Summary

Experienced Technical Writer, Business Analyst, and Agile Product Owner with a passion for learning new technology – Talented self-starter driven to create accessible, actionable and meaningful products and services that people love to use.

Experience

2022 to 2024, ClearlyAgile – Product Owner Proxy at PwC 

Served as a liaison between business and technical teams for a value workstream enabling the delivery of 7 applications critical to centralizing data and streamlining business processes. 

Led business stakeholders in working sessions to evaluate opportunities across multiple business areas to ensure consistent alignment with the vision and key objectives to reshape business processes with a focus on simplicity, optimization, and automation.

Worked day-to-day to manage the backlog prioritization and support scrum teams in all scrum events including; standup, refinement/grooming, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. 

Connected regularly with the business users and stakeholders to conduct discovery and gather feedback. Worked directly with the development teams, scrum master, and technical leads to accelerate the flow of value, evolve the product, and enable the delivery of MVPs and incremental releases for each application.

2020 to 2021, New York Life (NYL) – Digital Services Product Owner https://www.nylaarp.com/

Worked with business owners and the Agile development team to plan and prioritize the program increment roadmaps for the digital website services, and acquisition experiences – Documented and refined feature and user stories – Presented new feature demos – Represented the team’s work – Coordinated user acceptance testing – Conducted business validation – Worked with internal users to draft appropriate UX content & intuitive messaging as needed

2016 to 2020, TOPS Software Consultant / Product Owner https://topssoft.com/

Managed and implemented methods for capturing customer feedback, collecting customer insights, and drafting knowledge base articles – Used SSMS to assist in data modeling and technical design aspects of the new web applications – Conducted train-the-trainer sessions to ramp up internal staff to support the new application – Coordinated usability tests and user acceptance testing while we built the brand new online SaaS platform

2013 – 2016 TOPS Software Business Systems Analyst / Sr Technical Writer

Worked with SMEs to gather requirements, and assemble prototypes with workflow diagrams to help support the design and technical implementation of the online SaaS solution – Created learning videos – Authored and generate online help to support customer adoption

2005 to 2010, First Advantage – Sr Technical Writer / Business Analyst (First Advantage)

Authored online help for existing applications – Assisted in creating learning videos for new web applications – Wrote user stories and drafted business functional requirements for new feature development teams.

2003 to 2005, AT&T – Sr Technical Writer Consultant (SBC now AT&T)

Worked as a consultant to create high level business requirements and functional requirements for use by middleware developers for the VoIP solution – Wrote technical reference documentation for customer support representatives and to help populate the internal wiki / knowledge base.

2001 to 2003, BioMerieux – Technical Writer II (bioMerieux)

Worked in a highly regulated biotechnology company to launch the documentation suite (user manuals, getting started guides, product sheets, and online help) for the new compact system – Worked with QA & SMEs to review legacy systems and gather business requirements for the new system implementation – Worked with global subsidiary reps to validate the content translations for all customer-facing content, messaging and labeling.

2000 to 2001, Cardiff Software (HP Autonomy) – Technical Writer 

Authored and launched the first cross-platform online help system for the new forms processing software solution ‘Liquid Office’ – Co-authored the printed user guide with an API reference guide appendix, tutorials and server installation and configuration manuals.

Education

1995 to 1999 Missouri State University graduated with BS honors Cum Laude (3.43/4.0)

Bachelor of Science in English (Professional Writing) and Psychology

Certifications

• CSPO – Scrum Alliance – Certified Scrum Product Owner
• Certified SAFe Agile POPM (Product Owner – Product Manager / Scaled Agile Framework)
• CSM – Scrum Alliance – Certified Scrum Master
• IBM – Design Thinking Practitioner

Post Graduate / Professional Courses

• Writing for the Computer Industries – graduate course
• BM Rational Rose Intro Course
• Usability Testing Studies
• Intro to MS Access DBMS
• Database Administration for the Non-Database Administrator
• Microsoft BI, including Power BI, SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis Services
• Core HTML5

Languages

Fluent in Spanish

Skills

• Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, Visio, PowerBI, Teams, Azure DevOps, Relational DB Diagrams & Data Model in SSMS (SQL Server Management)
• Adobe Acrobat Pro, FrameMaker, Illustrator, Captivate, Robohelp, FullStory, Analytics
• Lucidcharts, Axure RP Pro, SnagIt, Camtasia
• Jira, Confluence, Trello, Basecamp, Airtable, Aha!, Planner
• Zendesk, UserSnap, UserIq, Qualtrics, Service Now
• Basic Familiarity with HTML, XML,  CSS, JavaScript, APIs, Git