great opportunity to join the Alexa Fund team. Roles in either Seattle or San Francisco.
