Dan Sickles Email & Phone Number

Pleasanton, California, Us

• Led release planning efforts for multiple scrum teams, carefully evaluating competing priorities such as new feature launches, iterative enhancements, technical debt, and production support of live customers.• Led over 50 monthly customer meetings with over 15 higher education member institutions on topics ranging from academic planning, advisory relationships, and more.• Mentored over a dozen new product managers in best practices for managing scrum ceremonies, UX Design, data-driven decision making, managing internal and external stakeholder relationships, leveraging Workday technology, and career progression.• Initiated, staffed, and drove multiple cross-functional UX enhancement projects involving dozens of stakeholders.• Co-led initiatives to identify and evaluate opportunities as well as develop replicable processes to deliver AI/ML functionality within the Student Academic Services space.

Pleasanton, California, Us

• Managed day-to-day activities for scrum team, including refinements and sprint planning, ensuring that development team had a steady stream of ready work.• Delivered live and recorded presentations to internal and external stakeholders, including customers, consultants, and sales staff, promoting newly released functionality at regular intervals.• Led redesign of academic planning feature incorporating a drag-and-drop user experience, including driving UX research and design efforts to incorporate intuitive ways for advisors and students to collaborate.• Launched functionality for institutions to analyze academic planning data, providing institutions ways to identify students who may not be on track to achieve their educational objectives.• Delivered numerous enhancements to how advisory relationships can be managed at higher education institutions, including adding new insight for students to understand who is in their support network.• Launched automated method for grouping students to address various cross-functional use cases, including advisory relationships, registration appointments, course eligibility, financial aid waivers, and more.• Launched ability for institutions to better monitor students throughout their entire lifecycle, ensuring that institutions can better track students from application through matriculation and graduation.

Pleasanton, California, Us

Pleasanton, California, Us

• Designed and developed functional specifications for course bidding feature for Workday’s cloud-based Student Information System for Higher Education• Conducted research and interviewed internal and external stakeholders to ensure broad functionality, technical feasibility, and optimal user experience• Worked closely with development team in an agile environment to develop working end-to-end functionality• Wrote comprehensive documentation to streamline future development and implementation

MBA student consultant for Shared-X, an agricultural business based in Peru. Worked with a team of student consultants to develop high-level strategy recommendations for building Shared-X's coffee business.

• Conducted market analysis of prospective customers and competitors• Developed plan for product positioning and customer segmentation and targeting

•Set priorities, scheduled workloads, trained, and undertook performance reviews for cross‑departmental teams while maintaining the smooth running of the company•Evaluated strategic options that led to acquisition of the company, collaborated with investment banker, and transferred business assets and operational practices to acquirer•Analyzed several business opportunities resulting in the creation of a professional services division which contributed more than 2.5% of annual revenues in the first year•Launched and managed production and both direct and third party distribution for new eBook program, which contributed more than 5% of annual revenues•Initiated and led implementation of new ERP and CRM software, centralizing information systems and allowing for better customer segmentation and targeting•Executed multiple digital marketing activities including website redesigns that increased website traffic from 10,000 to over 50,000 unique visitors per month•Developed new social media strategy that included whitepapers, infographics, and webinars, gaining tens of thousands of followers across popular social media platforms•Oversaw growth of email list to over 40,000 educators segmented over 10 interest areas who received over 1.5 million emails, increasing annual email revenue five‑fold•Increased titles translated into foreign languages from 3 to 35, across 9 languages

•Hired, trained, and managed sales representative and publicity coordinator to expand capacity of K‑12 and Higher Ed sales and marketing operations•Developed opt‑in email marketing strategy reaching over 20,000 educators with open rates of 10% and click through rates of over 20% across 1 million emails•Researched and signed agreements with 19 new domestic and 10 international distributors allowing for titles to enter new markets•Created new system for identifying and managing media and industry contacts, resulting in an increase of both print and online publicity•Identified prospective authors and negotiated contracts with them, leading to the signing of over 10 new authors and the publishing of over 15 new titles•Worked with authors to develop and tune their manuscripts to market needs and supervised production to make titles available for sale•Established new inventory management procedures, significantly reducing stockouts

• Worked directly with authors and school districts to plan book sales during professional development events.• Coordinated booth logistics and exhibited at national and regional conferences.• Established relationships and closed adoptions with college professors.• Followed up with customers to request payment on overdue invoices.

Master Of Business Administration (M.B.A.)

B.A., Economics And Political Science