Jun 2015 – Sep 2017 · 2 yrs 3 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

• Transform The Daily Beast's product and technology organization in five phases:
• stabilized the publishing and hosting environment to eliminate daily faults and failures
• rebuilt the tech organization to reduce release periods from six months to weekly.
• fostered a collaborative, single team across design, product and tech to enable value based product iteration
• replaced the legacy publishing system with lightweight, secure cloud based services. Eliminated $1M licensing costs, contributed to 30-50% increase in ad revenue and reduced time to publish from 1 hour to minutes.
• rebranded The Daily Beast with a new logo and revised brand style guide
• Site experienced daily brown outs due to poor cache strategy taxing the CMS. Introduced application performance monitoring. Removed real time elements from page cache. Offloaded resource intensive tasks from application servers.
• Transitioned from an onshore team of six and offsite team of twelve dependent upon outsource to an onshore team of seven across devops, engineering and QA. Resulted in approximately 30% reduction in contractor fees and salaries.
• Empowered a single design lead from within and authorized product owners to pursue their own initiatives, Instituted weekly iterations, better defined backlog, annual roadmap and clear monthly/quarterly goals.
• We replaced a 5 year old Java-based CMS with a Node.js/React.js based site, services, and authoring tools using serverless feed adapters built upon open source frameworks and tools. Implemented tag management and optimized the ad call stack allowing introduction of header bidding contributing to a material increase (30-50%) in advertising revenue.
• Facilitated adoption of a new brand style guide, and logos. Reduced time to publish content from draft to live from an hour to minutes. Moved to mobile first, responsive homepage. Adopted usability experiments and testing. Improved interaction in the bottom half of the homepage from 1% of clicks to ~10% of clicks.

Oct 2008 – May 2015 · 6 yrs 7 mos

• Build strategic consumer digital intiatives for the Chief Digital Officer and lead an in house engineering team, vendors and outsource teams to develop and operate consumer websites for Simon & Schuster, a CBS Company.
• Oversaw, coached and coded with a Scrum/XP team of developers who built and operate Ruby on Rails consumer and B2B websites hosted on a PaaS cloud provider.
• Evangelized iterative software and product development practices to reduce waste and build tools that better address end user needs and business objectives. The Team collaborated daily with the Product Team and worked in weekly iterations with pair programming, extensive unit testing and continuous integration testing on commits.
• Advised executive team on emerging technologies: digital rights management, data enrichment, and new content delivery formats and platforms. Prototyped e- embedded video and in e-book promotions for other books.
• Championed, prototyped and built tools for validating and enriching book metadata fed to retailers to increase discoverability on retailer websites and to facilitate promotions based on trending topics and events.
• Product Owner using customer interviews, user personas and story mapping to define the product backlog of a system to track and analyze effectiveness of marketing activities.
• Oversaw the build, maintenance and technical operations for S&S's e-commerce platform, including fraud prevention, threat detection, privacy and security attestations, and feature development. Individual contribution for coding and operational issues. Platform enabled S&S to increase direct consumer annual revenue an order of magnitude over three years.

Jun 2008 – Oct 2008 · 4 mos

• Product managed the Common Customer Gateway for Euronext Paris, through one milestone release. Applied Agile practices for visibility and goal setting. Provided onsite presence and release plan estimated by the Team, prioritized by the Product Owner and revisited weekly.
• Built trust with customer by accommodating formal planning, reported weekly pacing, scope changes and risks. Raised Team morale by engaging them in decisions and clarifying goals.
• Coached Scrum techniques for an XP Team: tools and techniques for planning and reporting on releases and iterations, role and responsibilities of agile Product Owners and agile values of trust and transparency between customers and the development Team.

Mar 2006 – Feb 2008 · 1 yr 11 mos

• Oversaw product and software development of internal and consumer software including software developers, user experience, graphic design and product owners.
• Introduced Agile Software and Product development practices. Team practiced Scrum for 3 years. XP 4 years.
• Collaborated in concept, business plan, and product development of Ript, a consumer windows application for collage-based visual planning. Product received high favorability ratings in focus groups and reached public Alpha. CEO presented Ript at the 2007 Microsoft Women's Conference.
• Co-authored Babynamer.com business plan justifying a site re-build in Ruby on Rails. In the first four months the site achieved a 250% growth in unique visitors without paid promotion.
• Participated in NBC-Universal/Oxygen integration process. Presented Agile adoption to the NBC-Universal Operations team for their unified traffic system project.
• Internal solutions built by the team in .NET, SQL Server Data Analysis Services were adopted by NBC-Universal.

Mar 2004 – Mar 2006 · 2 yrs

• Re-organized App Support staff into Product Team. Trained business units to reduce support requests. Reduced head count 2/3 while allowing staff to transition into more productive roles in the business.
• Managed Oxygen's Affiliate Site outsource. Project completed on time and on budget. Resulting site won design and trade awards.
• Decentralized Oxygen's web content production by training marketing staff and using existing creative services allowing the software/product Team to shift from an agency model to a focused, product/project delivery Team.

Oct 1999 – Mar 2004 · 4 yrs 5 mos

• Successfully moved mission critical network operations software systems from NYC to Denver on an aggressive six-month, contractually fixed launch date. The project required extensive modification of legacy systems and new integration points and had high risk for overruns. Introduced risk-based project management. Built a cross-functional team of developers, systems administrators and third party consultants. Delivered on time and budget.
• Lead and Individual contributor on project to rewrite web properties from Java EJB, ATG Dynamo, Weblogic and Oracle to C#.NET.

Jul 1997 – Oct 1999 · 2 yrs 3 mos

• Developed the Java based client for MDS PushCaster, an integrated monitoring tool to allow managers to view alarms and health report data for WANs maintained by US West Managed Data Services. Application used Java RMI and asynchronous threading, native and SWING graphical libraries.
• Wrote applications for Denver Nuggets/Pepsi Center luxury boxes including a real-time food ordering system and user/group administration service employing Java Servlets, Applets, RMI, JNDI and LDAP .
• Tech lead for the ITraining intranet allowing employees to request class registration and to record and report their training history. Tools provided manager reports and admin of the training tracks and schedules. Implemented as DHTML templates and object-oriented PERL scripts using DBI/DBD to connect to an Informix database.

Jan 1992 – Jan 2000 · 8 yrs · Seattle, Washington

• Produced forty developmental workshops working with actors, writers, directors and designers including the “Hothouse” series which solicited playwright applicants from across the country, paired them with local directors and actors for a two week period to create a new piece of theater. Directed in collaboration with writers Erik Ehn, Peter Buchman and Carlos Murillo. Played the title role in Charles Mee’s, “Orestes”.