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.
• 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.

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

• 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

• 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