Helena Beckert Email & Phone Number

Wellington Region, New Zealand

-People management and leadership of Engineers and Engineering leaders, seeking excellence in engineering practices across all disciplines using industry best-practices.-Driving improvements to our Engineering practice to ensure we continue to deliver measurable impact as we grow.-Lead a culture of accountability and responsibility around delivery, and creating an environment where engineers can deliver consistent, high quality product.-Creating delivery plans and outcome based processes to align teams across a growing business.-Coaching and mentoring the team, creating personal and professional development plans to ensure we can attract and engage top talent.-Growing the engineering team, recruiting in new engineers to bring new skills and capabilities into the team, aligning with Hnry’s strong culture and values.-Starting and building the Hnry Grad program to bring wonderful new talent into our engineering teams.-Building strong relationships with all members of the business to actively identify problems and propose solutions, based on customer insights and data.-Collaborating with and supporting other members of the wider Hnry team, to deliver the right outcomes for Hnry customers.-Striking the balance between perfection and short-term impact across the team.

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Key Achievements:- Teams owning and measuring their engineering excellence. Teams are engaged with both the work and their own processes and growth.- Overhauled SLO's and OKR's, achieving 100% in both areas. - Deprecated the old platform through a multi year strategy of improvements on the new platform (both feature and technical upgrades), giving the teams time to focus entirely on the new platform and give our customers the experience they're looking for. New platform scaled from 7 million monthly users to 15 million with ability to keep scaling.- Engineering issues and the value of our work at the forefront of product strategy, in line with our customer focus. Created a new process and space for the teams to prioritise and work on these engineering issues. Incidents declined from 4 a week on average to 3 a month. Role:* Ensuring Solutions are delivered right - from technical roadmaps and strategy to making sure we're looking at the right problem. Empowering teams and leads to own and drive their own delivery. Keeping our focus on the value we can add to our customers at the forefront of our delivery.* Planning the engineering workforce so we're able to deliver on our commitments.* Finance and Budget Management for Reporting Engineering Group - including vendor management and procurement.* Operational Excellence and improving engineering practice - ensuring standards and engineering excellence are at the forefront of our development and making sure teams have the space to execute to the standards. Also ensuring our products have operational support so we're always taking care of our customers. * Growing technical people leaders who put growth and the human value at the centre of our work. Enabling them to grow high performing teams.* Improving Engineering Excellence - Owning and Implementing technical standards and creating teams who have ownership and drive towards improving our practice. Managing technical debt.

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

-Responsible for the product development teams working on Xero’s products and their technical practices and standards.-Building a cohesive, thought-leading engineering community which rapidly delivers value to customers and continually improves.-Championing the "what" and "how" part of the product engineering equation, by helping to define and drive the product roadmap.-Bridging the technical and business worlds by collaborating with product, design and go-to-market teams to deliver on market needs and priorities.-Working with team leads and teams on personal and professional development.

Wellington, Wellington Region, New Zealand

Key Achievements:- Using data to both establish and solve customer problems. Lead the work to grow Data Science as an integral part of the team and product development process.- Implemented a new Lean Development framework to enable the team to respond to changes in the data we were gathering to cheaply and effectively test and refine our problem space and solutions.- Used the data and process changes to enable the creation of Cash Flow forecasting in Xero, Bank Rules automation and numerous small features to make our customers lives better and their job easier.Key Duties:-Enabling cross functional teams deliver better product more often using agile methodologies such as Lean Development and Design Thinking.-Driving a culture of quality through measuring success, asking better questions, learning and experimentation, and testing at all levels.-Using data science to inform product decisions.-Built queries and features using SQL, C#. React. Created AWS infrastructure.-Implementing Automation and Machine Learning strategies.-Product Management including estimation at the team level and organisational level.-Building relationships around the organisation.-Coaching and Mentoring

Wellington & Wairarapa, New Zealand

-Building Machine Learning Models and Data Analysis -Automation using Selenium, Specflow, TeamCity, AWS and C#.-Fixed production bugs in both C# and React.-Performance testing with JMeter. API testing in Postman.-Created Unit tests in the older parts of the Xero codebase.-Manual testing both current and new development using a wide variety of tools and frameworks such as exploratory testing, BDD, ATDD and usability testing.-Business analysis with a deep knowledge of the Xero system and accounting.-Working in an Agile environment utilising Scrum, Kanban and other methodologies.-Facilitating the Xero Tester Community of Practice. Helping others who want to present, working through questions and providing training where necessary. -Scrum master and Agile team facilitation.-Representing Xero to other organisations and working through strategies to get their testing to where they want it to be. -Working on release management testing strategies covering automation, environments, manual testing and tooling. This included both high level and detailed work on the move from 3 weekly planned releases to a continuous integration cycle.-Recruiting new Quality Analysts and Quality Analyst Engineers.

Wellington

Senior tech support in the Customer Experience team.