Jane Kaster Email & Phone Number

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Aveus, a division of Medecision, is a boutique strategic consulting firm working with senior leaders in healthcare to solve complex business problems and deliver rewarding and sustainable outcomes. Our capabilities are deeply rooted in over 20 years of market research, customer-centered strategy, experience design, innovation, change management and process.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

• Member of the General Mills Dynamic Talent Bench, a group of multi-specialty team members deployed across the company on a project to project basis.
• Helped guide Where to Play for personalized nutrition initiative at General Mills, narrowing from 50+ areas to 2 in 6 months; activities included market sizing, validating consumer pain points via qualitative.
• Team lead for Strategyzer training focused on identifying jobs to be done, creating customer value proposition and drafting business model canvas for a live General Mills project
• Team lead for Board of Innovation business design bootcamp focused on busines model mapping and ideating anchored in 10 types of innovation for a live General Mills project

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

• Sprosty Network is a business acceleration consulting firm, helping companies drive growth by creating innovative new opportunities.
• Designed and facilitated workshops to identify new growth opportunities, including problem finding and solution ideation
• Supported design of a revised innovation gate process, including tools and techniques, to evaluate initiatives
• Led teams through innovation process from ideation, marketing sizing, and product validation
• Developed innovation metrics, including cataloging core-adjacent-transformational pipeline activities and tracking current portfolio health
• Managed process for RetailXelerator, an accelerator designed to connect large corporations with early-stage companies

• Focusing on the consumer marketing and business development efforts for Goodspend, the latest product launch for 2100Inc that connects consumers with unique local experiences and products that align with their values.
• Assisted in building a two-sided community, recruiting consumers and local businesses to join the Goodspend network
• Helped to facilitate Prototype Thinking sessions, a cutting edge product design method that was created at Google X, Google’s moonshot innovation factory
• Provided strategic feedback on early brand strategies and helping to identify key customer personas, including participating in an initial brand sprint

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

• Built and managed the marketing team for venture backed IoT startup with funders including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a Bill Gates, Bloomberg, Bezos backed coalition
• Created multichannel communications strategy, including email, social media and other digital campaigns
• Increased brand recognition with PR campaigns that generated over 20 articles and 4 awards within 6 months
• Revamped company website with stronger brand messaging while improving SEO
• Developed trade show strategy and managed all aspects of the execution from launching Google geo-targeted ads to creating booth design to developing sales talking points
• Established thought leadership through publication of industry white papers, blogs, and video content

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

• Key Responsibilities:
• Planning and execution of product strategies to drive revenue growth for the product category
• Manage product life cycle to ensure the attainment of volume and profitability objectives
• Ideation of concepts for new product development and identification of market potential
• Partner with Sales to drive product line results
• Partner with Marketing to develop and manage product marketing strategies

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

• Promoted in June 2013 to lead the Retail Operations team responsible for implementing retail programs, training key partners and delivering consistent customer experience in a multi-channel environment. Key.
• Manage a team to develop, implement, and communicate retail programs designed to drive growth for global retail partners and alignment across channels
• Partner with the marketing and merchandising teams on the creation and implementation of turnkey program toolkits for both sales and retail partners
• Develop and execute measurement system to determine ROI on programs, including qualitative and quantitative feedback
• Oversee all training, including programs for sales team, retailer partners and store associates
• Manage the development and execution of retailer communication strategy to ensure delivery of accurate, relevant and consistent messages across all touch points

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

• Managed multi-million portfolio of women’s beaded jewelry throughout the entire product life cycle from launch to retirement, including premium licensed collections and partnerships.Key Accomplishments:
• Increased SKU productivity of new product launches 3x by driving assortment decisions grounded in analytics
• Generated incremental revenue for the Disney licensed collection by developing a clear category strategy and leading a cross-functional team to drive action plan
• Proactively developed, institutionalized and managed product life cycle governance process, product management decision making tools and new product launch best practices
• Effectively led cross-functional team of Design, Sales, Supply Chain and Marketing partners to develop, define and execute collection launches of over 100 new SKUs annually
• Introduced and developed new retailer sales toolkit that allowed sales organization to shift the sales process from a sell-in promotional method to a consultative business partnership approach

Greater New York City Area

• Promoted to Vice President position at the completion of an exclusive Associate Program and hired by Global Transaction Services division to manage $90 million product line for the financial institution market.
• Exceeded revenue target during a challenging economic environment by enhancing product offering, exploring new market opportunities, delivering on key initiatives and managing attrition
• Executed launch of new cross-border payments solution for the market segment and worked closely with sales team to identify target clients, resulting in $2.0 million in incremental revenue
• Successfully cross-sold $1.0 million of payment solutions by performing product adoption analysis across the market segment and partnering with relationship managers to close sales

Greater New York City Area, Shanghai

• The youngest and one of only four participants without a graduate degree to be selected to a prestigious post-graduate program with over 50 participating associates globally. The program allowed associates to rotate.
• Worked directly for CFO of Citibank China in Shanghai to create an analytical model for branch expansion, prioritizing target cities based on strength of macro-economic environment, concentration of customer base and.
• Built and managed a model to forecast capital calls and distributions for the private equity portfolio during rotation with the Global Pensions Investment group

Greater New York City Area

• Member of a four person in-house strategy, mergers & acquisitions team responsible for driving business development for internal business clients.Key Accomplishments:
• Managed financial models and led due diligence teams for deals worth over $2.0 billion in transactions including acquisition of a large North American corporate prepaid card and stored value solutions business
• Developed consistent methodology across products and regions to measure market size for the Global Transaction Services business, a $10 billion division of Citi that offers treasury and trade solutions to corporations.
• Selected by executive management to participate in the Voice of the Client task force, a group formed to institute best practices around client segmentation, service, feedback and escalation