• Brought a new streaming data product from inception to launch which transforms 600 billion monthly events from the new Unified Player into ~6.5 billion customer streaming sessions, all with less than six-minute latencies from customer action to processed data.• Drove adoption of the new streaming data product across marketing analytics, royalties, ads financial operations, AI-driven content recommendations, AI fraud detection and AI egregious account sharing, all while end-of-lifing bespoke pipelines costing >$500k annually.• Identified overlapping investments in internal data contract management products, redirecting one product team onto higher priority investments and saving $1.5m per year.• Developed a prototype data product planning process and data product maturity model to help mature a data product organization formed from 3 separate companies (Disney, Hulu & Bamtech).

Azure's CI/CD pipeline serves tens of thousands of engineers, but the division had little insight into adoption of both security and testing best practices, from segregation of duty policies, to consistency of use of key security tools, to safe deployment practices. I mapped out a northstar of a data- & policy-aware CI/CD pipeline, and commenced a multi-stage product development process starting with integration of telemetry from dozens of internal tools to create a executive-level view of the landscape; followed by refining and deepening our data product to automate change management audit responses and drive internal best practices adoption; and then began experimenting with deeper analytics and data science in selected verticals.

Promoted to lead a medium-sized Big Data engineering team building consumer profiles on Azure Data Lake derived from trillions of daily Windows & Xbox device events, processing over a petabyte of data daily to target & deliver ~16 billion emails & ~24 billion in-product impressions annually.My primary challenge was to maintain our rich, mature gamer dataset (with which we delivered Xbox Year in Review, winning a 2016 Games-related Webby award) while building a Windows 10 targeting data set from the ground up. Freeing existing resources to work on Windows 10 was step 1: keeping the lights on for our Xbox data set required every developer we had, leaving little time left to deliver new capabilities. After working with the team to understand what was holding us back, I determined that it was our pipeline automation suite. I drove adoption of new orchestration tools, cutting monthly developer hours focused on maintenance by more than half (from 80% to 30%). When complete, I was able to move half my team to building a Windows 10 data product, while continuing to grow the Xbox dataset for the first time in years (and with half the staff).Building the Windows 10 targeting data set was a matter of constant adaptation, as I partnered with Microsoft's Privacy & Legal team to respond and adapt to the Dutch Data Protection Agency's 2017 finding that Windows 10 violated Dutch and EU privacy laws.My largest accomplishment was reducing latency on our triggered email campaigns from 7 days to ~30 minutes. Part of this was technical, moving upstream to less processed, lower-latency data sources; as well as building a new signal engine which automated triggers on our email platform. Part was people & process, convincing our operations team to take greater risks, and working with our relationship marketing teams to build their low-latency campaigns based on the data available rather than their experience northstar.

Took a career side-step to shift from data-driven BizOps work to a 100% data-centric role with Xbox to modernize my data skills, which were years out of date. My task was to build reporting & analytics capabilities for Microsoft’s currency-stored value (CSV) business. My biggest success was convincing Xbox leadership, via detailed customer analytics and A/B experimentation, that a supposed $17m revenue opportunity with legacy Xbox 360 users was actually worth a mere $1m-$2m. But the experiment's results showed that a small change in the Xbox One UX displaying a customer's remaining CSV balance could drive increased spend among existing customers. When that feature was delivered, our hypothesis held true, generating millions in revenue and removing an accounting liability from our balance sheet.

Led a small analytics & business operations team innovating the analytics of customer usage & deployment profiles to help Office 365’s Enterprise subscribers through major re-platforming events. This was the most challenging (and exhausting) role of my career: my job was to deliver bad news about significantly disruptive change news to customers, partners and internal audiences, all balanced with positives about new Office 365 capabilities. While the organization was already investing in technical solutions to lower the scope and negative impact of future disruptive change, Microsoft's long successful on-prem business model and policies would never adapt to an evergreen cloud service. While far outside the scope of my job, I advocated for a break from the company's traditional 10-year software support model. It took years of networking and lobbying, but I successfully convinced executives across the organization to adotp a new software support model designed for the cloud that mostly (but not completely) satisfied customers, partner, and product teams.

Visual Studio, Expression Studio

Oracle JDeveloper, Application Server & Database