Adam Michaelson

Adam Michaelson builds and scales software businesses. Across more than 25 years, he has scaled from being an early-stage venture’s sole product builder to leading cross-functional organizations of more than 40 people. His leadership spans product management, UX, operations, and data science, with executive roles at Lendio, Aktify, BambooHR, and Workfront. He pairs strategic judgment with deep product craft—and he still builds.

At Aktify, Adam established the product organization around an enterprise conversational AI platform, engineered the human-in-the-loop infrastructure that trained models at scale, and managed a P&L generating $400,000 a month in EBITDA. Today, he prototypes and ships daily, guides backlogs with rapid experimental teams, and contributes directly to production code.

At Lendio, where he served across two tenures as COO, SVP, and Head of Product, Adam oversaw product, UX, operations, and people. From 2012 to 2016, he led the strategy and design of its small-business lending marketplace, driving a 14-fold increase in online conversion and helping grow the business from launch to $250 million in funded loans and $20 million in revenue in two years. Returning in 2022, he led a 40-person product and design organization across marketplace, SaaS, embedded finance, and AI products. His strategy for Forward Flow—automating application, underwriting, and origination up to funding—helped attract $9 billion in deployable capital.

At BambooHR, Adam expanded the platform beyond core HR into payroll, which became a primary growth engine as company revenue grew from $75 million to $200 million. He also led the organizational health portfolio across performance management, eNPS, pulse surveys, and analytics—partnering with PhD organizational psychologists to translate workplace science into software, increasing adoption by 122% to 400,000 users, and creating a $25 million ARR add-on. Earlier, as the first product hire at AtTask (later Workfront, acquired by Adobe), his user-research-led redesign helped propel the company from $7 million to $50 million in ARR in three years.

Adam operates on empirical evidence: immerse directly in the business, observe how customers actually work, test core assumptions, and invest where user data points. He leads with focused priorities, clear ownership, and visible measures of progress—building resilient teams equipped to continually raise the bar.