Lynn Slater

OBJECTIVE

Product manager role requiring technical and business skills.  Management duties are acceptable but best position would include a technical hands-on component.

SUMMARY

Very technical business adept contributor. Able to quickly master the state of a product and understand which things are easy and which are complex given this current state. Can access technologies and approaches. Able to collect needs and wishes from various sources, rank and consolidate these, find the synergies between the possible features, validate with engineering, and weigh all against timelines and resources to create immediate plans along with follow-up vision. Can make direct technical contributions or create prototypes to explore and explain design concepts.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Practice Manager: MetaByte (Client: Cisco eMarketing Group)                                      4/03 – Present

Interface between business and tech teams for Campaign Management and Lead Management. Also technical expert in campaign management. Learned how a big company uses the CRM datamart product I helped develop.

·         Key Technologist: Performed complex E.piphany product upgrade while preserving client’s intellectual investment. Worked product issues with vendor. Successfully trained business team how to use new features and work around bugs. Wrote custom “user experience accelerator” JavaScript for field validation and transfer between web apps.

·         Business Interface, Campaign Management: Was the point of contact for the business. Drove business team through complex trade-off discussions regarding data and practices to reach a data mart elements and CRM practices redesign to reflect current best practices. Converted these to specs and drove the implementation.

·         Business Interface, Lead Management: Business interface for a lead routing system. Met with various teams, trained, collected requirements, translated to technical requirements, validated designs and implementation. Drove the business to new lead management processes and walked these through the engineering process.

Director of Delivery Services: E.piphany 9/97– 4/03

Roles shifted to match needs of growing company and included engineering, services management, sales, training, application development, and development management.

·         Key Technologist: Co-holder of patent #6, 212,524 on core adaptive data mart technology. Designed and coded “EpiChannel”, the data exchange engine. Performance enhanced database semantics. Pioneered port to Oracle.

·         Professional Services and QA Management: Took over services and QA during a revenue recognition crises. Managed clients and stabilized projects to achieve revenue goals. Established delivery mythologies. Established product QA standards. Collected and communicated product needs to engineering. As services department grew I acted as senior technical resource and escalation liaison. Also created web sites for time entry, personal tracking, and knowledge distribution.

·         Sales: We had no sales other than 4 “miracle” deals brought in by the founders at the company’s inception Identified that the sales paradigm was not resonating with the IT side of the customers and changed it to articulate our technical strengths as well as our business functionality. Created a basic layer explanation that helped customers “get it”. Also created killer deployment demo designed to draw out and answer points of technical reservation. Went on sales calls, listened to customers, identified their true needs. Articulated to the business how the product would match the needs and articulated to IT how the produce would fit their environment. The result was that E.piphany was put on the CRM map with 10 deals in three quarters. The deals were all fixed price and fixed timeline, so the corporate reputation and P&L depended on expert perspective on what was required, on what the product could do, and what could be configured or enhanced by the deployment engineers. Supervised the deployment of all the deals. Authored “Sales Success Plan” adapted as the model for the sales force.

·         Training Management: Growth required that others learn how to fit, scope, and configure our product. Created training program from scratch including writing material, acquiring classrooms, and personally teaching 300 students. Showed others how to replicate our deployment success. Managed a staff of six. Remained a source of product features based on observations of student experience, performed deep quality scans of the product, and remained the most frequent contributor of technical articles to corporate knowledge base. Also wrote training registration web with real-time recommendations.

·         Manager, Application Development: We had purchased a new technology and greater market penetration needed partially pre-configured solutions. Re-joined engineering to develop a tricky reporting application on e-commerce solutions enhanced by the real-time technology E.piphany had just acquired. To obtain better vision, I developed a working e-commerce web engine. This articulated the synergy of the two technologies so well that it became the core of sales demos. Took over management of all applications development delivering eight on time products. Developed core reporting application templates that are the basis of all E.piphany analytic reporting.

·         Key Technologist: Rejoined core engineering when product’s accumulation of entropy threatened its continued development. E.piphany is metadata centric, and I took over metadata management, established development standards, and took over import/export technology. Developed scripting language and restructured the metadata to create a build and initialization process that was sane, expandable, and dealt with greater complexity in less time. These changes allowed E.piphany to deploy a much richer product and remain competitive.

·         Internationalization: It was time to go global, but applications and the analytic product where hindered by a poor internationalization approach and vision requiring serialized steps. Developed an I18n internationalization tool based on portable databases with embedded editors and which acknowledged that code and translations are works in semi-independent progress and that synchronization must be between moving targets. This technology displaced the various other I18n paradigms used in the other products, became the first technology to be shared across all product lines, and allowed E.piphany to go global.

Director of Architecture: Filoli Information Systems           4/97 – 9/97

Joined to provide architectural direction for what was believed to be a funded effort to create a next generation product. Analyzed current product, selected what features most needed to exist, created and got buy-in for porting/conversion plans and formed team to start the effort. Also oversaw integration of a distributed processing model into the data model, prepared plans to incorporate Tuxedo, investigated Java options, I/O performance tested the installed site, and wrote tools to support data model analysis and data redistribution as the number of installed sites increased from one. Organized job fair when company lost funding.

Director of Architecture: Sapient             12/96 – 4/97

Provided technical oversight of three call center projects. Defined nature of the Director of Architecture role and its relationship to other parts of the organization. Established regular training, cross project technical meetings, technical reviews, and a data exchange knowledge center.

System Architect: TRW Financial Systems           03/94 – 12/96

Architect on 1.5 Terabyte data warehouse feed via the conversion of 2400 different input formats.

·         Reviewed RFP and saw that it was unworkable. Met with customer, sold an alternative vision involving practical steps, sold the customer on TRW and landed a business process reengineering engagement. In the engagement meet with various business users, collected and analyzed needs, wrote the specification. Selected hardware and software and oversaw deployment including one major round of changes.

·         Evaluated and recommended software and hardware, wrote RAID DASD performance test suite, published “RAID 101” that is still cited as a reference.

Smalltalk Development Release Process Engineer: Sybase     10/92 – 02/94

Created practical Smalltalk development environment.

Group Leader: Independence Technologies      07/89 – 10/92

Early joiner who played many roles and had two products in this transaction processing middleware startup.

·         Created OLTP efficient object interfaces to relational databases. Created a data exchange product.

·         Process Engineering: established a set of release procedures, shared makefiles, documentation extractors, version control and CM utilities, and editor enhancements to allow the company to efficiently build and release multiple configurations on multiple platforms.

·         Created Drug Utilization Review utility that detects drug prescription mistakes.

OTHER EXPERIENCE

Senior Engineer (Multi-Media):  TRW (ESL)

Senior Engineer, GUI:  Silvar-Lisco

Senior Engineer, Expert Systems: Hewlett-Packard

Engineer, CASE:  Hewlett-Packard

Systems Programmer: IBM (NASA), Texas A&M

EDUCATION

Texas A&M University, BS Computer Science/Electrical Engineering minor,  GPA: 3.98,  magna cum laude

COMPUTER SKILLS

·         Data Stores - Data Warehouse, CRM, Oracle, SQLServer, VLDB, ETL Data Exchange, Object Modeling, SMP, MPP, Epiphany, Analytics, Oracle, SQLServer

·         Middleware - Tuxedo, OLTP, CRM

·         Languages - C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript, ASP, Lisp, Smalltalk, ADA, C, Shell, COBOL, Rules Engines, Object Oriented

·         Development Environments - GUI, CASE, Code Generation, Emacs, Graphics

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

·         'AIDA: An Expert Assistant for Dump Readers' with Keith A. Harrison and Craig M. Myles, Hewlett-Packard Journal, Vol 37, no 11, November 1986

·         Speaker, 'Introduction to AI for Engineers', Hewlett-Packard, January 1987

·         'Merging Data Paradigms: Object-Oriented Programming with Relational Databases', UNIX Review, Vol 10 No. 12, December 1992

HONORS

·         National Merit Scholar

·         Upsilon Pi Epsilon - computing science honor society

·         Phi Kappa Phi - national senior honor society

·         ACM programmers contest - Won locally in 1982 and in 1983. Placed in region in 1983

·         Hardin-Simmons University Summer Program in Mathematics - Top performance award

·         First place, University Interscholastic League Science Competition

·         Founded and served as officer of high school Math and Science club.

MISCELLANEOUS

·         Author of GNU Emacs ADA development environment

·         Author of GNU Emacs Empire Tool

·         First to integrate the GNU Debugger into GNU Emacs

·         Author of Emacs sql-mode.el

US Citizen