Strategic Leader, Cross-Functional Influencer, Innovator
An Agile and technical transformation leader focused on creating generative cultures that allow teams to flourish. An organizational influencer with a cross-functional background including 17 years of writing code, improving processes, and analyzing business requirements driving unique strategic insight into software development.
Skills
- Strategic Engineering Leadership
- Employee Empowerment
- Agile Transformation
- Change Management
- Liberating Structures
- Product Ownership
- Training
- Coaching
- Mentoring
- Domain-Driven Design
- Test-Driven Development
- Clean Code
- Scrum, DevOps, XP, Lean
- Google Cloud Platform
- Employee Development
Experience
Software Engineering Manager | Big Fish Games | 2020
As a pod captain and engineering manager, I was responsible for the career development of direct reports and product ownership of my portfolio. All products in the portfolio were new and innovative solutions to unsolved problems.
- Delivered an MVP of Jenkins-as-a-Service by leveraging transformational leadership in Agility, DevOps, and software development. Provided the first centralized cloud tech solution for game builds, integration, and delivery.
- Transformed a dysfunctional engineering team into a productive Agile team over four weeks. The team went from being unable to deliver a POC over nine mos. to providing new features each sprint.
- Created a new product vision, strategy, and roadmap that delivered Jenkins in Kubernetes, an Anka macOS virtualization cluster, Ansible configuration as code, system state management in Redis driven by Python, and a primitive customer onboarding tool within eight months.
- Designed a solution to automate publishing processes across the whole enterprise for the first time. The team chose a unique tech stack using Dart/Flutter, Pub/Sub, and OrientDB with a GraphQL interface to enhance long-term ROI.
- Coached the team through Domain-Driven Design event storming sessions, which enabled the team to organize and run them with stakeholders and SMEs successfully.
- Advised the team on GCP design options for an innovative Product Lifecycle Management tool resulting in a serverless environment, managed PostgreSQL, blue-green deployment, and secret management with Google KMS.
- Guided Business Operations through gaining clarity around requirement definition and product strategy for a new Product Lifecycle Management tool developed by my team. This partnership was critical in gaining buy-in for development resources and a robust product vision.
- Produced and delivered Product Engineering 101 training to ~30 voluntary attendees. This training helped propel the Central Technology department toward a more cross-functional model and strategic product management.
- Elevated Agile maturity across the business through mentoring, product ownership of another team’s project, participation in the BFG Agile Community of Practice, and transferring my TPM/Scrum Master to the PMO.
- Partnered with Learning & Development to provide strategic insights, theory, and structure for the Big Fish Mentoring and Career Development programs.
Test Engineering Manager | Big Fish Games | 2018 – 2020
I managed a team of Software Engineers, QA Engineers, and Lead Testers in creating software for QA and Business Operations. The team averaged an MVP release of a new application every four months.
- Transformed the team from a testing services provider to a solution-oriented team focused on automation and tooling, which reduced the need for the manual services previously provided.
- Initiated, designed, and managed the development of a tool whose MVP had 90% adoption by stakeholders and reallocated 300 test hours/month.
- Collaborated with our technical recruiter to reform our interviewing process. We decided on using project-based interviewing for the first time at Big Fish, which helped us hire an outstanding Sr. Software Engineer.
- Requested by a vendor to help launch a tech partner series of blogs. The post was one of their most successful at the time. https://blog.gamebench.net/testing-or-quality-assurance-engineering
- Designed, organized, and curated projects for our first Innovation Week event. ~30% of Central Technology participated, and the executive judging panel was interested and impressed by all the projects. They approved several of these projects for full development.
- Contributed input on increasing inclusivity in the interview process during the launch of the Internship Program.
- Collaborated with the legal team to create an open-source publishing policy resulting in the first OSS developed and released by Big Fish Games. https://github.com/bigfishgames-opensource/GameBenchAPI-PyClient
QA Engineer | Big Fish Games | 2016 – 2018
I began transforming the QA Engineering team to be a source of innovation by introducing Agile, test automation, and software development training. The training empowered the team to create and release a Python and JQuery application to track compliance with core requirements across the entire games portfolio for the first time at Big Fish.
- Saved UA $15k per soft-launched game through the core requirements solution.
- Reduced targeting of unqualified users by paid UA creating a potential value of $50k per soft-launch.
- Advised Business Operations on uncovering the root cause of cross-functional misalignments in the publishing process. This effort set into motion a long-term effort to centralize and clarify the documentation of publishing processes.
- Reduced the effort to complete SDK integration tests by 88% through Lean process improvements.
- Successfully pitched a network traffic log automated test solution to management that resulted in 800 hrs. saved each month on the team.
Lead Technical Business Analyst | ABC Legal Services | 2013 – 2014
Managed a team of Technical Business Analysts who provided business requirements analysis, development of application business logic, and application support. I worked to understand and remedy the root cause of functional and business requirement defects in our software. This effort required an understanding of business operations as much as the technical skills for development.
- Created an application support process that linked software bugs in support incidents and tracked them over their lifespan while still providing an immediate solution to unblock work for our customers.
- Developed robust reporting for support and development resource planning that allowed us to predict staffing for the team based on software release dates and markets.
- Led a process improvement effort that found opportunities to improve our training, software quality, and business operations.
Technical Business Analyst | ABC Legal Services | 2012 – 2013
A hybrid role that combined software development and business analysis to put engineering closer to the problems. I learned test-driven development, Java, MVEL, CI/CD, and managing development environments with virtualization for this role. Combining this technical knowledge with my operations and business analysis background helped set a new team bar.
Software Tester | F9 Entertainment | 2010 – 2011
I entered into this opportunity to expand my knowledge of software development processes to include game development’s specific complexities. I quickly delivered above and beyond my role by introducing pragmatic automation with Perl, SQLite, Excel, and C++.
Customer Operations Manager | Lexmark – contracted by New Dimensions | 2008
In this role, I was responsible for all operational objectives for Pacific NW accounts. Operational objectives included managing SLAs, KPIs, invoicing, and customer satisfaction. My data analysis and programming background served well in helping me discover tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenues and errors in accounting. I then led a cross-functional team to provide resolution for Lexmark and my customers.
Boeing Account Asset Manager | Dell – contracted by PFI Tech | 2008
As the Boeing Account Asset Manager, I was responsible for all inventory change management, reporting, and billing. I was able to reduce the weekly inventory reconciliation process down to a 1-day turn-around. Additionally, I created software to optimize device utilization and report on a network monitoring tool’s efficacy.
Lead Data Architect | Dell – contracted by RMS Computer Corp | 2006 – 2007
I worked on two different projects while in this role. The first project was working on the transition team that helped Boeing move from multiple vendors to Dell. I delivered an analysis solution with T-SQL and Excel that allowed for 90% of Boeing’s inventory to be reconciled. Before this solution, Dell could reconcile only 40% of Boeing’s imaging assets. This improvement allowed us to target far fewer devices for manual inventory.
The second project was to reform the Refresh Project’s processes to comply with Boeing’s Lean standards. The project had been put on hold indefinitely and was threatening the success of the contract. I used value-stream mapping, Kaizen sessions, and involving our customers in the process to get the project back on track. In Oct. 2007, Boeing granted me the Pride@Boeing Award for my contributions during value-stream mapping exercises.
Sr. Data Analyst | Cingular Wireless – contracted by Apex Systems | 2006
I was brought onto a SOX compliance team to audit all of Cingular’s user credentials. Until I proposed and developed centralized software, the team had used Excel for this project. The solution I created with Perl and T-SQL was more reliable, faster, and easier to adapt to new requirements.
Software Engineer in Test | Microsoft – contracted by Apex Systems | 2006
This role focused on white and grey-box testing of a .NET solution for organizing and visualizing BI reports. The team had many junior developers and test engineers. I took the initiative to coach the test engineers in QA techniques. I was also able to review code for the developers and found injection vulnerabilities and guide them through fixes.
Database Developer | Lexis Nexis, Applied Discovery – contracted by Redmond Technology Partners | 2005
As a Post Production Specialist, I was responsible for writing and maintaining DTS packages and T-SQL stored procedures that associated metadata to digital legal discovery files. The work demanded close attention to detail for quality assurance and helped shape my passion for reliable software.
Application Release Analyst | Print Inc | 2005
In this role, I created Print Inc.’s first application release process that determined the viability of release with known issues, training support personnel, documenting workarounds to problems, and triaging fixes for the next release.
Business Analyst Generalist | Print Inc | 2004
Print, Inc. initially hired me for a digital filing project to scan documents. I quickly discovered that we could increase productivity by 300% and reduce the project’s yearly cost by 50%. This early win set me up to manage a project to roll out software to over 2k customer locations. I then designed and prototyped a VBA and T-SQL product that analyzed the ERM and remote device monitoring software to reconcile billable data and inventory. Finally, I managed the development project and contributed to its development.