Dehron Hite-Benson Email & Phone Number

Austin, Tx, Us

Mountain View, Wy, Us

Working on something that's gonna change everything!

Worldwide, Us

• Led and managed a nationwide Technical Product Ownership and Quality Assurance Team, distributed across diverse business sectors.• Leveraged historical expertise to drive transformative enhancements within the IS organization, identifying and communicating areas of improvement to both teams and leadership.• Championed the adoption and refinement of Agile methodologies.• Mentored Technical Product Owners, equipping them with essential tools for effective product domain ownership.• Collaborated with the QA Lead to strategize and implement future enhancements to QA processes.• Conducted consistent Agile coaching sessions across various project teams.• Initiated multiple Guilds, focusing on defining both long-term and short-term strategies for each topic or challenge within their scope.• Guilds introduced: Agile & Governance, Product Management, QA, Salesforce, Data.• Pioneered "Agile 2.0", an initiative and methodology, empowering teams to optimize their Scrum practices.• As part of Agile 2.0, designed a comprehensive Process and Project template within Azure DevOps, facilitating a seamless transition for teams.• Engaged in Azure DevOps online courses to master the platform, complementing prior expertise in Jira and Trello.• Collaborated with IS leaders to devise a strategic staffing plan for the fiscal year, ensuring alignment with the organization's budgetary constraints. Regularly monitored the plan's implementation to ensure success.

Virginia Beach, Va, Us

• Overseeing a worldwide Engineering organization of 40+ team members, spread across the various pillars of the business.• Mentoring and developing Engineering leaders and giving teams the Agile/problem-solving tools they need to run Scrum/Kanban effectively.• Collected/aggregated information from Product Leadership to build out roadmap visualizations, which were used to level-set the group on what we were getting done when, but also to assist in defining our staffing plan.• Creating and maintaining an immediate and long-term staffing plan and then executing on said plan, which included doubling the size of the Engineering organization.• Overseeing and improving the Engineering recruiting process, largely through the use of my Interview Kit system.• Worked with other leaders in Engineering to define a staffing plan document that could easily be shared with our staffing/contracting partners in an effort to swiftly fill open reqs.• Developing roadmaps for Engineering teams that do not have a Product-component.• Working with our PMO and Product Leaders to define our short-term and long-term Governance Model.• Keeping Leadership across the company aware of our department’s progress towards meeting business objectives.• Rolled out several new Guilds, that all started using Charters to define long-term and short-term plans for all topics/problems within each Guild’s purview.• Through the use of Guilds and Charters, got teams using Team/Working Agreements effectively.• Got teams successfully using Technical Direction meetings to reduce the amount of disagreement after a Sprint starts.• Rolled out new Scrum ceremonies to improve communication and knowledge-sharing: Scrum of Scrums and org-wide Sprint Demos.

Austin, Tx, Us

• Overseeing a nationwide Engineering organization, broken up into 5 groups: Infrastructure, Front-end, Back-end, Native Apps, and Data Engineering.• Mentoring and developing leaders on each of the Engineering teams.• Overseeing, managing, and making improvements to the Project and Scrum Process used by the entire organization.• Project Management responsibilities for the entire Engineering department, including driving sync meetings and project retrospectives.• Researching and developing improvements to the way the organization plans roadmaps.• Overseeing the recruiting process for the entire organization.• Overseeing the budget for the department, to make sure we are meeting or improving on expectations.• Maintaining, administrating, and improving our Jira/Confluence instance.• Direct management of all Engineers (as we do not have Engineering Managers), which includes regular 1-1s, Quarterly Goal discussions, regular Skill Assessments, and all other HR management.• Got the Engineering department to the highest employee satisfaction score (out of all departments in the company).• Revamped our entire Project Process to improve how we plan projects and the accuracy of our estimates.• Introduced and utilized a Resource Management Roadmap to address various issues – context-switching, misaligned resources, project delays, etc.• Oversaw addressing all security gap issues that were identified by WarnerMedia’s 2-year Security Gap Remediation project.• Worked with the Infrastructure and Back-end Engineering groups to find over $400k/year in software cost savings.• Instituted Guild and Technical Direction Meetings on each of the Engineering teams, to improve cross-team-member communication, to give team-members an opportunity to share knowledge, and to make sure everyone is setup for success in their upcoming Sprints.

Austin, Texas, Us

• Managing Engineers on 5 various Scrum Teams – a total of 18 Engineers on 4 Features Teams and the Business Intelligence Team.• Using past experience to make meaningful, impactful improvements to the Product Development organization; getting us ready for an increased scale in operations.• Bridge the gap between Engineers and Architects to help Engineering Leadership build Technology Objectives for 2020.• Work with Product Leadership to build an overall organization Roadmap for our 2020 Platform objectives.• Worked with other Product and Engineering Leaders to oversee the Product Development re-organization, an effort to improve focus and efficiency.• Developed an Engineer Career Path and Performance Evaluation Process, based on rollouts I had done at previous organizations.• Created the Leadership Guild to more widely disseminate well-formed methodologies found within the business world – especially those in the technology sector.• Completely revamped our Hiring Process for the entire company, using a Trait-based approach to build Interview Kits for each role we hire for.• Oversaw the Summer 2020 Internship Hiring Process.

Ch

• Focusing on transitioning day-to-day responsibilities to our Team Leads so that I can focus on our long-term department initiatives. This includes handing off Sprint ceremonies and several of my 1-1's with the ICs.• Overseeing all of the major projects that Software Engineering is involved in.• Researching and Developing improvements to the way the organization uses JIRA Portfolio.• Overseeing the interview process and hiring of several Lead positions within the organization. This included making improvements to our interview take-home assignments.• Developed a new project process to address issues with the clarity of requirements and the accuracy of estimates.• Put into place a new resource management road-map to help the organization better plan what our Engineers are working on to reduce context-switching.• Began a regular schedule for Department Meetings for the Software Engineering organization, to improve communication throughout the department. This was on a six-week cadence.• Utilized Microsoft Stream (video service similar to YouTube) to improve process documentation within the organization.• Instituted Weekly Community Meetings on each of the Software Engineering teams, to improve cross-team-member communication, and to give team-members an opportunity to share knowledge. This meeting is on a rotation, so a different member of the team runs it each week.• Worked with QA and DevOps to greatly improve the reporting we had for Defect and Bug metrics.• Made many improvements to our JIRA Issue Templates to make it easier for Stakeholders to write Stories, especially when only a small change was required.• Oversaw the revamp of our App Release Checklists to include QA and Product steps, which were previously on separate Checklists. This greatly improved communication between the different groups.• With input from Team Leads, revamped many aspects of our Annual Review process.• Took over managing budgetary responsibilities for the department.

Ch

• Leading a worldwide team of 20+ developers, to deliver innovative, consumer facing solutions for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows platforms, enjoyed by millions of customers.• Dev Manager, Scrum Master, and Project Management responsibilities for 10 Software Engineering teams. • Mentoring and developing leaders on each of the Software Engineering teams.• Liaison with Product Management, Sales, Marketing, and Operational Stakeholders through all facets of an initiative’s lifecycle (roadmap planning, definition, execution, and release).• Team Goal planning, Annual Reviews, and career planning. This included developing a clearer way of communicating progress and areas of focus for individual contributors.• Work with developers on a bi-weekly basis to create and maintain personal goals.• Creating and maintaining process documentation for all Software Engineering teams.• Developed processes and provided mentorship to greatly increase developers’ skills in estimating upcoming work and being able to move work efficiently through the workflow.• Worked with Lead Developers, Architects, and Product Managers to develop Story templates, making it easier for everyone in the organization to write Stories, Bugs, and investigation tickets. Also liaised to create Release Checklists to reduce the amount of time it took to get releases out to customers.• Transitioned all Applications Teams to a heartbeat release cycle, where releases would happen at the end of a set Sprint.• Facilitated the migration of all business units from a Trello/Rally based workflow management systems over to JIRA, with a focus on process/workflow definition and integration. • Created the screening test for recruiting new developers into the organization, to facilitate finding better candidates more quickly. Also created a new interview process with different sections and responsibilities for interviewers, to increase retention and onboarding success rates.

Austin, Tx, Us

• Led a nationwide team of 13+ developers and remote contractors.• Successfully performed multiple functions for three development teams, including Scrum Master and Project Management.• Developed processes to improve resource management, code quality, and scoping.• Improved documentation company-wide by getting all departments on a single platform.• Responsible for Team Goal planning, Annual Reviews, and career planning.• Worked with developers frequently to create and maintain personal goals.

Las Vegas, Nevada, Us

• Developed over two dozen games, including the “Smokin’ Hot Jackpots” series.• Created template modules for all games and sub-games to be built from; templates that were used by the entire Game Development department.• Collaborated with product management to create the Feature Scope document, so that anyone could see how long any feature takes to develop.• Created and maintained the Game Programmer Checklist; a checklist for developers to go through before submitting a game to QA, which led to a large decrease in defects reported on games.• Collaborated with QA and production leadership to optimize the game submission process.• Worked with art and programming leadership to create a standard structure for art folders, which made learning our development process much easier for new hires.• Collaborated with art leadership to develop the standard font creation process.

• Developed UI for “Sims 3” and “Sims 3 Pets” on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.• Created the Trait module to be used by multiple other gameplay and UI systems.• Architected the "Town Map" mode of the game, and ensured that it remained robust and modular.• Implemented several UI components to be used by artists and scripters alike.• Worked with programming leadership to develop a process in which programmers, scripters, and artists could all share useful information with one another.

• Worked on several Nintendo Wii games, including “Family Fun Football”.• Designed and implemented a grid-based and vector-based path-finding system.• Developed a robust ball-catching system that allowed designers and animators to easily make any gameplay or visual changes.• Implemented systems that would expose behavior attributes to designers.• Designed an intermediate utility UI system that allowed programmers who were unfamiliar with Flash and ActionScript to implement menus.• Created a game sub-system that allowed mini-games to be easily added and integrated with the game flow.

• Developed the gameplay and UI for the Nintendo Wii game, “Helix”.• Implemented core gameplay features, including the parsing of song scripts, integration of the HUD.• Developed the game’s Tutorial and Input System, which both made use of the Facade design pattern.