Work Experience

Duke Energy

After joining Duke Energy as a Sr. Agilist, I first led the transition of a newly formed support team (supporting a large product portfolio - 10+ products) to Agile ways of working - specifically the Kanban framework, adapting it to optimize team health & dynamics. While doing so, I recognized that I could be more impactful as a Product Manager. The idea of creating products that touch people's lives for years in a meaningful way, was extremely fascinating. Hence, within 6 months, I transitioned to a Product Manager role.

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In my role as a PM, I managed a growing product portfolio of 20+ applications that rolled under the Electric Transmission Vegetation Management value stream at Duke Energy. This product portfolio was built to address critical pain points associated with the previously manual, vegetation data collection, loading, work planning, work execution and quality assurance workflow. The product portfolio uses machine learning based enhanced predictive analysis models at it core to to build highly cost-effective for annual vegetation maintenance, weekly emergent work, aerial saw work and herbicide application work. These complex workflows involved the following :

1. Collection of LIDAR images  via bi-annual aerial flights (to build annual maintanence workplans) , collection of images via weekly aerial flights equipped with HD camera and field data collection by transmission & distribution crew on a daily basis (to address weekly emergent work).

2. Predictive analysis to identify risk based threats to the grid.

3. Strategically prioritizing and planning vegetation maintenance work which allows for progressive reduction of O&M costs over time

4. Execution and validation of vegetation management work per regulatory guidelines.

5. Overall simplification of the workflow through the product portfolio to reduce manual labor.

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In addition to this, I also

1. Created a Skill Progression Path and Skill Assessment for Product Managers at Duke Energy

2. Lead the Enterprise Product Management Community of Practice at Duke Energy. The CoP is structured around the product skill areas, with one skill area per series and each series having 4-5 sessions. This has garnered significant interest and raving reviews from all parts of the enterprise with over 50 participants in each session. This has significantly allowed the organization to accelerate it's maturity in Product Management practices

Cox Automotive

As a Sr. Scrum Master, I served as part of 4 software development teams within a single value stream. My objective was to help my teams achieve their full potential by optimizing and streamlining agile ways of working.

 

Partnering with amazing product managers, engineering managers and tech leads, enabled us to run continuous product discovery and continuous product delivery on a dual track.

 

We explored activities such as hack days, mob programming, test driven development, launching with feature flags etc. to bring product and engineering organizations closer which then enabled us to achieve the dual track framework.  This involved coaching product managers on the impact of tech debt and product quality as well as involving engineering in product discovery activities such as user interviews, analytics, site visits etc. Both product and engineering groups were also coached on how to derive maximum value from agile ceremonies and simple agile metrics which further improved the team dynamics and health.

 

This also required nurturing partnerships with leaders at all organizational levels to stay aligned across the organizational structure.

Nationwide Insurance

Hired as a contract Scrum Master (TekSystems) in January of 2018, and later converted to a full time position in July 2018. At this time, the Harleysville Insurance was newly acquired by Nationwide Insurance and was embarking on an wide Agile transformation so as to integrate all systems and workflows between the 2 organizations. This initiative was also expected to significantly reduce O&M costs at Harleysville business unit. Being part of the core transformation team, our objectives included

1. Optimizing the staffing model based on objective demand criteria. 

2. Creating a strategic product taxonomy with individual cost/value projections and actuals. 

3. Implementing a lean monthly cost governance framework which would also oversee outcomes of discovery/sprint zero, risks analysis and execution/delivery of the value streams.

4. Helping the software development teams that owned the legacy Harleysville applications to embrace agile delivery so as to reduce lead and cycle times. 

As a result, the core transformation team was able to reduce the O&M costs by $1.5M within the first 6 months of the transformation of journey. This was achieved by

1. Sunsetting legacy applications, combing overlapping value streams and creating a strategic product portfolio

2. Creating a leaner and flat-er organizational structure enabled by objective data-driven prioritization of business initiatives.

3. Embracing newer technologies such as devops and cloud platform which enabled development teams to be truly agile.

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LiquidHub - Investment Banking Client

 

 

Although hired as a Business Analyst/Manager, the main responsibility of this role was to help a single development team move from a waterfall framework to an agile framework. This role served as the Agile Transformation team leader. The highlights of this role included:

1. Establishing agile ceremonies at a 3 week cadence with minimal impact to team productivity and project delivery

2. Facilitating agile ceremonies effectively and efficiently.

3. Coaching team members as well as stakeholders on the purpose of the agile ceremonies

4.  Being JIRA admin for the team and creating data driven JIRA dashboards for the team and for the leaders at the different organizational layers were part of the role

5. Conduct workshops such as user story mapping, user story writing etc. on behalf of the business product owner.

6. Help team proactively identify risks and escalate/mitigate them.

7. Provide consistent and frequent reports on project execution to all levels of organizational leaders.

David's Bridal

At David's Bridal, I started off as a manual software tester and then went on to become the lead QA Analyst. This role involved leading globally distributed QA teams to seamlessly hand-off work back and forth over a 24 hour period, across time zones each day. This was necessary to meet thr project schedule.

 

This role also involved creating project test strategy, determining test level-of-effort and providing them to QA manager while supporting the rest of the on-site and offsite QA team for test execution.

 

Later on, also acted as a supporting business analyst shadowing a senior BA, for minor projects. This helped acquire skills that were necessary to grow/transition into a business analyst role later in my career