Welcome!
This version of my resume includes much more information about who I am, my skills and my experience.
I am a mix of many things: Analyst, Developer, Animator, Illustrator. I love learning things that have technical complexity, and
I find the process of learning and designing technical solutions to be extremely fulfilling. If you hire me for a job, part time or full time, you
get a dedicated, experienced, multi-faceted person with a wide variety of talents!
Experience
Lead Product Manager since 2021 (full time)
I obtained my CSPO
and A-CSPO through ScrumAlliance.org
Lead Business Analyst since 2005 (full time)
Acted as Product Designer on several projects since 2017 (full time and freelance)
UX/UI Design since 2000 (off and on as needed, full time and freelance)
Practicing Scrum and Agile methodologies since 2017 (full time)
Practicing Large Scale Scrum since 2022 (full time)
Customer Experience focus since 2020, with an emphasis on providing a seamless experience between web and mobile devices.
Skill set
- Sprint setup and management in JIRA
- Interfacing directly with clients - at all levels of the business - to identify their needs.
- Collaborating on requirements with leadership, process owners, SMEs and empowered users
- Documenting process on the fly: I have become very adept at mapping out a process while in discussion. The benefit is that you force the group
to think through the process. It drives deeper and deeper questions and facilitates greater understanding during and after. It also serves as a living
record of what was 'known' at the time
- Developing high level features
- Creating user stories: writing acceptance criteria in Behavior Driven Development (BDD) format and following INVEST guidelines
- Planning releases and creating road maps for the work
-
Data analysis and visualization: I always find that querying the database can help me get to the root of a problem. I'm comfortable with SQL and can find my way around a database.
I really think that, as a Product Owner of a system, I should be as familiar with the database as I am the front end of it.
- Preparing and Reporting status to leadership at multiple levels, including creating proposals and 3+2s
- Regularly engaging in planning and prioritization
- Managing the backlog
- Providing UI/UX design guidance: using my education and UI/UX sensibilities to help design user experiences that are pleasing and sensible.
- Monitoring the burndown report (and other JIRA reporting) to better understand the team's velocity and predictability.
- Ability to "see" the long and short term goals for a project: I have been working on technology projects since 2000
- Confident and diplomatic communicator: as a Product Owner I am not a manager. I must use my power of persuasion to motivate and change opinions
- Leading large group discussion - both in person and virtually: I feel comfortable in front of large groups, whether on MS Teams or Zoom or in person
- Coaching other Product Owners in practice, Agile and Scrum
Project technologies
- Java-based web applications, SQL database
- Projects with microservice architecture and Mongo database
- Kafka
- Automation testing
- Typescript
- Interface libraries: Angular
- ADA tagging
- Document generation
About me...
I started my career by obtaining a Master's Degree in Medical Illustration from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Illustrating surgical textbooks is a fascinating type of Information Design, because you really have to think about what
information is important to the series and what information is extraneous or noise. This taught me a lot about hierarchies
of information and how to visually communicate an idea. It also taught me about gathering requirements and meticulous detail. The first requirements I ever gathered were from a doctor.
But my break into web technology came as a research assistant at UIC's computer center where I helped setup the Instructional
Technology Lab and learned HTML, Javascript and C.
From there I worked at other companies as an Analyst, Web Developer, Web/UX Designer and Project Manager. From August 2000 to mid 2002
I lived and worked in Prague, Czech Republic as an Analyst and Project Manager (I even learned to speak some Czech).
I returned to the US in 2003 and started freelance web design and development. I attended classes at Simpson College in West Des Moines, IA to learn object-oriented programming in Java.
From 2003 to 2013 I took on many freelance projects that required me to learn and use Javascript, ASP, PHP, MS SQL, MySQL and even Flash Action Script. I continue to use these languages (except Flash)
for personal projects.
In 2005 I started my career at Wells Fargo, working as a Business Analyst. In 2013 I transitioned to a more technical Business Systems Consultant role. Then in 2021 I started my career as a Product Owner.
From 2021 to 2023 I also worked as a developer for Virtual Chemistry, using Typescript, C# and the Knockout.js library.
In my spare time I am a film maker, videographer/video editor, artist and all things 3D enthusiast. Most recently I've explored game development on the Sandbox.game metaverse.
My Daily Activities
I am currently the Product Owner of two scrum teams, each with their own busy backlog. I run a two hour refinement session four days per week. I really try to
stick to the Scrum best practice of allocating 10% of the sprint to refinement. In addition to the Scrum Product Owner training, I also took the Scrum Master training. Though
I do not typically work in this role, I find that I am adept at taking on the responsibilities when necessary.
Every quarter I also do the high-level planning for our PI sprints (a feature of Large Scale Scrum). I create the parent Jira stories and write value statements (as a...I want...so that) and
high level acceptance criteria in BDD-compliant format. Then I work with the tech lead on each team to begin fleshing out the major pieces of the work.
From there I run one or more sessions with our stakeholders to better understand their business needs, and continue the process of writing stories and refining them with the team.
One of the things I have gotten used to in Large Scale Scrum is the switch from one quarter to the next. For example, I am running refinement sessions to wrap up the work in
quarter three, and at the same time meeting with stakeholders to document the needs of the quarter four work so I can transition to creating those user stories. The overlap typically
lasts for about two sprints.
Onboarding new teams: At the time of this writing I am onboarding a brand new team of contract developers. They don't know anything about the company and so
one of the first things I did was create a sprint of validation activities for the team. Testing is the best way to learn...but it's also valuable for my other
team as their current project will require a massive amount of testing.
I am a person that people come to when there is an emergency and a fix in the system is needed ASAP. My manager recently asked me to lead a discussion concerning a particular
issue, and he asked that I drive the discussion and document the process. This is something I am now very adept at doing as I typically take notes in some form of a process
diagram. Once this was done and we identified the problem I wrote the acceptance criteria for the story that my team then worked on, and we turned it around - end to end -
in about 4 days. The development and validation in the lower environment did not take that long, but we did have to wait to get it into production.
Credit Risk Review Revamp
It was decided that the first area to focus on should be Credit. The project started with a big room planning session where the team blocked out all of the features
A proposal was created and a tantalizing mockup to go along with it. This was a basic wireframe-style mockup that was completed before any of the analysis was done
I setup a weekly session to interview credit underwriters about their work.
Virtual Chemistry - Left side menu
It was decided that the first area to focus on should be Credit. The project started with a big room planning session where the team blocked out all of the features
Development
I am working towards being a full-stack front-end web developer, in that I have slightly more experience
with the client-side scripting languages.
Here are all of the programming/scripting languages and supporting libraries I know, in order of my experience using them:
- HTML5/CSS
- Javascript
- Typescript
- PHP
- SQL (My and MS)
- C#
- Python
- Java
- VB Script
Libraries I have or am currently working with:
- Node.js
- knockout.js
- Vue
- React
- babylon.js
- three.js
- bootstrap.js
Development IDEs and code management:
- MS Visual Studio
- GIT Extensions
Education
Iowa State University: Biological Pre-medical Illustration
The program at Iowa State is sort of unique in that it combines all of the science and art you will need
in order to qualify for a graduate level program in Medical Illustration. While there, I was also heavily
involved in computer illustration and design due to multiple computer labs that were available.
University of Illinois at Chicago: Master's of Biomedical Visualization (Medical Illustration)
My focus was Medical and Surgical Illustration, Graphic Design (including Information Design), Computer Illustration, 3d modeling/animation and Facial Prosthetics.
It was fortunate for me that I was a research assistant at the UIC Computer Center. This is where I got my start as a web developer.
