Herndon, Virginia, United States
I've spent more than a decade in project and program management in tech, and I'll be honest: a lot of people still think that means Gantt charts and status updates. It does not. To me, it's always been about helping people see a better future, and then building the road to get there. These days, I get to do that at Zapier, where I run our event programs. Whether it's an intimate in-person retreat or ZapConnect, our annual virtual conference with 12,000+ attendees, the goal is always the same: help people walk away knowing exactly how AI and automation can take the tedious stuff off their plate, so they can spend their time on the work that actually matters. I have yet to meet anyone whose dream is to copy data from one place to another. But I've met a lot of people who light up when they realize they don't have to anymore. I am genuinely excited to sit down at my laptop every day, knowing my job is just the fun stuff: the ideation, the creation, the collaboration, and I get to automate the execution. That's what I'm here for.
At Brillient Corporation, I expanded into the Digital Transformation space. Although the Intelligent Solutions team of which I am a part does a fair amount of work in the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) space, the first five projects I have run have been focused on IDP (Intelligent Document Processing). Two of these projects began their workflows as physical documents - specifically microfilm and paper - but with my IoT background, I'm accustomed to marrying physical and electronic workflows. I coordinate with subcontractors or internal teams for physical scanning, technical experts and developers for the data extraction and other project deliverables, and then report back out to upper management and customer stakeholders as needed. I am currently using a combination of Microsoft Project for customer deliverables and Asana for my own task management.
I was one of the earliest employees at this IoT start up company, and as such I helped to build the foundation of the project workflow from the ground up. This required me to work closely with each team, from Sales to Operations, including upper management and Engineering, to understand their needs at every phase of the project. I experimented with different project management tools to meet the needs of our teams: the Operations team was always on the road or in the field and therefore needed mobile friendliness above all else; we had to be able to create visualizations on the fly for the Sales and executive teams; I needed an end-to-end solution that allowed actions like linking dependencies, syncing with the Engineering team's Jira boards, all within a start-up's budget. As a result of my deep-dives into each team's workflows and processes and my central position in the company, I worked as an interim Director of Operations for a year, and I ran the Customer Success team for the last two years of my tenure there. Although I decided to pivot back to my full-time passion for program management, my time running the Customer Success team fundamentally changed the way I looked at project management by reminding me that at the end of the day, the only real measure of project success is how thrilled all of my stakeholders are with the outcome.
In my role as a project manager in this software company, I was the sole manager of more than a dozen projects and change requests from 5-8 clients at a time, both domestically and internationally. I interfaced at least weekly with each client to ensure continuity and quality, and to actively identify potential issues/necessary replanning, in both English and Spanish. In order to achieve the project's goals, I coordinate with multiple teams of subject experts, and serve as the point of contact for internal finance department, internal senior management, and all client contacts for each active project. In the last year of my employment at Telarix, the company was pivoting from the largest telecom customers to smaller, quicker-moving and less well-funded customers in order to maintain their impressive growth. We recognized that some of our processes and tools, while appropriate for multimillion dollar projects that spanned several years, were inappropriate for our newer clients. Therefore, I collaborated with our internal technical teams to identify redundancies, select lighter weight tools for reporting, and develop new internal coordination methodologies that allowed our experts to work on multiple projects in parallel without causing confusion or burnout. After having met with our internal teams for several months, I developed and finally rolled out a new project process to all of our global teams.