Director, Engineering Program Management, CloudBees

August 2023 - present
Remote

  • Establish and optimize the operational rhythm for the CloudBees SaaS Platform Leadership team.

  • Lead the ongoing adoption and refinement of Scrum methodology and development flow, focusing on enhancing project agility and team velocity through improved ways of working and a comprehensive change management plan

  • Actively drive continuous improvement processes, focused on achieving sustainable enhancements in product quality, team performance, and customer satisfaction.

  • Drive cross-functional collaboration among software development, SRE, CISO, Documentation, and Marketing teams to foster a culture of innovation and accountability.

  • Leading an effort to develop and deploy a comprehensive dashboard to provide actionable insights, enabling data-driven decision-making. Standardized performance metrics and resource utilization, optimizing planning and productivity across engineering programs.

Founder, The Collab Catalyst

April 2023 - December 2023
Seattle, WA

Mission: Save the world from ineffective communication.

It’s bold, but it can be done, and it starts with you. Businesses of all sizes struggle with executive communication and alignment, leading to fragmented decision-making, low employee engagement, and misaligned goals across the organization. These issues can hinder business growth, affect customer and employee satisfaction, and impact the company's overall performance.

I started The Collab Catalyst to address these challenges by providing leadership team development coaching, workshop facilitation, and organizational communication training.

https://www.thecollabcatalyst.com

Principal Technical Program Manager, Atlassian

April 2022-May 2023 - impacted by layoffs
Seattle, WA

Implemented and managed the structure and operational rhythm of the Customer One program within the CTO organization at Atlassian, which consisted of two teams: Product Innovation and Go-to-Market (GTM).  Our Product Innovation team solved internal problems as a means to build and ship new capabilities to customers, and improve existing Atlassian products. Our GTM team aimed to demonstrate the capabilities of Atlassian products to customers, with a focus on Enterprise IT executives, enabling shorter sales cycles and expanded product subscriptions and adoption.

Accomplishments

  • My team influenced $9M in revenue over 6 months by participating in customer sales calls, CIO roundtables and other events, as well as through sourcing and generating case studies and thought-leadership pieces for our microsite, The Connected CIO.

  • Led the development of a partnership with Atlassian Ventures to offer a new service to portfolio companies called IT Demo Day, where we invited them to demo products to a panel of Enterprise IT experts in a “safe space” for strategic feedback. 

  • Drove the development, execution, tracking, and reporting of strategic goals (OKRs) for the Customer One program. 

Additional Responsibilities

  • IT Program Management Craft Committee, member

  • Atlassian Women+ ERG, member

Director of Business Operations, projekt202

March 2021-April 2022
Seattle, WA

Led a team whose purpose was to break through the organizational silos caused by hyper-growth to unite cross-departmental leaders and systems, and ultimately streamline the company’s business processes and performance.

As my first initiative upon starting the Business Operations department, I developed an operational transformation program called Chrysalis. I intentionally branded this program in an effort to spread awareness of my new team and strategy, gain executive alignment and support, secure resources, and create a sense of legitimacy and urgency to deliver on our top priorities.

Accomplishments

  • Established and led a Business Operations Team by recruiting and hiring a team of three, resulting in enhanced efficiency and productivity of the organization's operational activities and systems.

  • Successfully spearheaded an Employee Experience research initiative, resulting in the establishment of key metrics for employee satisfaction and productivity. Garnered support from top-level executives for operational improvements and formulated a comprehensive roadmap for implementation.

  • Centralized and replaced 6 disparate sources (knowledge bases, wikis, and intranets) with a single intranet, providing employees with a reliable source for news and knowledge.

    • Unnecessary support tickets reduced by ~50% as a result of published FAQs, how-to, and troubleshooting guides, with a time savings of 37.5 person-hours per week, equivalent to a projected annual cost savings of approximately $72,000, while freeing up critical resources for more productive activities.

    • Average of 20 minutes saved per employee each week when searching for company documentation and information, including searching for experts who can answer a pressing question.

  • Revamped IT Service Desk (ITSD) processes, streamlining support ticket assignments through automated and precise methods. The initiative also improved the reporting of our IT Service Management (ITSM) ecosystem (Jira Service Management), providing detailed and accurate insights for effective decision-making.

Additional Responsibilities

  • IT Steering Committee, member

  • Slack Architecture Committee, member

  • Employee Mentorship Program, mentor

Awards

Dynamo Award, 2020 - Award description: This recognizes people with seemingly unlimited energy for not only work-related projects, but for the extended community as well.

Principal Program Manager, projekt202

November 2018 - March 2021
Seattle, WA

Led a company-wide Delivery Consistency initiative, which included the planning and delivery of an internal knowledge base for our cross-functional delivery teams (Project Management, UX Design, Research, and Engineering) including standard operating procedures and templates.

Led strategic business transformation and UX research and design programs for clients including:

  • lululemon: omni-channel guest experience strategy

  • Salesforce: government sector COVID-19 emergency response strategy

  • DocuSign: system administrator behavior-based personas and investment strategy

  • NTT East: consult executives in digital transformation strategy; led large scale market and user research project

  • Globe Telecom: UX Center of Excellence (CoE) strategy and implementation, including on-site training and coaching

Accomplishments

  • Launched an internal knowledge base “Delivery Consistency KB” which had an 80% adoption rate and provided delivery team members with the assets, tools, resources, and instruction to do their job more effectively and consistently, without having to recreate the wheel for every new project. 

  • Led the strategy development of one of the "Power of Three" initiatives at lululemon, resulting in a 9% in-store revenue increase and 66% two-year compounded growth rate. Read Forbes article

  • Led the Program Management work stream analysis and recommendations for the post-merger integration of the largest acquisition of projekt202 to date.

Sr. Project Manager, Smashing Ideas

May 2018 - November 2018 (contract)
Seattle, WA

Managed Agile development of ReachNow’s mobile apps, which included rearchitecting and redesigning the existing experience to combine car sharing and ride hailing into a single application while ensuring extensibility for added services in the future.

ReachNow was a unique startup within the BMW Group, created as a premium mobility service that made it easy and fun to get from A to B. ReachNow was the first company in the world to provide both free-floating car sharing and ride hailing from a single fleet of conventional BMWs and MINIs, and BMW i3 EVs. In February 2019 ReachNow became part of the mobility services joint venture between BMW and Daimler.

Accomplishments

  • Developed project management plan template in Confluence that was adopted as the official template for the practice that enabled consistency and efficiency for the PMO.

Lead Experience Design Advisor, USAA

October 2017 - May 2018
San Antonio, TX

Managed a team of 4 UX researchers in the MSR (Member Service Representative) Lab — a contained test and learn call center environment. Partnered with enterprise business executives and design-inclusive SAFe teams to define goals, objectives, metrics and KPIs to develop business cases for proposed projects. 

Managed research operations including capabilities, services, processes, training, governance, and tools.

Led small and large-scale qualitative research efforts and usability testing: conduct focus groups, interviews, and other user-centered design methods; write and present research readouts to executive leadership, project teams, and key stakeholders.

Accomplishments

  • Scaled lab capabilities and service offerings by training and incorporating additional methodologies to include interviews, contextual inquiry, card sorting, diary studies, and participatory design workshops.

  • Created a research repository to allow enterprise-wide sharing of knowledge and completed studies across the company, which in the past were only distributed to the requesting team via email and stored on a private drive (and often never to be seen again).

  • Developed a Design Thinking training program to enable product and business teams to conduct low-risk, small scale user research initiatives when they were not a high enough priority for the lab to service.

  • Updated the service intake process decreasing lead times from 2 weeks to 1 week, including collecting critical information up front in the intake form.

Sr. UX Producer, USAA

April 2017 - October 2017
San Antonio, TX

Managed a team of 4 experience designers as part of the Enterprise MIAM team, with a focus on the member identity proofing and authentication user experience.

Collaborate with senior leadership, product owners, and stakeholders in Cybersecurity to understand business needs and develop a strategic roadmap.

Producer (UX), Smashing Ideas

August 2016 - April 2017
Seattle, WA

Led multiple projects that included consulting clients on planning and executing strategic business objectives, market and user research, and product development (mobile and cloud-based applications; connected devices) for Microsoft, Philips Oral Healthcare, Allen Institute, and Bezos Family Foundation.

Awards

Q2 MVP Award: This peer-nominated award resulted from my success in turning around a suffering client relationship (inherited when I started) and improving the team performance and morale.

Marketing Sciences Lead (Head of Project Management), Extreme Arts + Sciences

September 2015 - July 2016
Seattle, WA

Developed and implemented project management processes and workflow, as well as Agile coaching.  

Led digital analytics strategy, monitoring, and reporting for the agency and clients.

Senior Producer, T3 (The Think Tank)

May 2014 - September 2015
Atlanta, GA / Austin, TX / New York, NY

Acted as primary on-site agency partner to UPS, managing the design and development of the UPS consumer mobile applications program and consulting on digital strategy. Responsible for managing and reporting on the annual client retainer, project budgets, complex integration of enterprise and agency timelines, resource allocation and assembling and leading geographically dispersed teams across the globe.

Accomplishments

  • Directly increased the company's revenue and growth through expanding partnerships and projects as a result of developing strong client relationships as a trusted advisor. This allowed the agency to open an Atlanta office within one year (target was 2 years).

Digital Project Manager, Scout

September 2012 - May 2014
Atlanta, GA

Assisted in the successful integration of Scout’s first digital team and new organizational processes to scale from the previous model of print design only to a fully integrated agency model, which included updated team models and workflows.

Founder, Lola & T.Rex

2005-2013
Atlanta, GA

Founded and ran business operations of a web design and development studio.

Project Manager, Leeman Architectural Woodwork

1999-2007
Atlanta, GA