A staggering number of innovations originate from bad ideas. At Capital One, I created a “Bad Ideas” workshop to encourage my teams to openly take risks and innovate. Participants shared every bad idea they could think of to solve a ridiculous problem - great ideas were not welcome! Together, we built these ideas into a great one. This was not only a fun exercise but encouraged psychological safety in brainstorming, teamwork, and inclusion. I want everyone to feel safe sharing openly - ideas, suggestions, or disagreement - as openness ignites innovation and sparks new possibilities. I have approached challenges throughout my career with this devotion to innovation combined with a strategic mindset. When faced with a challenge, I start by articulating a vision to inspire and unite my team, followed by a roadmap that will achieve concrete outcomes, and then I apply contemporary engineering practices to achieve the desired results. For example, I was working at Capital One in 2020 when the Feds required an urgent change in bank liquidity reporting impacting the entire liquidity workstream including downstream dependencies. I led a cross-functional team - engineering, product, and design - to transform a system that had previously taken 3-4 days to produce a monthly liquidity report into one that took 6 hours using Microservices, AI, and AWS services. Most recently, I led and delivered a vision, strategy, and roadmap to modernize U.S. Bank’s core payments processing platform. In parallel, to put proof to the roadmap, I built an engineering organization using contemporary engineering practices such as Continuous Deployment, Team Topologies, Product Delivery, Microservices Architecture, etc. We had fully staffed teams in 7 months with a functional Cloud Microservices domain running at Mainframe speeds (30ms) 2 months later.As rewarding as these accomplishments have been, the success was even more satisfying due to the collaborative efforts that arrived at innovative solutions.Technology is integral to nearly every business function. I ensure that I understand business challenges through listening tours, actively engaging teams, rolling-up the sleeves, and collaborative brainstorming. I am a passionate learner, always reading and experimenting to devise new approaches. I’m excited about the opportunities provided by the explosion of Data, AI, and machine learning as they open new doors for innovation.Do you have questions about how innovative engineering solutions can deliver impactful results for your organization? Contact: btsnyder@gmail.com