Stephanie Cruz Email and Phone Number

• Developed and execute the product vision for our highly innovative structured literacy app, Blend, serving over 2000 users, including 5+ school licenses and partnerships with certified training programs.• Built a digital blending board and spelling mat tool from the ground up built on Godot, Firebase, and SvelteKit. • Closely collaborate with our primary stakeholder, our reading specialist and subject matter expert, to define requirements that inform the product backlog, feature prioritization, and bug fixes.• Develop detailed UI mockups to obtain critical insights from SMEs, ensuring the implementation of highly valuable features that achieve the product vision and address customer needs.• Lead the cross-functional team to identify key insights from feedback and analytics, ensuring customer needs are prioritized in the backlog.• Maintain relationships with enterprise clients throughout the customer journey by facilitating onboarding, training, ongoing support, and license renewals to drive value realization and retention.• Drive strategic partnership initiatives through cobranding, cross-promotion, and product adoption, fostering mutually beneficial relationships to expand market reach and increase product visibility.• Crafted and curated a suite of multimedia educational resources, including user manuals, tutorial videos, and informational emails, to facilitate user onboarding to our cutting-edge app, significantly enhancing understanding and adoption of our tool.• Interface with customers frequently to gather feedback and provide training by hosting webinars, conducting focus groups, and representing Blend at national conferences, highlighting innovative features and championing the product's value proposition.

• Serving as a full-time developer specializing in web and game development, actively contributing to a diverse range of projects, including client-driven initiatives and the development of proprietary software products. • Cultivated strong customer relationships that reinforce confidence and trust in our software, driving renewed and additional contracts.• Taking up the responsibilities of designing and conceptualizing all of our projects, encompassing tasks such as logo design, project prototyping, the creation of mockups, and overall UI/UX design for our websites and apps.• Collaborating closely with clients to transform their unique software requirements into tangible solutions, striving to identify innovative approaches to solve complex problems, offering custom software solutions that cater to their specific needs and goals.• Successfully built and delivered multiple projects, ensuring that our software met the highest standards of responsiveness and accessibility and providing comprehensive support for our clients.• Focused on a client-centric approach, collaborating closely with stakeholders to understand their unique requirements and translate them into functional and user-friendly solutions.

• Led the transformation of a vital legacy batch platform to real-time microservices architecture using Vert.x, GraphQL, Couchbase, and Redhat Openshift Cloud Services, significantly improving global customer onboarding, acquisition, fraud and risk functions, as well as servicing and marketing operations across the company.• Guided the scrum team by providing clear direction and fostering effective communication across the SAFe release train, including product owners, release train engineers, solution architects, and other stakeholders to report progress on our KPIs, supplementing the efforts of our scrum master.• Acted as the primary liaison for our consumers throughout the organization, facilitating seamless integration with our platform by producing API specifications and technical documentation that Ipresented to cross-functional teams and senior leaders.• Collaborated closely with our product owner to identify and refine backlog items, ensuring the team’s commitment to the product goal.• Managed the CICD pipeline for the team, establishing automated deployment processes and developing suites for monitoring.• Led the effort to define, document, and enforce platform standards and guidelines for CI/CD and code management by establishing best practices and creating manuals for the growing team to utilize throughout our software development life cycle.• Worked with HiveQL and other big data tools to extract and analyze data to identify data quality gaps.• Led the Women in Technology, Geek Squad, and Millennial Employee Network ERGs, driving inclusive environments and organizing impactful events fostering professional development and personal growth across diverse employee demographics.• Represented American Express at multiple conferences, including The Grace Hopper Celebration and university hackathons and job fairs, presenting on behalf of our organization while championing our workplace culture, values, and career opportunities to prospective employees.

• Utilized data mining principles and algorithms to produce predictive models for various business units to improve demand forecasting and other processes• Worked with big data tools and technologies such as Cloudera Hadoop, Hive, and Impala to facilitate a cloud-based data mining platform• Developed scripts in R to manipulate, analyze, and model data from multiple sources• Analyzed relational database systems to create data dictionaries, documentations, and entity-relationship diagrams for all data sources