As co-founder and chief executive officer, it is my absolute privilege to lead a diverse, cross-functional team of brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs. Locoal is an Austin, TX based sustainability technology and up-cycling company focused on delivering the next generation of climate mitagation systems. Since 2016, Locoal has been committed to ending the wasteful process of filling landfills with wood waste through innovative gasification and bioconversion technologies and commercialization of sustainable co-products created in the conversion process.Global Problems, Locoal Solutions.

As a development product owner (DPO), USAA's title for the SAFe PMPO role, I partner with our IT agile teams to drive requirements in support of our Savings and CD's portfolio. Working in both product strategy and application development arenas is a great fit for anyone who enjoys being at the point of execution where the ideas, plans, and focused efforts of many teams culminate into cutting edge enhancements to how users interact with our products, services, and financial tools.

As an operations manager, I worked primarily in optimizing an 18-person team's workflow through automation and leaning out many of the cumbersome and unnecessary process steps to achieve a much better value ratio. As a leader, I also worked to specialize half of the work force through a peer mentorship and development program aimed at maximizing the comparative advantage that could be achieved by having paired teams that shared a common backlog and allowed them to self-form to divide the work. This concept came out of an IT best practice of paired programming and reduced their number of errors per work-hour by approximately 400% and improved their average time to market per task (handling time) five minutes to slightly more than two.

As an IT project manager, I was responsible for ensuring that all planning, progress updates, scope creep risk management, and communication routines were in alignment with delivering high quality technical changes that met both the scope and market windows needed to help USAA achieve its mission in supporting the military community as their financial provider of choice. In addition, I was responsible for managing all financial aspects for my area regarding project forecast, spend, and demand.