Chris De Jong Email & Phone Number

Charleston, Sc, Us

Charleston, South Carolina, United States

As Staff Product Manager, I drive the formation of the Product Management culture at Kohl’s while leading multiple cross-functional product teams integral to a successful business partnership launch between Sephora and Kohl’s at over 200 sites throughout the US. I defined the vision, strategy, and gained executive buy-in for a product branded “Item Findability”, defining a means for how Kohl’s will increase the probability of associates and customers finding the items they are searching for in stores, through technology. I led the integration of Sephora and Kohl’s Point of Commerce (PoC), creating continuity in experience for customers shopping between the two companies. In this role I delivered:• An Item Findability minimum viable product (MVP) from idea to implementation in over 1000 stores in less than 5 months. This resulted in Kohl’s store associates’ ability to quickly find products to fulfill online orders amongst 8500 newly introduced products in a new physical store layout, with near $0 cost in training.• Research direction and viability assessment of Bluetooth and RFID for multiple use cases in a retail application. This was executed by establishing business relationships with key external partners of Kohl’s, including SES CEO of North America and representatives of Qualcomm which resulted in lowered cost of R&D.• Strategic re-direction for the Associate Guided Checkout team. I successfully shifted the product, team, and stakeholders towards user-centered design to provide increased economic impact to the company.• Creation of the Kohl's Product Management skill development journey. These scalable guidelines defined a clear path for skill maturity as a Product Manager, training over 170 Kohl’s Technology employees.• Talent acquisition and retention through public speaking events representing Kohl’s Technology, and significant hiring recommendations to build the talent pipeline within both Product Management and Product Design organizations.

Charleston, South Carolina

As Senior Manager, I led the Boeing South Carolina (BSC) Digital Transformation Environment (DTE) program, with the mission of digital transformation of a Fortune 20 company. I managed 19 employees including full-stack developers, product managers, product designers, and service delivery leads. I led global strategy, objectives, resource needs, governance, and operations for the enterprise-wide DTE program. This encompassed software development consulting projects spanning enterprise health & safety, electrical wire design and installation, manufacturing operations management, robotic numerical control automation, and e-commerce spaces. In this role I delivered: • Financial planning and visibility for a $3.3M annual budget. • A redesigned company hiring procedure which created the first program site to drop all reliance on outside consultant labor, reducing program costs by $1.5M in 2019. • A plan to develop my employees through relentless learning, which created an environment of thought leadership. 65% of my employees generated whitepapers or gave industry presentations. • New business opportunities across lines of business, which led to over $1M in new consulting projects in e-commerce for Boeing Global Services and robotic automation for Boeing Research & Technology. • Guidance to multiple concurrent project teams on product vision and execution, which helped teams to work through challenges with deliberate action, resulting in one project accelerating schedule by 1 year. • Go-to-market mentorship for project teams, facilitating one project teams’ software launch across every commercial aircraft program as well as two defense programs in under 1 year.

As Service Manager, I drove execution and advised on strategy for the BSC DTE service. I leveraged a team of 19 teammates, aiding clients in implementing agile software development, Lean Startup, and user-centered design principles, driving a digital-first culture shift for an addressable market of ~600 people. In this role I delivered: • A governance model to assess the health of a service execution team, and produce health improvement plans, resulting in an average health score of 80%. • Consulting proposals outlining desired product outcomes, execution, and budgetary estimates for DTE and client teammates. Execution of my proposals resulted in a 41%-57% reduction in client team cost to deliver value. • Definition and establishment of a new role, the Practice Lead, which allowed for sustainable execution of program goals without need for outside consultant help. • Interactive workshops teaching hundreds of participants about the principles and tactics of product management. Trained 4 peers to effectively lead workshops eliminating myself as the single point of failure as a trainer.

Charleston, South Carolina

As Agile Coach, I coached individuals and teams within the Electrical Wiring Program on the implementation of agile and Scrum best practices. In this role I delivered: • Tactical implementation steps to project managers, product managers, product owners, developers, analysts, and managers of agile software development methodologies in an electrical engineering environment. • Direction as lead scrum master for 3 development teams across 2 cities focused on developing software solutions for electrical engineers. • Increased visibility of work by developing KPI dashboards to monitor progress and highlight positive and negative performance trends.

Charleston, South Carolina

As Project Manager, I managed quality, scope, schedule, and cost of multiple software projects in the engineering data distribution domain. In this role I delivered: • Completion of a special project scoped with hiring 30 candidates for an international service center to increase the strategic globalization of The Boeing Company. • Management of a special project scoped with transferring knowledge for 9 business critical applications from one long time development sub-contractor to a new development sub-contractor. • A common and repeatable process for gathering status, communicating progress, and gathering risks and issues, utilizing Project Management Best Practice concepts.

Charleston, South Carolina

As Customer Engagement focal, I was the primary point of contact responsible for prioritizing and managing IT projects for critical 787 final assembly factory efforts. In this role I delivered: • Successful management of a 787 Final Assembly construction project to support an increase in manufacturing production rate. • Implementation of Lean+ Visual Factory principles to the 787 program through development of an enterprise solution visualizing Shop Order Instance availability and true impact of constrained work, projected to eliminate 137,000 hours of manual effort per year.

Everett, Washington

As Functional Analyst I was responsible for decomposing software requirements into functional, logical, and physical architecture components. In this role I delivered: • Developed relationships with third party vendor, researched vendor software, and assisted with implementation of software, to ensure efficient plan execution for the modernization of a legacy tool.

Bellevue, Washington

As Project Manager, I managed quality, scope, schedule, and cost of multiple software projects in the Computer Aided Design and Engineering domain. In this role I delivered: • An application of the Scrum methodology to a software development effort seeking to customize a commercial off-the-shelf test management and defect tracking tool for the CAD/CAM organization. • Project status, key health metrics, and risks/issues/opportunities to customers, team members, peers, and management on a consistent cadence.

Chicago, Il

Owned a companywide resource tracking initiative, to better forecast actual versus projected resource allocation to various hardware and software projects.Performed quality review of technical system installation documentation for multiple high revenue international gaming products.Coordinated and supervised a test build for a high revenue international gaming product, to ensure thoroughness of system installation documentation.Managed the deployment of hardware between office branches for multiple projects, vital to project launches.Coordinated software deployment for system gaming products for internal users in satellite offices.Quickly learned an internal company software solution, and became point of contact for data creation and entry utilizing the toolParticipated in cross departmental meetings tracking project milestones, statuses, and blockages

Assured any and all business related information was correct and properly inserted into the system.Worked on proprietary system to relate information within the search engine and booking system.

Addressed, evaluated, and prioritized requests for technical assistance from users experiencing problems with hardware, software, networking, and other computer-related, Web, and commonly used office technologies.Took initiative to learn company internal organizational structure to increase problem resolution efficiency.Maintained all software and provided essential updates.Supported corporate wide systems assistance to the home office and other satellite offices.Provided essential skills which ensured quick office relocation during a corporate move.

Master Of Science (M.S.), Management Information Systems

Activities and Societies: Student Leadership

Bachelors Of Arts, Information Science

Graduated Cum Laude of the College of Computing and Information Technology

Education record