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Work Experience

Summary

I am a seasoned technology veteran with over 20 years of industry experience. I am passionate about helping organizations drive change through being customer-driven and creating meaningful products through modern software engineering that impacts people's lives. I am also an experienced people leader focused on growing and leading successful multi-disciplinary teams. My philosophy centers around building a strong people foundation through collaboration and mentorship, focusing on engineering excellence and choosing pragmatic processes and tools while being driven by customer-focused outcomes. I have had the opportunity to manage and lead a broad range of teams, including:

  • Managing teams starting from small startup teams to large complex multinational organizations involving stakeholders across Asia, North America and Europe
  • Working in consulting with Big 5 firms, enterprise application product companies, and private and public sector organizations.
  • Running my startup for two years as well as being a senior leader for growing technology companies
  • Wide range of experiences, including organizational strategy, vendor management, stakeholder management, project delivery, operational delivery and running outsourced and offshore operations

Experience

Vivid Seats

January 2021 - Present

Head of Engineering (Senior Director)
Responsibilities include:

  • Provided oversight of 73 people in the Software Engineering Division and reported directly to the CTO. Direct reports include Engineering Directors, Principal Engineers and Delivery Leads.
  • Development of a go-forward technology strategy in the 2-year time horizon in partnership with the CTO
  • Developing the annual engineering strategy to support the technology strategy
  • Planning and managing an 11 million-dollar-a-year annual budget
  • Partnering with product management organization to leverage technology capabilities to enable product roadmap

Achievements include:

  • Build an engineering organization that can effectively respond to changing business needs by transforming the engineering organization into a capability-first, capability-driven technology organization.
  • Enabled the business to effectively react to business needs by developing a fiscally responsible and  flexible delivery model that leverages various partnership models as well as an effective co-op program
  • Raised the level of engineering by establishing clear architectural principles and engineering disciplines
  • Rebuild the post-pandemic engineering organization by re-structuring and hiring over 30 people (and doubling the organization) in a year.
  • Achieved a lower-than-industry standard of unplanned attrition rate by running an effective employee management program that included a robust continuous growth and feedback plan
  • Matured the product and engineering to be outcome driven by building a strategic planning framework that focused on continuous delivery and investment-driven planning
  • Re-architected vital systems, including our E-comm, payment and loyalty program capabilities

ThoughtWorks

April 2020 - December 2020

Principal Consultant

Recruited to be the CTO for one of ThoughtWorks strategic Canadian accounts

Responsibilities include

  • Provided oversight for 44 people in the account across five projects and staff from Canada, Ecuador and Brazil. Roles managed include project managers, software developers, quality analysts, UX designers and business analysts.
  • Co-lead the account with the Client Principal as well as the Delivery Principal.
  • Provide overarching technical oversight for the entire account.
  • Provide strategic leadership support to key TELUS executives.
  • Remediate the delivery structure of the account to focus on providing business value to the client.
  • Actively coach and grow team members within the account.
  • Clients include a Canadian Telecom company as well as a Global Online Accounting Software company from New Zealand.

WE

June 2016 - April 2020

Chief Technology Officer

Recruited as the first CTO to help drive organizational scale through technology

Responsibilities include

  • Oversight for up to 43 people in the Technology Division, whose scope includes IT infrastructure for offices in Toronto as well as 7 other cities in the US, Canada, UK, Kenya and Ecuador, helpdesk for 1000 people globally, software engineering and digital product management
  • Act as a steward for the organization as a member of the Executive Team by developing organizational strategies that align with the organization's business priorities and outcomes.
  • Key strategic partner for initiatives like Digital Transformation and Evolution
  • Drive broader operational maturity and efficiencies for the organization as a member of the COO team.
  • Act as Chief Architect for the organization but providing final sign-off before going into development
  • Develop strategic relationships with our key technology vendors and partners to drive the right strategic outcome for the organization.
  • Partners with Business Units to solve for organizational needs through the Technology Division
  • Grooms next generation of leaders in technology for the organization
  • Coach other business unit leaders in areas of operations and product management

Achievements include

  • The division is a thought leader in product management, organizational discipline and people management.
  • We reduced our overall spending by removing unnecessary complexity from our systems. Two key examples include reducing our expenditures in e-comm by 500% annually while increasing our capability by migrating platforms and reducing spend and time to market by shifting work of creating content on our platform from engineers to the marketing team.
  • I introduced Agile software development by honing in on iterative development, focus and discipline. Agile adoption resulted in higher engagement scores for division employees (highest in the organization), the ability to recruit employees driven by learning and growth, and the ability to shift to other, more appropriate technologies.
  • Created the Digital Product Management department and introduced the role of product owners and product managers who can clearly define product requirements to drive user engagement on our products. This department also leveraged Design Thinking as a means to get a better understanding of user needs to lower waste.
  • I shifted the organizational thinking from tactically delivering apps and projects to strategically creating capabilities to enable the organization to scale more effectively with lower CapEx and OpEx costs.

Kinetic Cafe

May 2014 - June 2016

VP, Engineering

Recruited to transform the organization from an agency to a product company. Focused on revamping the software delivery methodologies, project delivery processes and hiring practices.

Responsibilities include

  • Oversight for 6 Project Managers, 3 Dev Ops Engineers, 2 QA and 30 software engineers
  • Act as Chief Architect and provides application, infrastructure and network architectural guidance on the core platform and client-facing projects
  • Strategic technology partner for our clients
  • Groom the next generation of technology leaders.
  • Ensure delivery for all of our key strategic projects.

Accomplishments include:

  • Transforming the organization from an agency to a product company by architecting and delivering our go-to-market product, the Kinetic Commerce Platform
  • Building a culture of engineering excellence and continuous growth
  • Introduced modern software practices such as Behaviour Driven Development
  • Established our DevOps culture and Continuous Delivery
  • Consistently Deliver to production every two weeks.
  • Platform metrics:
  • 110 transactions per second / 800 ms response time
  • 100% uptime since July 15, 2015
  • 0 Sev 1 in production
  • 85% - 95% Unit Test Code Coverage

WordJack Media

May 2012 - May 2014

Chief Technology Officer

Participated in the creation of WordJack Media by providing technical advice in 2010 and joined the company full-time in May 2012 to rescue the software development effort at the startup

Responsibilities include:

  • Managing a budget of $300K per year
  • Managing a team of external vendors to deliver software
  • Manage the infrastructure that supports the company as well as the 150 clients' portfolios
  • Manage the company's technology roadmap.

Accomplishments include:

  • Launching the first iteration of the company's information and work management platform within three months of joining the company with the staff of 1 part-time vendor
  • Platform increased the efficiency of marketing managers from managing 20 clients to 50 clients resulting in an efficiency increase of 150%
  • The technology platform also increased the company evaluation by 5X instead of 1X, typical of an advertising agency.

Points International

May 2010 - May 2012

Director, Software Engineering

Recruited to assist in the revamping of the Software Engineering organization and the day-to-day running of 25 engineers across the software, quality and principal engineers with the addition of 10 contractors

Responsibilities include:

  • I actively partnered with multiple facets of the business, including the Marketing and Accounting departments.
  • Participates in monthly Business Update meetings alongside the other executives of the company to discuss the ongoing health of the business
  • Co-chair the Change Approval Board to ensure the quality of the product delivery.
  • Accountable for the overall platform architecture as the Architecture Working Group Chair
  • Championing the adoption of Scrum and Agile at Points
  • Managing the yearly Software Engineering budget upwards of $2M/year

Accomplishments include:

  • Process changes resulted in the ability to provide consistent delivery.
  • Enhanced the people talent capability by:
  • Improving the talent assessment process to attract and evaluate the best talent in the Software Engineering Group
  • Instituted weekly one-on-one for each team member and quarterly performance reviews for the team to ensure timely feedback to the team members
  • Sponsored better external company software culture awareness through social media channels such as blogging (lifeatpoints.com), Flickr and youtube
  • Achieved a 100% retention rate in software engineering  in 2011 despite being in an active market
  • Enhanced the development capability by:
  • Formed and executed the plan to convert from developing in Java to Python for client-facing apps to accelerate the development
  • Introduced BDD to create meaningful documentation and decrease the time to translate stories to test, and develop better visibility for product managers to understand what's being tested in their product
  • Successfully implemented Continuous Integration increasing team productivity by 2 hours per day.
  • Achieved a 0 Sev 1 while introducing 5 new products and features and 30 new installations in 2011

Canpages

October 2009 - June 2010

Director, Software Development

Brought in to manage a development team responsible for Canpages' web properties, including Canpages.ca, Gigpark.com, Ziplocal.ca and the Immersifind platform

Responsibilities include:

  • Designing and implementing a new web architecture to deploy multiple web and mobile applications combining existing data sources with external APIs like Twitter, Facebook and Google/Bing Maps
  • Formalizing Agile Development processes for the Software and Product Development teams

Accomplishments include:

  • Launched new mobile applications for the iPhone and Android platforms

Zoocasa

October 2008 - October 2009

Director, Technology

Brought in to lead and manage an existing development team using Ruby on Rails

Responsibilities include:

  • Determining and managing the scope, budget, strategy and architecture of the technology group
  • Liaison between the technology team and business team as the technology stakeholder on the business management team
  • Maturing the IT organization by formalizing roles and responsibilities, developing new processes such as a formal SDLC and product development process to ensure a stable technology delivery process for the organization and introducing architectural principles and development principles that are specific to the Zoocasa organization to assist in more independent and sustainable development

Accomplishments include:

  • Launched new mobile applications for the iPhone

Continuing Care e-Health

November 2005 - October 2008

Strategic Technology Lead

Recruited to build the Transition competency whose focus is on assisting end-user organization transition support functions from one organization to another and to be an active managing member of the overall Solutions Group and as an active member of the Solutions Group Senior Management team

Responsibilities include:

  • Providing Strategic Technical direction to ensure the supportability, sustainability, scalability and functionality of the e-Referrals program
  • Liaising between the technology team and business team as the technology stakeholder on the business management team

Operations Lead

Responsibilities include:

  • Oversight for 2 managers, 4 Business analysts, 10 support staff
  • Ensuring the solutions being developed by the Enterprise Architects and Solution Architects align to the Ontario E-Health Blueprint
  • Initiating and implementing the 360-degree Architecture review process to ensure that solutions built meet the security, privacy, scalability and supportability mandate of the Ministry of Health
  • Developing the yearly budget, outlining the yearly deliverables, negotiating the mandate and the marketing of expertise of the function area to our delivery clients
  • Liaising between key business stakeholders and business executive management to the Solutions Group
  • Creating the Application Management Support team for CCeH-developed applications. This included the development of roles, responsibilities, processes, tools and the staffing of the appropriate resources in order to deliver support services to the end-users
  • Acting as a management liaison between the business stakeholders and the technology stakeholders of the e-Referrals product

Accomplishments include:

  • Developed the Transition Methodology and Framework to ensure that the support of an application can be transitioned in a consistent and repeatable fashion. The Transition Methodology and Framework includes the development of processes and performance metrics guidelines to assist organizations in developing the support functions within their organization
  • Developed the Organization Charter for the Application Support Management Group and was a member of the ASMG, which also comprised the CIO of the OACCAC, Director of Operations of the OACCAC, Executive Lead of the Continuing Care E-Health Program and Director of Operations of SSHA, who are all technology stakeholders of the applications supported.
  • Co-developed an Operational Readiness Framework to assist clients assess the readiness of a solution to be run in operations mode

Deloitte

January 2003 - November 2005

Consulting Manager

Responsibilities include:

  • Being the Global Program Lead in an outsourced Application Development Maintenance and Support solution for a global manufacturing client supporting over 20 applications and over 40 technologies
  • Oversight for 2 regional managers, 8 team leads, and 40 support staff across Canada, the United States, India, Singapore and Japan
  • Assisting in the creation of the change management required for the client to adopt from an in-source support model to an outsourced support model
  • Developing the processes and assisted the client in changing from a demand-based planning model to a capacity-based planning model for development
  • Working in collaboration with the Deloitte global resource centers to develop the people strategy and build the delivery team from the ground up, including onboarding, organizational structuring, organizational integration, knowledge transfer and ongoing capability development.
  • Developing and managing the ongoing knowledge transfer and knowledge continuity plan and strategy
  • Developing and managing resource retention and rotation strategy
  • Designing and implementation of team reporting structures, end-to-end support processes
  • Designing of the development and deployment of processes, infrastructure, tools and performance metrics development and reporting

Accomplishments include:

  • Running the most profitable support program for the client account while meeting the contractual obligations of 5% reduction of cost to clients year-on-year
  • Remote Teams achieved CMM Level 5 by leveraging ITIL
  • Initiated and sponsored the project's reporting data-mart and day-to-day web-based operational tools to better analyze our support capability, develop more relevant performance metrics and assist in continuous performance activities
  • The highest retention rate of people in the India resource centre. The retention rate was over 90%, while the rest of the resource centre had a retention rate of less than 60%

Siebel Systems

November 2000 - December 2002

Consulting Manager

Roles include Configuration Lead, Technical Lead and Architect for Siebel Marketing/Analytics for various clients

CHC Working Well

September 2000 - November 2000

Project Lead

Lead the implementation of the First Appointment Booking System

Cambridge Technology Partners

May 2000 - September 2000

Consultant

Implemented asset management product for mining client

Positionwatch

May 1998 - May 2000

Project Leader

Designed, developed and maintained e-commerce initiatives