Strategy & Operations
I excel at uniting organizational vision and product vision as one, uniting all teams or sub-organizations working to build that product under a single organization that views itself as a product organization rather than a company bifurcated into IT and Business sub-organizations that are often operating out of sync. To realize the vision, I focus on establishing organization values in alignment with the values of those whom the organization and product aim to serve. All teams within the organization align to these values and establish principles that reinforce alignment. Similarly, objectives and metrics align to the desired outcomes of the people the organization aims to serve, and the organization’s teams are working in alignment towards shared objectives with shared values. I create strategies that unite the users or citizens as participating members of the organization with a role to play in creating the product, regularly engaging them at distinct phases of the product’s transformation cycle, which includes discovery, implementation, and go-to-market.
Product Management
I have spent over a decade working in product management, delivering products from idea to market, and managing key parts of the user experience. I have spent considerable time working on parts of the product designed to engage the user at key points of the user journey to remove pain points and improve user satisfaction. I have developed my own frameworks and problem-solving method for product management, which includes high collaboration with cross-functional roles at key interaction points within the product development cycle that create alignment between the users & stakeholders and the teams working to build and support the product. I view product management as a collection of capabilities, including strategy, user or stakeholder relationship management, feedback and story management, opportunity management, issue management, and event management. I believe that the most impactful thing that a product manager can do outside of regularly engaging with citizens or users is to create highly collaborative events that bring people together, while guiding them through an experience that drives agreement and consensus around the desired outcomes, priority issues, the opportunity for change, reviews and discussion around proposed solutions, focus groups for feedback and testing, and more.
User or Citizen Engagement
I have spent over a decade creating journey maps and mastering sets of capabilities to engage users at various parts of their user journey. For years, my focus was on customer engagement and understanding a stack of capabilities to interact with customers and market to them or solicit feedback through various channels. I have evolved to think of the core user type for a singular product as that of a Citizen, which branches into sub-roles, including one of a consumer and another as a worker or producer. I prefer the term Citizen over User, as it includes the individual as a key part of the organization that has a role to play in the development of its product. Within the frameworks and method, I have developed, citizen users are highly engaged and pulled in for participation throughout the product transformation cycle. There are three core phases during which the user is engaged: Discovery, Implementation, and Go-to-Market. Inclusion and engagement at each phase are critical to ensuring highly adopted releases and product-market fit. I have deeply learned and understood a set of capabilities for engagement that are both push and pull from the citizen’s perspective to the point that I believe I can commit them to code.
Operating Model/System Design and Organizational Design
I have spent years evolving operating models using best-in-class practices that I have picked up over the years at various fortune 500 companies and technology organizations. I think of this as an operating system that I have created and implemented at multiple organizations, customizing it as needed to fit the maturity of the organization. My models incorporate people, process, and product, and they are highly collaborative in nature. The models unite the user or citizen, the organization, and the cross-functional teams building the product under a single operating system.
Relationship Management
I spent the first decade of my career focusing heavily on customer relationship management (CRM). Within customer relationship management, I am highly skilled in a wide variety of sub-capabilities, such as campaign management, event management, contact management, account management, quote management, offer management, and email management. I understand CRM in such depth that I have been designing and building a new type of CRM that I call Citizen Relationship Management. There is heavy overlap between this capability and the capabilities for product management and user engagement.
Resource Management
I spent years focusing on marketing resource management, which included scheduling and planning, activity management, event management, digital asset management, budget management, and financial reconciliation. I expanded my focus over the years to include human resource management, which got me working to merge identities of workers with the identities of consumers under the Citizen Relationship Management capability.
Learning Management
I worked myself up to meetings with the US Department of Education Technology Office and the US Secretary of Education based on my vision for learning management and the future of education. I was also part of an accelerator at USC called EdVentures. I have a strong understanding of how to build out learning management, including knowledge management, objective management, course management, lesson management, and activity management. As I mention in project management capability, I have spent a good amount of time figuring out how to integrate the two capabilities to create a seamless connection between learning and work.
Service Management
I have worked with service management and contact center solutions at three large organizations (retail, financial, and insurance), implementing both Oracle and Salesforce solutions. I am an expert in knowledge management and knowledge centered support (KCS). I also have experience in several types of chat, both proactive and reactive, which allow people to engage with bots or people, as well as the knowledgebase. Additionally, I have a depth of understanding in case management and incident management. I have also done work with IVR and personalized offer management. Prior to my professional career, I spent 6 years as a CSR, which has proven critical to my mastery of this capability.
Policy Management
I have recently been heavily focused on policy management, which is inclusive of procedures, guidelines, and the creation of standards. This is a newer capability that I continue to explore, as I find it to be critical to the development of a nation or overarching governing body for the internet. I have been expanding this to include management of terms & conditions, which starts to dive into contract management.
Identity & Access Management
I have been focusing on identity and asset management for 6 years, exploring how to create a global identity. I have been designing a new type of access token that I call an Access Rights Token (ART). My primary focus is on Citizen Identity as a starting point for a web-based operating system that is the interface for a digital nation. I have been actively researching different inbound and outbound access rights use cases that can potentially be managed with the ART inside of the digital nation.
Program & Project Management
My vision is one where Project Management and Learning Management are so tightly integrated that learning and working becomes one activity. I have a strong understanding of how to build project management systems and integrate them with these other capabilities. Within the project management umbrella, I would include initiative management, project management, activity management, and task management as capabilities in this domain. I am certified scrum master, but I have worked at all levels of project management across a variety of industries, holding roles of program manager at the initiative level across 5+ project workstreams and project manager for projects with up to 50 team members.
Asset Management
I worked for multiple financial organizations, managed checkout flows of large consumer products, and implemented capabilities at companies to manage a wide range of asset types, which has given me a deep understanding of the set of capabilities required to design and build an asset management system or financial system. This includes inbound deposit, outbound withdrawal, invoice management, charge management, adjustment management, payment management, item and inventory management, order management, hold management, digital asset management, batch or lot management, cart and checkout management, and financial reconciliation, among other things.