Technical Product Manager · Engineer, Founder & Manager
Andres Elizondo
About
17 years building products that ship.
Technical product manager with 17 years across software engineering, product UX, startup founding, business strategy, enterprise services, and team management.
Built and launched Salto IDM in 40+ countries, a complete product portfolio for identity management in Salto, one of the top 10 companies in smart locking technologies worldwide.
Founded a venue pre-ordering startup that processed €210K+ in the first year, signed a contract with the Amsterdam Arena, and learned the hard way about product-market fit and timing during the COVID pandemic.
Architected and developed enterprise systems used for finance, audit and automation in HP and Microsoft.
Building the AI-Native Framework as an exploration project on how product-led companies can use governed agentic work to turn AI into a repeatable source of product value and growth.
Selected Project
What I'm building right now
AI-Native Framework
“What happens when a company runs every function, not just engineering, as governed agentic work?”
An AI-native operating system for building and running product-led companies.
Experience
Companies I've built things for
Over a decade across startups, scale-ups, and global tech firms — shipping software, growing teams, and learning hard product lessons.
Salto Identity Solutions
CurrentUtrecht, The Netherlands
- Product-led organization. Leading a 15-person team in product, marketing, engineering, sales, support, and finance, organized so the whole company operates around the product and the value it delivers.
- Product portfolio. Expanded the offering of Salto IDM into a layered product portfolio using a master brand, validating the commercial strategy and technical architecture with global executive leaders.
- Operating model. Built the KPI and data framework covering roadmap delivery, release quality, support readiness, product marketing impact, and product revenue, aligning company strategy and go-to-market.
- —Product-led organization. Leading a 15-person team in product, marketing, engineering, sales, support, and finance, organized so the whole company operates around the product and the value it delivers.
- —Product portfolio. Expanded the offering of Salto IDM into a layered product portfolio using a master brand, validating the commercial strategy and technical architecture with global executive leaders.
- —Operating model. Built the KPI and data framework covering roadmap delivery, release quality, support readiness, product marketing impact, and product revenue, aligning company strategy and go-to-market.
- Global product launch. Owned the launch of Salto IDM as a Physical Identity and Access Management product end to end: strategy, go-to-market, pricing, sales enablement, competitor research, documentation, and stakeholder alignment across a multinational organization.
- Business acquisition. Took part in the Salto acquisition discussions as the technical and product voice. Adapted a scale-up product into a multinational with partner and reseller channels, mature processes, and multiple business units, keeping customer focus while delegating hands-on engineering.
- Built the platform. Designed, architected, coded and deployed the SaaS platform that became the company's product foundation, moving from a project-based business toward product-oriented value.
- Built the team. Ran technical hiring, evaluated candidates, and onboarded developers onto the team, two of whom went on to become its Product Owner and Software Architect.
Bitz
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Founded a product from zero. Built the MVP, architecture, roadmap, and business plan for a mobile pre-ordering product for festivals and venues. Accepted into Startupbootcamp, winner in the Johan Cruijff ArenA "Change the Game" program, and chosen as one of its tech suppliers to run the solution at the stadium.
- Learned product-market reality. Processed over €210K in orders in the first year with clients across events, restaurants, and bars, before COVID closed those markets. This led to a responsible wind-down under SLA.
- The most complete product lesson of my career: timing, business model, network and market structure decide outcomes alongside the product itself.
CXO Software
Utrecht, The Netherlands
- Engineering with UX. Built a financial-dashboard product using the full stack (C# .NET, ReactJS, AngularJS), and grew in collaboration with the design team to define how the product looked, felt, and worked.
- Emerging tech. Began building with Solidity (Ethereum) as a side project, which seeded the Bitz startup.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
San José, Costa Rica
- Regional financial software. Managed the full project implementation for the ITO CenAm Financial Tool to manage confidential results for executives across HP's ITO Central America and Caribbean. It involved multiple countries and teams requiring remote collaboration, requirements gathering, and communication.
- Enterprise automation and audit. Built the Reconciliation Audit System for SOX applications used worldwide in stock trading. It automatically reconciled, validated and flagged thousands of IT access control changes.
Microsoft
San José, Costa Rica
- Deployment at scale. Supported Microsoft clients with large-scale automated deployments of Microsoft products, including Windows Vista and Office 2007. Assisted public institutions and banks with software update implementation, knowledge transfer, and escalation support for senior technical engineers.
Education
Where I studied
University of Amsterdam
MSc Information Studies, Human-Centered Multimedia
2015 – 2016
Designing and Evaluating Iter. A human-centered carpooling application, studying how design builds trust, safety, and belonging within a closed community during a UX design internship at Pernix.
Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC)
BSc Computer Engineering
2008 – 2014
Web Service Integration in N-Layered Software Architectures. Research focused on improving software scalability, maintainability, and component reusability through the use of a Service Layer.
Skills & Credentials
What I bring to the table
Product
Product strategy and roadmap, go-to-market, portfolio and platform architecture.
Management
Business models, KPIs, cross-functional and executive alignment, hiring and team building.
Engineer
Full-stack development (C# .NET, ReactJS, SQL), UX design, SaaS architecture, agentic AI.
Certifications
Mind the Product — Product-led Courses. PMI — Project Management Certified (CAPM).
Languages
Hobbies
Get In Touch
Let's talk
Open to product, founding, or technical roles in the Bay Area — and to conversations about agentic AI, product-led companies, and shipping real software.
andelizondo@outlook.com
linkedin.com/in/andelizondo
GitHub
github.com/andelizondo
Company
ae-software.net