Christina Spirou Perdikoulias
About Me
Leader of Business & Technology | Founder of Opportunity
I am a dynamic leader with a proven track record in guiding technology companies through transformative growth. With deep expertise in SaaS transitions, product strategy, and customer-centric innovation, I excel in driving strategic direction and building outcome-oriented cultures that elevate product value and fuel rapid business expansion.
Experience | Board
Board & Advisory Experience
Experienced board member and advisor with a strong track record in guiding strategic direction, overseeing governance, and providing actionable insights to drive organizational growth and success
2021 - Present Day
DigitalEd develops online education solutions designed especially for STEM, serving the Global Higher Education market.
As a Board Member who also serves on the Management Team, I provide a critical bridge between corporate strategy development and its effective execution across the business. I also offer continuity and operational expertise as the only Executive that has led through the company’s funding rounds starting in 2019, through to PSG’s acquisition in 2021.
2023 - Present Day
Established as a remedy to the commoditization of craftsmanship, Acolyte specializes in software solutions designed to consistently deliver outcomes that embrace, enable, empower, and delight.
As a founding Board Member, I focus on corporate strategy, product development and commercialization, as well as thought-leadership and market development.
2019 - Present Day
ReadyChek is a SaaS company that provides advanced mobile technology for short-haul commercial drivers, enhancing safety checks and compliance through an intuitive app and admin web portal.
As their Board Advisor, I advise on general business matters ranging from organizational structure and formal contracting, to business development and customer acquisition. My focus is on supporting the founders through their early startup phases, and advising on activities in preparation of future growth and prospective funding rounds.
2021 - Present Day
Xenia is a frontline workforce management platform for the hospitality industry. As their Strategic Advisor, I advised on and supported their transition from stealth startup to public launch and subsequent initial customer acquisition. My focus is on product strategy and organizational structure as they grow, and advising on activities in preparation for funding rounds.
2019 - 2021
Roadmunk was a SaaS organization that developed roadmap technology for product and marketing teams. As Board Observer, I assessed, advised on, and supported the overall direction and strategy of the business, with a special focus on Product Leadership and Design, leading into the company’s sale to Tempo in 2021.
2016 - 2018
Mentorship at the Hatchery and Launch Lab connects Innovation Teams with compatible professionals. In my role as a Mentor, I advised and oversaw the activities of emerging companies while they are enrolled in the Hatchery program, defining their startups and advising them through commercial operation and the funding process.
Experience | Professional
Professional Experience
Seasoned professional with a track record of driving product strategy, development, and market success across multiple leadership roles
2018 - Present Day
In this role, I oversee corporate governance and the execution of strategic initiatives, providing executive leadership while shaping product vision and Go-To-Market strategy for the business. In this capacity, I also facilitate investor communication, and negotiate with partners and vendors to drive successful outcomes.
Operationally, I directly manage People & Culture, Customer Success & Experience, and Product & Engineering, with accountability to our global P&L.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
∙ Started in 2018 as Chief Operating Officer, with a mandate to lead divestiture process, establishing independent operations for all business functions, including Global Sales, Service, People Operations, and Finance.
∙ Promoted to President & COO in Q1 2019.
∙ Successful migration to SaaS operations, retiring on-premises product offering.
∙ Realized continuous business growth of over 30% YoY after taking over executive leadership and operations, leading to a controlling Private Equity investment by Providence Strategic Growth Equity Partners (PSG), in 2021.
∙ Continue to realize double-digit growth, and > 95% retention post-acquisition.
2018
Directed product vision and strategy through market and competitive analysis, customer advisory, and value proposition messaging, including pricing and evangelism.
Managed product marketing with foundational content development and positioning. Oversaw product development, including COGS, business case development for new and sustaining projects, and cost/benefit analysis.
Handled partnership and vendor relations, negotiations, and budgeting.
2013 - 2017
In this role, I drove product vision and strategy, leading market and competitive analysis, customer advisory, and value proposition messaging to guide strategic direction.
I led the product organization, including product management, product development, UX design, and prototyping, and was responsible for COGS, business case development, product marketing and cost/benefit analysis for new and sustaining projects, along with technical partnership and vendor relations. In this capacity, I led the technical due diligence engagement leading to the successful Private Equity acquisition by Madison Dearborn Capital Partners (MDP).
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
∙ Optimized development planning and execution to reduce work in progress from up to thirty active projects at a time, to six, with reduced cost to delivery.
∙ Launched four new products in one year, including a cloud-native, SaaS security product, bringing in over $1.8M in sales within the first year.
∙ Built the Product Management organization and practices from the ground up.
2010 - 2013
Led a team of Product Managers and over a dozen development teams across two continents, driving the definition, communication, and execution of customer requests and strategic initiatives. Developed and refined requirements gathering and development processes within a Disciplined Agile Development environment.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
∙ Met the challenge to define and implement incremental delivery processes within a standards-driven environment, achieving Level 3 SPICE Compliance, and ISO-26262 Compliance; accomplishing these certifications for our organization within 18 months.
∙ Led numerous Customer Advisory Councils with Global Innovators such as the Centre of Software Excellence at Rolls-Royce, Continental AG, and Cummins.
2005 - 2010
Progressed through multiple roles from Engineering Product Specialist to Director, with subsequent appointment to the Executive team. Led all aspects of product direction, including requirements gathering, scheduling, and launch.
Managed interdepartmental and executive reporting, and engaged with the Customer Advisory Board to drive strategic initiatives
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
∙ Established a Project Management Office and Localization practice, managing a global network of technical resources across our resellers to meet sales targets in non-English speaking regions.
∙ Successfully launched a market-innovator, model-based design product into the Japanese market, proudly acquiring Toyota, Mazda, Honda, Denso, and Aisin Seiki as first customers.
2002 - 2005
Started as a University of Waterloo Engineering Intern, which led to a Post-graduate, 18-month, company-funded project for my Master's degree in Engineering.
Projects included CFD simulations, investigating and defining the characteristics of molten metals as they relate to the brazing process, and designing engine oil coolers and lightweight cooler prototypes for fuel cell systems.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
∙ Contributed to, and participated in the development of a patent for the design of a heat exchanger, successfully granted in 2003.
∙ Obtained by Master's in Chemical Engineering based on my research on brazing technology and the characteristics of molten metals.
2002 - 2003
Studied Vapour Extraction production rates and interface advancement under various conditions and with a variety of solvents.
Contributed to a published paper: James, L.A., Chatzis, I., and Spirou, C., “VAPEX Production Rates in Consolidated Porous Media Models and Growth Rate of Solvent Chamber”. Proceedings from the Canadian International Petroleum Conference, Calgary, Alberta, Paper 2003-205, 2003.
Innovation
Thought Leadership and Invention
Innovator with a portfolio of patents and published academic papers, showcasing contributions to advancing technology and research
The patent pending Voice2Brand system provides individualized and organic design elements to creative professionals, that serve as the foundation for the development of unique and original brand identities, trademarks, and promotional footprints. These methods can enable users to develop objective, organic creative outputs that are uniquely representative of one’s voice, while also providing valuable assistance in potentially avoiding inadvertent instances of copyright infringement.
The music industry faces a dilemma caused by an overwhelming abundance of unregulated sharing and model sourcing of digital media. This has resulted in the increasingly difficult challenge of enabling accurate assessment of similarity, for the purposes of discovering similar works and detecting possible copyright infringement.
This patent pending solution provides artists with the means to identify their creative property within a separate work, freeing them to openly share their craft with confidence.
Existing experience with educational institutions that track student outcomes in relation to the time spent on formative activities has demonstrated a consistent positive correlation with improved student outcomes. This study is centred on Higher Education using data from the asynchronous learning platform Möbius, and produces a data-driven validation of the positive correlation between time spent on formative activities and improved student outcomes in an asynchronous online learning environment, and further builds a basis of insights identified as contributors to successful student outcomes. We identified “distance” in time of first engagement in study before an Exam as an early indicator of success, where we found a moderate positive correlation, whereas there was a weak correlation for the same behavior with respect to Practice Tests and Tests. The behaviours identified in this study raised more opportunities for further study on the nature of student engagement through their learning progression, and other early behavioural indicators for successful student outcomes.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9766578
This paper provides an overview of the considerations and principles followed in the planning and design of mathematics learning resources, structured as year-long courses in secondary school mathematics, and provides a summary of the requirements for the infrastructure put in place to enable continuous, scalable, global open access.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9234364
Effective requirements elicitation and management is a common need in supplier- OEM relationships, and continues to play a vital role in all aspects of the product development lifecycle. While traditional methods address the business goals for requirements and provide guidance in ensuring the accuracy of the “Descriptive- Prescriptive-Explanatory” outputs for requirements gathering and documentation, engineering organizations continue to encounter challenges with respect to capturing and communicating change, accommodating the addition of relevant design details and efficient propagation to inform development. These challenges become more difficult to overcome in mechatronic systems, which combine mechanical systems with integrated software.
http://papers.sae.org/2012-01-2033/
Increased pressure to improve efficiency and reduce costs in software development continues to grow, along with the volume of software in automotive components, with more than 85% of the functionality in the modern motor vehicle now controlled by software. The application of process assessment models such as Automotive SPICE has been described as incompatible with agile approaches. Common misunderstandings of the intent of the standard, and what flexibility is available within agile methods is the source of much of the misconceptions, and can be overcome with a Disciplined Agile approach to software development. In this paper, we present a case study describing the successful implementation of Disciplined Agile development within an Automotive SPICE compliant environment, including a brief discussion on common misconceptions, the approach taken to achieve a successful result and discussion on challenges faced.
http://www.aspiceconference.com/index.php
Model-Based Development (MBD) has become increasingly important in the development of embedded software for commercial vehicles. For MBD to be most effective, modeling must be a unified part of the system and software lifecycle. System and software lifecycle management processes and tools that encompass all phases of the product, from concept to end-of-life, are essential to meet today's business innovation and quality demands.
http://papers.sae.org/2011-01-2265/
A heat exchanger in which a heat exchanger core is disposed within a casing which includes a side wall formed by bending a plate into the form of a sleeve in which edges of the plate are in adjacent, confronting relationship with an inwardly projecting, transversely extending deformation, the deformation being disposed between a pair of press members with one of the press members being transversely inserted within the sleeve. The press members are moved together to remove the deformation with resultant pivoting of the edges into abutting contact or overlapping relationship. The heat exchanger core is formed of a plurality of stacked plate pairs each having a plate in inverted orientation. Outwardly projecting ribs of anticlastic form are so formed in each plate that the ribs on each plate of each plate pair are interengagingly intersect with the ribs on the adjacent plate of the adjacent plate pair accurately to align the plate pairs in the heat exchanger core.
https://patents.justia.com/patent/6976531
James, L.A., Chatzis, I., and Spirou, C., “VAPEX Production Rates in Consolidated Porous Media Models and Growth Rate of Solvent Chamber”. Proceedings from the Canadian International Petroleum Conference, Calgary, Alberta, Paper 2003-205, 2003.
Education
Education, Licenses & Certification
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Specialization focus on applying prompt engineering techniques that create demonstrably useful outcomes, and a particular focus on the application of generative AI prompt techniques to tasks throughout the data methodology process including data set generation data set augmentation, and machine learning model development and refinement, visualizations, and insights.
The Innovation Governance Program (iGP) is a pioneering executive leadership initiative tailored to nurture professional advancement in Canadian tech companies and enhance governance competencies.
Master of Science in Data Analytics, focusing on predictive analytics with applications in Machine Learning.
License-holder in good standing.
PEO regulates the practice of professional engineering and governs its members to serve and protect the public interest by ensuring all professional engineers meet rigorous qualifications for licensing and that only properly qualified individuals practise engineering.
As part of its mandate, PEO also establishes, maintains and develops: standards of knowledge and skill; standards of practice for the profession; standards of professional ethics; and promotes public awareness of its role.
Graduate Degree (Master's) in Chemical Engineering.
Thesis Topic: Control of Molten Systems utilizing principles of Model-based Design
Undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering, within the Chemical Engineering track.
In my tenure as a student at one of the world's top Chemical Engineering programs, I gained knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, and math to transform raw materials into useful products. We were also trained to design and control complex physical and chemical processes as part of the undergraduate curriculum.