Summary
Product manager who has charted a non-standard path through design consulting and applied R&D. Results-oriented problem solver who has consistently driven clarity of vision and responsibility, regardless of title. Motivated to understand complex systems and devise workable solutions. Draws out the best from people through a combination of high standards, clear communication, and ability to establish trust. Over 20-year career has built an unusually broad set of hands-on and managerial skills relevant throughout the product development lifecycle. Seeking a diverse, high-performing team with whom to have some fun and kick ass.
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
30 units toward Master of Human-Computer Interaction
Brown University
Bachelor of Arts in Economics
2001
Recent
Lead UX Designer,
Senior Researcher
Secure Decisions – a division of Applied Visions
Sep 2016 – Present
Leader and Principal Investigator of cybersecurity product research & development
- Led Kompar and Samaritan product dev. projects with combined budgets of $2.75M
- Managed a five company, six team project with an $18M budget to build a unified threat management system
- Developed and iterated product roadmaps, defined research agendas, wrote requirements, shaped technical architectures, managed sprint/scrum processes, managed and designed UX, wrote and curated product content, wrote reports
- Conducted product presentations, partnership discussions, and pilot program negotiations to assess product-market fit
- Developed product commercialization plans, including market research, competitive analysis, financial forecast models, and strategy
- Targeted marketing to 400+ security professionals via podcast, email campaigns, and 3 regional and international conferences
- Influenced research agendas without formal authority and designed web GUIs based on self-conducted user research for DARPA and DHS projects
- Recruited & supervised 2 PhD researchers, managed cross-functional teams of 2-12
- Defended project funding through 5 sponsor leader changes and multiple decision gates
Consulting Product Manager and advisor to cybersecurity startup acquired by Synopsys
- Defined requirements and supervised development of Triage Assistant functionality that uses machine learning to enable users to save hundreds of hours of work
- Wrote marketing content to educate prospective customers about important process challenges and corresponding product capabilities
- Conducted competitive analysis to help guide product roadmap and messaging
- Helped influence Gartner's market definition and positioned Code Dx as the "application security system of record"
- Helped refine pricing to increase revenue through spreadsheet models
- Wrote marketing content to educate prospective customers about important process challenges and corresponding product capabilities
- Synthesized user needs through interviews and secondary research about management of software security programs
- Influenced company org. structure, hiring, and employee comp through executives
- Represented Code Dx at 5 conferences via talks, networking, and booth support; product demonstrations, explanations of value proposition, question answering
Past
Product Manager at rapidly growing SaaS company
- Led team that released new software system to measure order fulfillment performance, send alert notifications, and track historical data for 30,000 suppliers
- Conducted user research, defined product requirements, led UX design, and collaborated with engineering, support, marketing, and legal
- Coordinated discovery and upgrade of legacy systems, plus creation of new systems, to enable self-service functionality of product vision
- Defined and socialized fulfillment performance metrics featured in customer-facing dashboards and reports that I collaboratively designed with UX
- Led go to market efforts: market positioning, sales & support training; drove customer adoption through presentations, videos, and direct support
- Supported development team's successful introduction of new continuous integration & deployment technology, including use of the AWS cloud platform
- Developed & championed product development process w/ RACI to help product, marketing, engineering, and QA apply agile, evidence-based learning practices
- Collaboratively developed business case evaluation framework to structure decision criteria, encourage objectivity, and streamline portfolio management discussions
- Demonstrated skills include team leadership, system design, requirements definition, UX design, market analysis, clear communication, and mentoring
Designed UX/UI of software as principal design resource within company of 50
- Performed future product research, ideation, and design – both hardware & software
- Aligned development teams on $7.3M National Cyber Range program using user personas and workflow use cases
- Designed software architecture and user interface for next-generation Naval cyber defense system
- Mapped and visualized computer network defense processes and systems of U.S. Navy
- Active in business development: concept generation, proposal writing, graphics and visualization, work breakdown, networking events
- Designed and presented GUI concepts for new RSA Continuous Composite Identity Claim Verification product
- Co-developed and briefed training material for applying principles of information visualization to the design of information security visualizations
- Developed company-wide design and user testing guidance; trained staff on its application
- Developed subject matter expertise in computer network defense, 802.11 WiFi technology, and cyber simulation ranges
- Demonstrated skills including use case development, requirements discovery, wireframe and workflow design, web-based prototyping
Designed products and services, with a focus on complex, information-rich systems
- Sole interaction designer for web-based logistics tool that enabled client to earn the only Army 2008 Secretary of Defense Performance Based Logistics Award
- Kiosk design saved client $300k and won 'Best in Show' at KioskCom Expo
- Successfully managed $30k to $550k+ projects with clients including General Dynamics and the Whirlpool Corporation
- Active in business development and proposal writing; helped win $600k+
- Taught human-centered design training course to engineering staff of client firms
- Demonstrated skills including study design, contextual inquiry, think-aloud testing, and wireframing
Brring!
Jan 2006 – Nov 2008
Worked all aspects of service creation while bootstrapping the company
- Wrote patent, designed logo, wrote & recorded phone tree, wrote backend code
- Built internal collaborative infrastructure to allow the team to work
- Co-designed internal policies and helped grow service to 16,000+ subscribers
- Demonstrated skills including company bootstrapping, Asterisk PBX, Linux, Perl, and customer support
Independent research of human time perception with Dr. Coty Gonzales
- Performed review of dynamic decision making/time perception literature
- Designed and coded subject task (Java stocks & flows game) and conducted experimental sessions
Provided technical support to multiple research projects
- Developed agent-based simulation models of military C4ISR systems
- Identified need and built a grid computing system that spanned the CA and VA offices; grid decreased the time to develop simulation models by ≥50%
- Wrote report sections describing model, modeling approach, and findings
- Gave presentation on computational grids and RAND’s Condor grid to ~50 programmers
- Represented RAND at requirements development meetings for DoD biometrics system
- Drafted educational material about biometric technologies and their application
- Statistically analyzed a large volume of survey data in Stata and Excel
Skills
User research
Systems thinking
Storytelling
Empathy
Meeting facilitation
Psychological safety
Collaborative leadership
Physical & digital prototyping
Goal, question, metric (GQM)
Scientific method
Experiment design
Analytics & statistics
Creative & strategic thinking
Tools
WebSequenceDiagrams
Alchemer/SurveyMonkey
Camtasia
Jira/Trello
Confluence/Wiki
Microsoft Office
Paper & Pencil
Many others
Python/Perl
Stata/R/Octave
HTML/CSS/JS
Git/SVN
AWS cloud
GNU/Linux
macOS
Windows