Danny Costello

Product Manager and Director of Technical Operations with 10+ years scaling SaaS platforms, leading cross-functional teams, and managing multimillion-dollar budgets. Built the product management discipline at ClickFunnels, led global technical operations with PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, and delivered predictable, adoption-ready releases. Experienced in cloud migrations, CI/CD, QA automation, and compliance frameworks. Skilled at mentoring PMs, balancing innovation with security, and aligning roadmaps with measurable business outcomes.

KAPinnovation | Remote | 2017 – Present

Consultant: Fractional CTO / Product Management & Compliance

• Founded and operate a consulting practice advising SaaS startups and growth-stage firms on secure, scalable product delivery.
• Led product discovery workshops, using customer interviews, data analysis, and competitive research to shape client roadmaps.
• Applied SQL and analytics tools to uncover customer usage patterns, validate hypotheses, and prioritize features.
• Guided clients through PCI DSS and GDPR frameworks, creating governance documentation and audit evidence.
• Designed QA automation and monitoring systems, improving defect detection and release confidence for small teams.
• Partnered with engineering, design, and compliance stakeholders to align product strategy with business outcomes.
• Facilitated product/tech workshops and documentation that connected infrastructure decisions to growth goals.

Etison LLC. | Remote | 2017 – Present

Director of Product Operations, Manager of Product Managers, Lead Product Manager

Directed product discovery using analytics, usability testing, and direct customer interviews to prioritize adoption-driving features.

• Mentored 5+ Product Managers, aligning team OKRs with strategic goals.
• Partnered with engineering, QA, and compliance to deliver scalable features under PCI DSS Level 1 that served millions of entrepreneurs.
• Developed KPI dashboards to track adoption, customer outcomes, and roadmap execution.
• Director of Technical Operations (2019 – 2025)
• Owned cross-functional delivery across engineering, product, QA, and infrastructure, ensuring stability and scale for a multimillion-dollar SaaS platform.
• Achieved and maintained PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, integrating governance into product design and delivery.
• Partnered with leadership to design a white-labeled payment provider, balancing compliance, scalability, and customer experience.
• Delivered predictable outcomes by aligning projects with OKRs and instituting CI/CD automation that cut regressions by 40%.
• Directed a 50+ person distributed team while remaining engaged in hands-on product planning, KPI tracking, and customer-impact analysis.
• payment systems, ensuring compliance and seamless customer transactions.

Education

• PCI Professional (PCIP) — PCI Security Standards Council
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Amazon Web Services
• Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) — Scrum.org
• PenTest+
• Diploma, Electronic Engineering — RCC School of Electronics
• Certificate, Systems Engineering & Program Management — Thales University
• AI for Business Specialization — University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

Skills & Tools

• Product & Collaboration: Figma, Miro, Jira, Confluence, Productboard, Shape Up, Scrum, Kanban
• Cloud & DevOps: AWS, GCP, Heroku, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, ArgoCD
• QA & Analytics: Selenium, Cypress, Postman, PyTest, JMeter, TestRail, Datadog, New Relic, Looker, Segment
• Security & Compliance: PCI DSS Audit Tooling, GuardDuty, Burp Suite, Feroot, Cloudflare WAF, GDPR,
• Programming & Data: Python, Bash, PHP, SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL), Ruby on Rails