OBJECTIVE:

Lead business and technology teams to deliver high business value using Agile methodology

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

• Accomplished Senior Technical Project Manager with 10+ years of hands - on experience in leading and delivering large-scale, mission critical, technology projects and process solutions in the US and Global markets.
• Agile Scrum Methodology expertise in delivering business value in rapidly evolving and dynamic environments
• Dual Masters Degrees. Strong qualifications in full-cycle project management and cross-functional leadership highlighted by a track record of building motivated project teams.
• Top performer of consistently meeting/exceeding business goals, strategy-minded, customer service expectations, with strong work ethics, high integrity and ownership-oriented mindset.
• Unique combination of experience that integrates business and technical skills as a TPM, Product Owner/Program Manager, including personal skills to build strong relationships with third parties.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Program Manager/Product Owner

Responsibilities:

• Managed to translate emerging customer needs and technologies into actionable business terms and associated plans along with prioritization of all enhancement requests in Digital Business Technology while assuring proper business case has been provided and the solution fits with overall strategic direction.
• Consult on design and content of all digital projects to ensure consistency across platforms, for efficiency and lack of redundancy, appropriateness of statistical analysis, with relevance to business and strategic objectives.
• Provide leadership and mentorship to team members in the areas of strategy, external research, business analysts, and ultimately implementation of digital solutions to our customers. Leads a team of information technology professionals, end user customers and vendors, maintaining capital and operating budgets of the team.
• Cultivate the product vision and provide leadership in expanding features and development of new products requirements for identity data and analytics products. Responsible for expanding SAFe awareness and Lean-Agile practices, as well as developing and launching SAFe Agile Release Trains. Providing Service Delivery in the form of ART Launches, participate in SAFe and Value Stream Workshops, Portfolio Management sessions, and Leadership Facilitation Sessions.
• Serve as the key stakeholder in product related decisions during planning and grooming and possess an in-depth knowledge of goals and desired objectives of the initiatives and delivery across large numbers of agile teams.
• Works with the Architect(s) and Tech Lead(s) to identify non-functional requirements such as infrastructure needs, responsible for review and prioritization of issues found by QA team and conducts User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and participates in sprint demos to ensure that the final product meets the “definition of done” and understand the technical dynamics and guide and remove impediments.
• Responsible for release management including conducting regular meetings to review upcoming releases and priorities and working with Operations and Dev Ops to determine deployment schedules.
• Evaluate high-level project information and assess project components to forecast work effort that required Service Level Agreements between organizations with the legal, and operations departments.
• Set deadline for product development, work closely with a scrum team, scrum master and developers participating in scrum meetings to give feedback on sprint, as well as to set sprint goals and relay new user stories.

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Technical Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Managed multiple projects Marketing Automation and Decisioning (MAD) and Marketing Identity Manager (MIM) concurrently, including project plan development, product requirements, resource planning, co ordination of project team, deliverables, testing, and implementation.
• Ensured all project documentation standards and governance requirements are met within the required timeframes in accordance with the appropriate Project Management Framework designated for the given project.
• Led integration of seamless Operations across MUB’s platform, which included procuring infrastructure on-premises (CHDC) and drive innovation by working with teams on new technologies, tools and ideas to ensure that the platforms are constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs.
• Stay current on the dynamic trending capabilities, engaged in Vendor contract negotiations and vendor relations management, while staying within budget.
• Defines creative, high quality, simple product roadmaps based on future-state operating strategies and visions.
• Established and conducted meetings to communicate expectations, project roles, status updates, track open issues, and developed Implementation Project Plan and Change Control process for distribution to project participants.
• Identified and managed project dependencies and critical path items while ensuring project quality by utilizing appropriate methodologies and available to manage production issues and off-hours support and coordination.
• Participate in the effort to work with multi-discipline partners with the ability to work in Agile, Waterfall and hybrid delivery models.
• Managed internal customer relationships with our business partners and champion the employee and business stakeholder experience, leading the development and deployment of comprehensive monitoring and reporting tools to ensure technology utilization aligns with Company goals and objectives.

Confidential, Phoenix, AZ

Technical Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• End-to-end program experience managing digital products “Above the Line Spend” (ATLS) that comprises of Amex Assistant and Amex P2P projects.
• This is a new energetic team of high-performers with opportunities to adopt innovative technologies by defining the next generation of native software services for web, analytics and mobile apps product roadmaps and new product development. Applying customer insights, research, and data to evaluate the effectiveness of digital solutions, collaborated with different engineering teams to build a platform of reusable building blocks that provide a foundation for our businesses to innovate faster and drive competitive advantage.
• ATLS projects use a decoupled architecture, separating the front-end and the back-end into distinct/standalone applications, and, as a design feature, REST APIs have been designed to facilitate data interchange via JSON. The team's applications also interface with 15 downstream services having the majority being stateless, and utilizing various authentication/authorization strategies as well as incorporating APIGEE.
• Managed a critical delivery for Amex Assistant (MYCA portfolio) by helping structure the team optimally, determined the roles and responsibilities and working model, achieved productivity improvements, and enhanced Agile working practices.
• Managed the development of highly scalable, performant full stack JavaScript Web applications and Web Services employing Node.js, React/Redux, MongoDB SOAP and REST, from Front End to managing QA engineers for a defect-free automated testing experience utilizing mostly Selenium.
• Proficient in SDLC including preparing Requirement Specification documents, facilitate user story sizing and estimation, design documents, Implementation Plan, Test cases and Analysis, User documents and Technical Help documents to make sure we are complaint with audit requirements.
• Formed a strong partnership with the team-architects, engineers, quality analysts, Product Owners, experience applying UX principles to create exceptional customer and stakeholder experiences and maintained morale and encouraged team building through micro team building events and maintaining a positive attitude to deliver the first high-tech products or services for the digital and web development group.
• Engaged in hands-on software design and ensure alignment of strategy, architecture tools/methods with software engineers and architects to execute product roadmaps.
• As a RTE for ATLS, approve RFC, facilitate and coordinate production installs, establish maintain and communicate development schedule for product releases, environment schedules and ensured feature releases that delivered value to customers where multiple teams, release trains, or solution groups are involved in development and release by hosting RTC (Release Train Coordination) meetings as needed.
• Ensured that the Product readiness Managers are in coordination of program level initiatives that cross multiple release trains.
• Track and communicate team velocity, owner of the project financial management and view in clarity and other KPIs in relation to the plan and published progress reports including budgeting and reporting.
• Focus improvements in profit and ROI through resource allocation strategies and drive discussions with a focus on continuous improvements, developed Agile teams, and monitor performance by addressing impediments or product quality issues.
• Coordinate communications on an E2E level, provide timely and accurate team status to upper management proven success with risk management, team leadership, provided CRM solutions, escalate and facilitate resolution of risks, remove barriers from the team and changes tied to the product development initiatives.
• Certified Product Owner (Enterprise Payments) for Funding Processor/Funding Source Gateway and Direct Deposit Technical Applications experienced with defining and maintaining Product/Sprint Backlogs in Rally with B2B financial services for maximum revenue opportunities.
• Versatile product management professional that led three separate Agile product teams - Conducted discovery of product requirements, defined/maintained product roadmaps, maintained and prioritized the backlog responsible for defining entire product portfolio vision, strategy and roadmap, often times acting as the executive for products.
• Worked with internal and external stakeholders to communicate on product plan and gathered feedback from high-profile partnerships and applied new trends and competitive best practices into product roadmap and requirements.
• For the Funding Processor (FP) and Funding Source Gateway (FSG) a global Payment Gateway System, designed an aesthetic and attention to detail to the user’s experience gathered analysis of product specifications and enhancements, influenced new vendor agreements by demonstrating value of intellectual property to alliance partners to support the Credit / Debit / Banking Network.
• Managed day-to-day activities of products, prioritized user stories fulfilling all INVEST criteria, continuously groomed the backlog, developed Scrum Team Maturity Scorecard paving the way for higher Productivity, Responsiveness, Predictability and Quality and communicated and build consensus across disciplines to articulate a long-term product roadmap with clearly defined business value, metrics and targets in conjunction with Director.
• Processed electronic Funds Transfers, via the Funding Source Gateway that we integrated with Bank De Mexico/ Enlace Karpay (Real Time banking money movement system) to process all real-time Mexico Banking Transactions designed to generated >$1M in incremental revenue. The Funding Source Gateway also integrates with IMA (CecoBan, MYCA Globestar) (batch-time banking money movement)
• FSG offered features like Payment Authorization Service, Capture, Return Service, Reversal, Disputes, Settlement and client databases, EFT Funds In (Payment/Banking Network transactions) and EFT Funds Out (Payment/Banking Network transactions)
• Coordinated First Data (FDR GGE4) integrations to process Credit Card payments, including compliance and AML/Anti-Fraud principles.
• Led efforts in FSG integration with IMA(CecoBan), third party vendor to process Direct Deposit and Direct Debit Payment, estimates transactions that generated $5M+ annual recurring revenue for entire product line.
• FSG application integrated with Wells Fargo, for Jackson Hewitt and Verifone via Rest API to disburse funds to the Serve Card, application that accelerated revenue growth of mature product portfolio from 0% to 10% yearly.
• Creating user stories and working with UI/UX designers for product features delivering a Minimum Viable Product through careful and deliberate prioritization.
• Helped the teams to develop and deploy high-quality software by defect/issue tracking, delivering fully functional product increments and strengthening the approach of shipping early and often.
• Collaborated and communicated with the delivery teams, accepting or rejecting work results, experience with pivotal tracker, protect team from over-commitment and steered the projects by forecasting and tracking progress.
• For Global EMV (chip and pin/signature) Prepaid Card technology platform.
• Managed global rollouts of smart/chip/EMV, debit, credit, and gift/stored-value cards including the implementation teams, hardware, software, EMV, risk, testing, and budgets.
• Managed teams to create the Network Authorization and Card Creation for these cards.