American Family Insurance

As part of a $100MM+ project with Costco and GM planned and oversaw the nationwide rollout of American Family’s next generation platform, balancing priorities of 3 Operating Companies, 2 product owners, across 4 backlogs, 8 teams and a total of 60 software engineers/SDETs.   

I was key contributor and involved in most aspects of the cross-team rollout including budget, overall planning, requirements gathering, story refinement, defect triage, QA testing, user acceptance testing, bi-weekly stand-up, product owner approval, deployment, and production validation.

Directly led a team of 15 as program manager for one of the operating companies, defining work and coordinating the team’s efforts via scrum ceremonies including interval planning, grooming, sprint planning, daily stand-up, and retrospectives.  

Mentored team members on negotiation, dispute resolution, career growth. Advocated successfully for the conversion for our contingent staff, provided annual reviews of staff as part of our 360 review process.

Technical toolset: AWS, Clarity, Jira, Confluence, Mirro, Cloudbees, Gitlab, Swagger

Strategic Technical Project Manager

Amazon

Managed the program for Amazon's collaboration with Sony for the Alexa Smart Screen and TV Device SDK for Android. The product allows customers to talk to Alexa through the Echo and see visual responses on the TV for music and camera feeds. Developed the project plan and timelines, negotiated cross-team dependencies and blockers, served as scrum master, shared software development manager and product manager duties, managed our internal and external betas, wrote weekly statuses and executive summaries presented to directors and VPs.

Senior Technical Program Manager

Homesite Insurance

As the Technical Program Manager, led teams located in Boston, Madison and Seattle building American Family Insurance's next generation auto insurance platform. Responsibilities included day-to-day operations of the teams, sprint planning, analysis, forecasts, and reporting.  Agile and Lean methodologies were used in a date-driven model.

Technical Program Manager

Nordstrom.com

As part of the Web Analytics group served as corporate tag manager using IBM Coremetrics and performed data quality analysis on our tagging efforts sitewide via Teradata, Redshift, Snowplow, performance dashboards and SQL as well as ad hoc troubleshooting of issues as they arose

Managed the program to build our in house replacement for Maxymiser, our previous web experimentation platform.  Using Facebook's open source solution, Planout, we were able to decrease client impact by as much as 99% over the third-party solution resulting in a page performance increase of nearly 200ms.

Additionally, the implementation of our solution allowed Nordstrom to:
•	Unlock the ability to run A/B experiments from server-side applications,
•	Empower business stakeholders and dev teams to experiment and iterate quickly before releasing new products/changes to customers,
•	Allow our Optimization Analysts and Data Scientists to have a broader array of mathematical options for designing and analyzing experiments resulting in improved site performance, customer experience and conversion

Technical Program Manager 2

•	Support Agile transformation by helping to manage development teams within the Scrum framework, actively participate and lead Agile ceremonies, helping teams to improve iterative development. 
•	Remove impediments and blockers, working cross-functionally across the organization. Utilize JIRA and Confluence to track user stories and velocity.
•	Manage resource assignments, scheduling, and scope prioritization. Clearly organize and forecast deliverables and dependencies. Monitor cross-functional project scope and execute change requests when additional features or functionality are required. Provide status reports and regular updates to the leadership team. 
•	Evangelize proper Agile process, helping educate teams and stakeholders

Successfully supported a DevOps team to deliver an estimated savings of 4.5MM annually as a result of introducing deployment automation in Development, Test and Production environments

Supported a DevOps team in decomposing epics into supportable features, and those features into user stories that would pass the INVEST standard, discovering acceptance criteria and tasks with the development team, driving, tracking and reporting on work in JIRA, and socializing the team’s work with the Nordstrom community in presentations and bi-weekly status reports.

Drove task dependencies outside of the WRTO focus to remove blockers from the team.

Partnered with Engineering Infrastructure teams to develop and implement a Kanban workflow to improve visibility, communication and throughput.

Supported a virtual cross-departmental team to improve the stability of our search platform (FAST) which enabled Nordstrom to keep key features in place during the 2013 Nordstrom Holiday Event.  These key features contributed to the most successful Holiday Event to date.

Program Manager 2

As a part of the team automating and improving the build and deployment process using Jenkins, Powershell and Web Deploy:
- Creating and maintaining the product backlog
- Creating, editing and validating the product Epics, Spikes and User Stories
- Participation in scrums, sprint grooming, sprint planning, demos, reviews and retrospectives.
- Partnering with external teams

Project Lead / Product Owner

Design and Development of Nordstrom Canada Marketing page. http://nordstrom.ca
Redesign of the Nordstrom Product Page
Redesign of the Nordtrom Outfit Page (Complete Looks)
Implemented Bazaar Voice Reviews/Community Javascript API
Member of 4 person team porting the Nordstrom site to Tridion SDI WCM

Sr. Web Developer

Redesign of the Jobs and Help sections of the retail web site.
Developed Winter Sale Deal of the Day Promotion
Ongoing rewrite of the website (HTML5, modernizr, Adobe CQ5, JSP/JSTL)

Front End Web Developer

Expeditors International

Front end development for two high profile customer facing products. Technologies included Richfaces, jQuery, XHTML, CSS.  Primarily focused on design and performance optimization.

Provided analysis for an initiative to convert our conventional deployments to a Blue Green Deployment model.  Extensive interviewing, modeling and workflow/flowcharting performed in close collaboration with our deployment team. Agile and SCRUM methodologies employed with two week iterations.   

Proposed, researched, piloted developed and released an external monitoring application for Expeditors 25 customer facing web applications, resulting in an 80% reduction in overall downtime for monitored systems.

For a global community of 12,000 users in 300 offices, Served primarily as a business analysis, project management and development resource in corporate operations. Enhanced, maintained and created a number of Expeditors’ internal Notes/Domino systems including: Asset Tracking, Credit Management, Event Management, Travel Planning, Calendaring, Legal Response and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).  Integrated an in-house ID Management System with IBM-Tivoli Identity Manager.

Developer

Iceweb

Software Engineer
Iceweb | Portland, OR
12/2001 – 9/2005
Manage day to day application maintenance and trouble shooting for IceWEB's largest client, Drake Beam Morin and their suite of Lotus Notes/Domino and ASP web-based tools including: Client Tracking, Billing, Sales Automation, Online Community, Intranet Portal and Distance Learning.

Served as primary resource and developer for IceWEB's flagship applications: IceWEB CMS (an online Content Management System) and IceSHOW. (A distance learning /webinar application incorporating video, PowerPoint, closed captioning and quizzing.)

DevElements

Vopak

Managed Internet and Intranet development through entire life-cycle for Vopak Europe, consisting of 10 multilingual sites in 9 languages and a module to allow users to administer content. Developed and maintained freight forwarding workflow system for Vopak Products Americas. Mentored junior members of the team.

IT Engineer

Coinstar

Software Professional with 25 years of progressive experience in software development, business analysis, user experience design,  and team leadership with a focus on iterative, lean and agile modes of delivery.

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