Summary

Chris Makarsky

Product executive with 20+ years building and scaling B2B SaaS, platform, and consumer products โ€” from founding-stage startups to enterprise businesses within Mars Petcare. I combine product & business strategy, cross-functional execution, team leadership and user empathy to launch products people love โ€” and metrics that move.

Highlights

  • Built the Wisdom Panel product org and enterprise platform behind a $10M+ partnerships business and 5M+ pets tested.
  • Took Dealpath from its first paying customer to >$10M ARR as VP Product, building the market-leading deal management platform for commercial real estate (Blackstone, Starwood).
  • Scaled consumer products to massive reach: grew Zynga Poker >10ร— and Klout to 10M+ accounts and 100B+ API calls.

Experience

20 years of product leadership

Wisdom Panel (Mars Petcare) 4+ yrs
San FranciscoSF, CAFountain Valley, CA Nov 2021 to Present

Director & Head of Product

  • Built and led the Wisdom product organization across platform, growth, and engagement teams in a B2B2C environment, coaching junior and senior PMs & product designers toward their next career milestones, authoring talent-development plans, and hiring talent to scale the team.
  • Drove the transition from siloed reporting products to a more-integrated enterprise platform: delivering B2B report deliverables, a shared B2B portal, and admin/ops tooling on a common data backbone to unify our pro breeder, vet, and pet-owner experiences & help scale our growing $10M+ partnerships business.
  • Led intelligent workflow automation for partner- and clinic-facing operations, including both Banfield and Antech diagnostics integrations and pet parent claim experiences, critical to both maintain & grow $5M+ partnerships and contributing towards 5+ million Wisdom tested pets by 2025.
  • Established the product org's first AI best-practices & usage policy and embedded LLM/AI tooling across product discovery and delivery, coordinating RACI with LT peers: standardized PM workflows through shared AI skills, sped up turnaround on customer feedback, and enabled more thorough competitive & brand research.
  • Owned end-to-end lifecycle for flagship launches (Behaviors consumer feature; v6 reporting platform, B2B platform) and distilled portfolio roadmaps into strategic narratives for executive SDx leadership and external Mars, Royal Canin, Banfield stakeholders.
Dealpath 6.5 yrs
San Francisco, CA Jun 2015 to Dec 2021

VP Product & Sr. Advisor

  • Owned product roadmap, execution, and team management as part of the core executive team.
  • Built the product that became a market leader for deal management in commercial real estate.
  • Led product growth, from landing the first paying customers ($198 check!) to seeing growth to >$10M ARR.
  • Worked closely with major CRE institutions, including Blackstone & Starwood Property Trust, to understand & deliver product features to ensure long-term engagement.
  • Advised on product strategy and scaling practices during a high-growth phase post-tenure.
Stealth startup 2 yrs
San Francisco, CA 2013 to 2015

Co-founder

  • Prototyped a new platform for group acqui-hiring. Probably still a good idea, but didn't work out this time!
  • Raised seed round; learned & internalized fundraising & storytelling basics, when to say yes vs no.
Klout 2 yrs
San Francisco, CA Jan 2011 to Dec 2012

Head of Product

  • Oversaw consumer features & redesign that grew Klout to 10M+ accounts and 100B+ API calls.
  • Led roadmap and launches for mobile and business platforms, landing major brand partnerships (e.g., Spotify via Klout Perks) and new revenue channels.
Zynga 2.5 yrs
San Francisco, CA Aug 2008 to Mar 2011

Lead PM / Senior PM

  • Led product for Zynga platform components and grew Zynga Poker >10ร—.
  • Defined sustainable growth mechanics for social gaming as part of the ZWorld initiative.
  • Designed & launched Poker Blitz, the best poker game you'll never play.

Skills

Match

Education

University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA
  • 2007

    MS, Management Information Systems

  • 2005

    BS, Economics and Psychology

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