What to do with aging software on fragile infrastructure and a mountain of tech debt when it pays the bills, has the largest customer base and the most complete offering in its market segment?Once hired, I got busy building a Product team - defined the Product roles, integrated the roles into the organization and SLDC, and nurtured existing talent while hiring seasoned product folks to join in on the fun. Then we focused on defining a roadmap by evaluating existing commitments, assessing customer requests & sentiment, understanding our competitors, sharing roadmaps with our partners, applying our experiences with related business problems in other industries, listening, brainstorming, failing-fast... Sprints balancing innovation, usability improvements, measures to reduce code maintenance costs, improve performance, and the kitchen sink for good measure. All of it operationalized so we can repeat as well as course correct when and as needed.Great! We went from not knowing anything beyond the next release to a vision of where we wanted to go and what we needed to build to get there. Now what? What's missing, can be improved, can be optimized?❖ New Product Opportunity - identify, elicit, assess new product ideas. Strategize, analyze, design, plan, scope, coordinate, market, iterate. Establish the vision and path for an initial BI offering to be expanded to include data management and data analytics offerings in the future.❖ Technology leadership - lead Software Engineering and Quality Assurance teams onshore and offshore as well as architecture and Dev Ops functions.❖ SDLC and Release Mgmt - move from ad hoc releases to more frequent and regimented release schedule. ❖ Process optimization - institute UX team and processes, transition from a Customer Support to a Customer Success model, CMM assessment and improvement plan.

Responsible for developing and leading a team of highly productive product managers across multiple roles including product owners and business analysts.Responsible for defining the vision for a portfolio of ZS-Javelin applications overseeing investment strategy, and successful on-time, on-budget execution of product strategy and roadmap. Work to highlight ZS' distinct competency in analytics including evolving the service and software offering to include predictive analytics solutions.Maintain product backlog and roadmap through constant collaboration with customers, ZS subject matter experts, professional services, and the software development team.Establish and maintain strategic alliances from identifying partnership opportunities to defining legal terms & conditions, co-development strategy, joint go-to-market approach, and partnership evolution strategy.Instituted the collection and evaluation of metrics in order to track outcomes against objectives and improvement areas. Metrics defined across areas such as marketing (win/loss, market share, customer satisfaction), quality (defect leakage, bug identification rates), support (case open/close rate), and operations (license compliance, SaaS hosting).Identified and implemented an approach to improve execution of Agile development approach and incorporation of new roles (User Experience, Customer Support, Architecture) resulting in renewed team collaboration and motivation, increased efficiency in developing feature enhancements, reduced cost of development, and improved quality of product releases.Established a key customer advisory forum in order to maintain a pulse on the market.Present and solicit ideas with customer stakeholders and executives.

Led a team of product managers responsible for defining roadmap and producing quality, comprehensive requirements for a portfolio of enterprise tax applications.Improved knowledge sharing and collaboration across product marketing, development, quality assurance, support, sales, professional services, and training to ensure each release maximized ROI and customer satisfaction.Evaluation of investment strategy for existing and potentially new SaaS, tax applications. Defined migration strategy for outdated, desktop applications being redeveloped on the new Corptax platform.

Led a team of developers, architects, and test/quality assurance in developing an integrated Deal/Price Management solution within Oracle's Order and Contract Mgmt suite. Team received positive recognition for ingenuity and efficiency by Oracle executives. Rewarded 2 patents for unique innovation.Collaborated with and provided training to global sales, support, and professional services teams as part of Deal Management go-to-market activities. Achieved unprecedented sales revenue and customer growth through a targeted commercialization approach.Lead case development and analysis as part of patent application process.Brought in to lead a project struggling to get off the ground through redefining and reinvigorating the Agile process in developing unique predictive analytics solutions focused on meeting specific business needs.Enhanced the role of the product management team through meticulous definition of user stories and acceptance criteria alongside involvement with design reviews, test plan reviews, and triaging. Improved collaboration across all project sub-teams resulting in improved efficiency and quality.Led a team focused on evaluating and identifying market opportunities employing predictive analytics leveraging Oracle Fusion MiddlewareWorked closely with data scientists, architects, UX designers, and engineering in defining a framework by which to efficiently develop pre-packaged predictive analytics applications.Launched predictive analytics solutions focused on sales (improving lead quality, opportunity conversion, sales collaboration), marketing (improving marketing campaign and event effectiveness), and human capital management (identifying and addressing performance and attrition risks).

Acquired by Oracle