Came to Zinnia through the acquisition of Policygenius

Policygenius is America's leading online insurance marketplace. Our mission is to help people get insurance right by making it easy for them to understand their insurance options, compare quotes, and buy a policy, all in one place. Policygenius has established headquarters in New York City and Durham, NC and raised over $150 million in venture capital in our quest to become a one-stop shop for all the financial protection you'll ever need.

● Drastically reduced wasteful production and realigned product goals through the introduction of lean startup methodologies.● Shortened our MVP cycles by implementing a build, measure, learn feedback loop.● Introduced product analytics to the team and evangelized the process to the rest of the organization through presentations and workshops.● Grows technical team lead’s people management skills through open discussion and coaching. ● Codes machine learning scripts on a weekly basis (both supervised and unsupervised) to help find usage trends and predictions for product analytics.● Partners with product management, UX, visual design, marketing, and sales to create an all-encompassing strategy.

A startup, with the goal of bringing technology to small and medium sized film and television production companies. The product aims to help the crew and the producers connect, collaborate and create — using project management and networking tools.• Conceived product ideas and used contacts in the industry to validate the core concept.• Acquired industry contacts — through networking and cold emailing — in order to learn the details of every part of the industry. This included learning how the industry differed internationally, through contacts made in the U.K. and Israel.• Designed and built an MVP using modern web, mobile, and server frameworks (Angular, Ionic, Django, etc.) — rolling out software using two week SCRUM sprints.• Interviewed industry veterans — including the head of YouTube Space New York — in order to write blog articles about the product and the industry’s landscape (https://blog.helioscene.com).• Organized film and television meetups to foster conversations — helping to learn more about the industry and market the product.

Responsibilities: • Managed software developers to build and enhance a custom CRM.• Developed the product’s technical and functional vision.• Partnered with six internal businesses concurrently to develop software that helps employees manage their processes and helps their management to execute strategies.• Acted as a lead designer on software projects for multiple teams.• Was a hands on manager who coded — looking for ways to improve processes and introduce new technologies.Notable Management Achievements:• Improved efficiency, motivation, and flexibility by moving teams from waterfall project management to SCRUM and Kanban.• Lead an interdepartmental task force to standardize MS SQL-Server use and create a unified server architecture, which improved stability and reduced maintenance time.• Mentored employees to help build them as leaders allowing the organization to grow organically.Notable technical designs:• One of the lead architects on a modern data driven CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that was built in house from scratch. The system was built to be functionally competitive with other CRMs, while giving the benefit of custom functionality needed to support unique internal business units.• Designed and implemented a metadata driven UI framework for employee dashboards — allowing for a single system to support dashboards for many different employee types. The dashboards could be configured to adapt to the needs of each specific role.• Designed and implemented a data driven ETL engine that processes hundreds of source data sets without the need to write additional code for each. The system generically moves data through a pipeline and into a production MS SQL-Server database. Overall, this project reduced the effort it took to add a new data source from four days of work to less than an hour.• In addition to developing custom software for sales departments my team also customized a Salesforce.com instance.