Directing a $45M Defense Technology Portfolio at BluePath Labs

Situation

BluePath Labs, an 8(a) and SDVOSB defense technology contractor, needed one person to own product strategy across six government contract portfolios at once: mobile, SaaS, and cybersecurity solutions, all aligned to Department of Defense requirements. The portfolios didn't share a roadmap, a prioritization method, or in most cases a team. An active DoD Secret clearance let that person sit directly in the classified and controlled-unclassified conversations the work required.

What I Built

• Directed end-to-end product strategy across six government contract portfolios worth $45M, integrating mobile, SaaS, and cybersecurity solutions to Department of Defense requirements.
• Authored two multimillion-dollar proposals that put $51B in potential contract value on the table, through business case development, KPI definition, and stakeholder alignment.
• Led AI/LLM-based research operations at the Army Cybersecurity Institute, overseeing 12 projects applying advanced prompting and context engineering to cybersecurity and health optimization problems, years before that was a common enterprise skill set.
• Implemented experimentation frameworks, A/B testing and analytics instrumentation, to validate features, optimize adoption, and improve compliance reporting across the portfolio.
• Scaled cross-functional teams from 4 to 12 employees across five groups, doubling contract value and tripling headcount while holding delivery quality steady.

The Hardest Problem

Proposal work in the federal space lives or dies on whether the business case survives a procurement review board that's seen a thousand proposals promising the same things. Getting to $51B in potential value across two proposals meant KPI frameworks and stakeholder alignment specific enough to survive that scrutiny. Generic value statements don't survive it; every competitor submits those.

Outcome

Six contract portfolios ran under one coherent product strategy, not six disconnected ones. The team grew from 4 to 12 while contract value doubled. Proof the scaling was funded by delivery, not headcount padding. The Army Cybersecurity Institute research program applied frontier LLM techniques to defense-relevant problems years before that became standard industry practice.

Skills Demonstrated

Multi-portfolio product strategy, federal proposal development, AI/LLM research leadership, team scaling under delivery pressure, defense-sector compliance and reporting.