Max Stevens Email & Phone Number

Time to relax and refresh, I traveled, pursued some long-neglected personal interests, and am now getting myself ready for the next challenge.

Seattle, WA, US

• Performed an audit of all software tools, expertise, and use within the companies. Led to a new product and team plan focused on backfilling strategic gaps and removing long held technical debt in a timely quick to.
• Hired an all-new software team to implement that plan, managed vendor relationships for tactical project fill in, and improved processes with a focus on timely delivery of a quality product
• Set and implemented new strategic direction for how software is delivered to and maintained for customers. New strategy reduced support burden by half and increased customer satisfaction.
• Solved tactical issues, from infrastructure challenges holding the team back to reallocating resources to align with changing company and customer priorities
• Built a cohesive cross functional team across Software, Product, Electrical Engineering and Manufacturing
• Worked with senior leadership to provide insights into engineering capacity, allocated budget, resource contention, financial and skills planning and trade-offs within the demand/capacity

Other, ZW

- Recruited to rapidly expand and mature the Technology organization in support of first round funding. Restructured and grew engineering team from 8 engineers to over 20, including key hires such as Principal Architect, QA Manager, and several Senior Engineers.- Introduced an Agile SDLC into the organization, building an engine for consistent delivery.

Wellington, Wellington, NZ

- Technical product leader for the engineering organization providing architectural guidance, overview and employee growth to enable an agile successful team creating a secure, performant platform. Reported to the CTO.- Created custom development solutions by enhancing and extending the core Author-it platform. Managing onsite and remote development teams.

Wellington, Wellington, NZ

- Infrastructure as a Service - taking a mature windows based server product and moving it to a cloud based service provider. Evaluating different providers and technologies (AWS/Azure/Docker/etc) for fit, specifying new integration points to leverage platform, designing the migration process.- Release Management - stepped into a Release Manager role to.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Led the performance and scalability efforts across product development, QA, and operations teams. Developed the strategy for identification of key success factors, creation of metrics, evaluation of results and.
• Responsible for defining quality and efficiency of the Office Web Apps – creating specific performance targets and identifying opportunities for better scalability.
• Created and managed the service hosting plans for the product. Identified and deployed 6 geo-redundant datacenter locations across 4 continents achieving minimal acceptable latency targets.
• Established the syndication platform to enhance the Web Apps marketing strategy, including development of key feature areas (officewebviewer.com, embedding) and strategic partner acquisition.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Initiated and drove a complete redesign of the OneCare interface for v3, focused on a simple, consistent model that communicated key value and differentiating concept in the marketplace.
• Recruited a full UX team, including Design Lead, Designer, Writer, User Researcher and a community outreach expert to build a beta community and effectively turn that into a larger user community after launch.
• Built and put into practice complete user research plan, including customer connection for the wider team, baseline and competitive usability, persona research, and design testing.
• This redesign of OneCare from the ground up included the creation of new branding, visuals, interaction model and restyling key signature elements. Concentrating on the key strategic message and core product values.
• Created three scoped design briefs and chose and managed a $100,000 vendor contract to successful completion, integrating the results back into the overall architecture.
• Grew a team of designers, user researchers, community program managers, writers and developers into a cohesive successful team. Many went on to significant promotions and larger roles within and outside Microsoft.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Led the User Experience team in refining and shipping the first major interface change to Internet Explorer since IE5.
• Served as the public face of IE’s user experience, working to reconnect, excite, and gather feedback from the end user web enthusiast community via the IE blog (averaged over 350 comments per post), developer chats.
• Drove the inclusion of several critical end-stage features derived from user feedback.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Led an incubation exploring ways to unify disparate communications mechanisms for consumers.
• Created initial design concepts as explorations to guide UX and functionality thinking.
• Defined scenarios and developed storyboards to identify and evaluate business opportunities, validating those offerings with customers via focus groups, usability studies, and competitive analyses.
• Determined the market value of the offering along with the appropriate target customer segment, leading to an increased R&D investment in the enterprise offering.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Designed new UX for application sharing leading to a measured 30% increase in user desirability.
• Worked with performance team to increase server throughput over 50% in Live Meeting 2005.
• Integrated multimedia video support via scenario definition, customer feedback, and console designs.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Acted as release PM, a cross team and cross-functional role responsible for triage and issue prediction, handling, resolution and synchronization with Office to release SharePoint on time.
• Designed the product security model still in use today. Drove security process across team, organized engineering security stand downs, on point for all security investigations throughout product cycle.
• Added several key features missing from document libraries within WSS. Additions included multiple document upload and document versioning.

Developed a distributed Java system for thin clients to access existing server based native code