Danny Costello

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

Built the product management discipline from the ground up, introducing lifecycle frameworks, roadmapping, and GTM strategies.

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