Michael Winters

Provided fractional product leadership for local not-for-profit, retail, and e-commerce businesses on product development strategy and AI tool integration as an independent consultant.

Founded VetReady, a pet health journal that helps owners track symptoms, medications, and side effects, then generate AI-powered health briefs for vet visits. Conceived after my dog Desmond was diagnosed with adenonasal carcinoma in October 2025. Tracking his symptoms through radiation therapy revealed a gap no existing tool was filling. Built the product end-to-end as sole engineer and product owner, priced at $19/year with no ads and no data selling.

Shipped the entire product solo: 19 pages, 27 components, 12 API endpoints, 13 database tables, 17 migrations, and ~5,000 lines of source code. Integrated six major services (React, Supabase, Stripe, Anthropic Claude API, PostHog, and Vercel) into a cohesive product covering frontend, backend, auth, payments, AI, analytics, and deployment.

Designed and implemented serverless AI brief generation using Anthropic's Claude API, with Upstash Redis rate limiting, abort signal handling, and tiered access control. Owners receive structured, veterinarian-ready health summaries generated from their logged journal entries, turning scattered observations into clinically useful context.

Built GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA-compliant infrastructure from the ground up, including consent management, full account and data deletion flows, and privacy-first architecture. Maintained ~94% gross margins at $19/year by owning the full stack and keeping infrastructure lean. With 95 tests across 10 test files, the codebase reflects a standard of shipping discipline rarely seen in solo builds.

Built Chewy's first automated compliance analytics platform from the ground up, re-architecting instrumentation across all product surfaces into a unified metrics framework. Eliminated 50+ manually corrected metrics, saved 20 hours/week in analyst capacity, and shifted the organization from reactive execution to outcome-driven prioritization.

Hand-selected by CTO and CISO to stabilize GRC and Privacy Technology teams during a critical leadership transition; led PCI DSS 4.0 readiness across three business entities through Attestation of Compliance delivery, reducing audit cycle time by 50%.

Operationalized Chewy's CCPA/DSAR compliance program at enterprise scale, processing 2,000–3,000+ data subject requests bi-weekly with a 4-day average completion time (91% faster than the 45-day SLA). Deployed PII automation to production, launched BigID data classification across 29+ data sources, and managed a 56-application User Access Review program via SailPoint integration.

Directed product strategy and execution of "Chewy Heartbeat," a product-led growth initiative and analytics dashboard delivering the company's first unified view of customer behavior and conversion performance across the full purchase funnel, establishing a new standard for executive-level data visibility.

Designed and deployed Chewy's first AI/LLM enablement program for Product Managers, equipping 20+ product teams with practical fluency across roadmapping, PRD drafting, and data analysis workflows. Drove measurable cost avoidance through reduced manual effort and faster decision cycles.

Implemented a quantitative prioritization framework that reduced peak-season escalations to zero across 20+ product teams, improving roadmap transparency for executive stakeholders through data-driven prioritization.

Directly managed 13 reports across global teams; mentored 20% to promotion and turned around 30% of underperformers within 12 months through structured coaching and performance management.

Led a 21-person cross-functional team (data scientists, hardware engineers, software engineers) as technical and strategic owner of Amazon's computer vision defect detection platform. Deployed across 300+ fulfillment centers, drove an 11% reduction in item defect rates, and owned the full technical roadmap from ML research through frontline operational rollout.

Directed end-to-end technical planning and execution of Project Kariba, a zero-to-one upstream fulfillment model routing bulk inventory to low-cost staging nodes. Avoided an estimated $293M in supply chain costs over three years through a ground-up cost model, product selection strategy, and 3PL operating framework. Solution remains in active production and continues to scale.

Led ground-up re-architecture of Amazon's largest operational metrics platform (30,000 daily users). Reduced page load times from 3 minutes to 5 seconds (97% improvement), replaced manual Excel reporting across 300 fulfillment centers, cut report creation time by 80%, and drove 2× year-over-year user engagement growth.

Identified a critical gap in operational reporting across the Amazon fulfillment center network and led development of a custom dashboard generator to close it, enabling on-demand metric tracking from floor operations through VP level. Drove adoption through a three-month early access pilot and nationwide roadshow; 100+ custom dashboards created in the first month, cutting business review prep by approximately 10 hours per site and eliminating an estimated 3,000 hours of weekly operational overhead across the 300-site network.

Drove $32M in cost avoidance through platform optimization and technical debt reduction while maintaining 100% system uptime throughout major architectural migrations.

Managed a team of 3 managers and 30+ individual contributors; drove 4 high-impact promotions and maintained a high talent bar through performance-based people leadership.

Directed a 5-day mission-critical turnaround of pandemic-response tooling, ensuring uninterrupted global delivery of essential goods during unprecedented supply chain disruption.

Designed and launched day-one customer support capability for Apple Watch 1.0, building custom real-time support solutions for a product category with no screen-sharing capability. Achieved 96% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) across all Apple contact centers worldwide at launch.

Delivered real-time video, screen sharing, and chatbot integrations into Apple's core contact center platform across five global locations, equipping 2,000+ support agents with expanded capabilities.

Led technical partner relationship between Google and Walmart as primary liaison, managing implementation of 10,000+ daily product listing ads generating $10M+ in monthly revenue.