Matthew Briggs Email & Phone Number

Changing companies can seem very overwhelming, but I finally decided to make take that chance and followed my career out of the world of large equipment manufacturing and into FinTech! As a Senior Product Manager at FirsTech, I find myself using much of what I have already learned from a long career in technology and data to solve new problems in payment processing and banking services. On a daily basis I get to interact with customers, understand their product needs, and then collaborate with excellent cross functional team of developers, program and project managers, infrastructure, and support analysts to deliver high quality financial products. I develop SOW's for a wide range of products and features and follow those projects from signing to development to delivery and support.

Peoria, Illinois, United States

As a Product Manager I felt like the breadth of my experiences and the skills I'd developed all came together. I had responsibility for the engineering roadmaps for data pipeline and data quality products. I gathered the insights and requirements from our source and consumption partners. I translated those into features and stories to organize the product and deliver it. I worked across our engineering, operations, support, and other product teams (cross-functional!) to make sure that end-to-end capabilities and components were available when needed. I leveraged agile methods to help schedule and execute the work in sprints while also keeping mind of target dates and risks to the product delivery schedules. And at any given moment, I was reaching back to a memory or experience as an analyst, a lead, a project manager, or an architect to help me solve a problem. It was a great role for someone who just can't help but try to do a little of everything!

Peoria, Illinois

Having worked on enterprise data platforms on various cloud technologies for over three years, it was no surprise to be scooped up into the digital organization to help blueprint a new digital data platform. In this role I had familiar responsibilities as I designed metadata service and data reject handling capabilities. This time, however, we were designing not from specific business demand and requirements, but from our own experience and knowledge of what users of digital services were looking for. This is when I first started to consider leveraging product management concepts to help scope and refine my architecture work. That turned out to be quite effective to use domain knowledge and insights gathered from around the org, and it also helped me parlay my technical responsibilities into product management ones. By the end of my time in this role, I was also defining and executing the demand intake and the breakdown of architecture requests into features and stories to help improve delivery of solution designs and PoC's acting as Product Owner for the digital architecture backlog.

Peoria, Illinois Area

Leaning into the architecture track, my next role was an evolution from data to enterprise. As an Information and Integration Architect in the EA organization I had many different responsibilities. I evaluated new IT demand to produce standard conceptual and logical architecture artifacts. I presented several solution requests and designs to ARB and change control boards. I was also the primary architect for metadata management and data governance capabilities for two enterprise data platform programs, performing PoC's and pilots on MS Azure, SAP HANA, AWS and with SaaS tools like Collibra Data Governance Center. This job is where I really learned how to CLOUD!

Peoria, Illinois Area

Upon my return from Europe, I took my first role as an architect. My responsibilities included the management and enhancement of the SAP data team's conversion solutions and interfaces, many of which I wrote the specifications for years prior. I maintained the development standards and best practices for the team, as well as researched and PoC'd new SAP data management technologies. I also retained some of my project lead responsibilities, writing new data project plans for facility consolidations.

Charleroi Area, Belgium

I cannot say enough about how fulfilling this opportunity was to me both professionally and personally. It is one of the highlights of my career! Reprising my role as a Data Project Lead, I relocated to Belgium to support SAP deployments in Europe. I had Team Lead responsibilities for mentoring nine other project leads from different countries. I was personally responsible for two site deployments myself, running their data projects and devising new solutions to help improve efficiency of managing and loading master data. My favorite part of working with a talented international team was going in thinking about how much I was going to teach them, then coming home grateful about how much more they taught me!

Peoria, Illinois Area

I was not in this role for very long, but I managed to pick up some excellent skills in my short time as a functional business analyst. My responsibilities included business process mapping and functional specification development for configuring SAP screens and transactions. I credit this role for helping me remember to consider the end-user perspective on my architect and product management work to this day.

Peoria, Illinois Area

This was my first real promotion into responsibilities that would shape the rest of my career and also one of my favorite jobs. It's the role that burned the phrase "cross-functional" into my psyche forever. I had responsibility for leading the data cleansing and conversion projects for 5 different SAP deployment sites, managing the project plans to develop and execute data load cycles from Legacy to the new ERP. By the time I was finished, we had run three mock cycles, validation, defect resolution, and GO-LIVE for over 120 SAP data objects per site. I was also tasked to lead the hypercare support team on-site at one of the facilities for six weeks. The perspective gained by watching your data at work in the facility is invaluable!

Peoria, Illinois Area

Changing jobs and organizations can be scary, transforming old skills and experience into new ones. My first such change just happened to be into the company's largest transformation initiative at the time! I dove head first into a role supporting business and ERP transformation. As a Data Integration analyst, I got my first taste of large scale requirements gathering and detailed specification writing for several data domains. For the SAP procurement functional area, I managed the mapping, development, testing, and execution phases for data conversion and interfaces for two sites. I also had defect coordination responsibilities for an SAP greenfield deployment.

Morton, Il

This was my right out of college job! An OO programer with a fresh B.S. in computer science cranking out COBOL code for Logistics clients. It was a great first opportunity because learned a lot about supporting the supply chain, and I got to cut my teeth on so many elements of the IT experience: development, 24/7 on-call shifts, client facing support, and ITSM to name a few. By the time I finished my tenure, I was lead analyst assigned to an warehousing and inventory management client.