Product Operations and delivery,
shown through the work.

Problem. Salesforce IT was growing rapidly across the United States, Ireland, and India. Large programs combined traditional program governance with Agile team delivery, but expectations, artifacts, and support handoffs varied widely.

• At the request of the CIO and the Project Management Office (PMO) leader, authored a three-phase Playbook covering initiation, iterative delivery, operational transition, required artifacts, and support handoffs.
• Balanced iterative team delivery with the enterprise controls leadership required, then turned the approved model into workshops, project-start walkthroughs, and adoption support.

The deeper value was reduced management complexity: leaders gained shared language and repeatable controls instead of treating every team and program as a separate exception.

Problem. Quarterly planning was absorbing too much time because feature shaping, dependency discovery, and readiness work often happened too late. Technical work was often presented as a threat rather than as an economic decision.

• Moved refinement, readiness, and dependency discovery into continuous preparation. One highly mature team reduced planning from approximately 3.5 days to one.
• Reduced scope creep through clearer requirements, incremental validation, and earlier dependency identification.
• Worked with Engineering Managers to frame business cases and quantify expected returns for technology-driven development and system upgrades, for stakeholder communication and tradeoff analysis alongside Product-driven business cases.
• Used business cases and Cost of Delay to combine business and technical roadmaps into one ranked portfolio view.

Related: Write It Right, a whitepaper I co-authored with Tanya Jones and Karen Benbow on how one team fixed story writing upstream to shorten quarterly planning.

Problem. Delta Dental needed a shared approach to slow releases, inconsistent quality, technical debt, insufficient automation, and uneven engineering practices across approximately 40 delivery teams.

• Co-created the assessment and improvement process: a 24-practice, 11-stage maturity model, survey, workshop materials, reporting approach, and team improvement process.
• Directly coached close to 30 teams across two survey rounds and helped them prioritize findings into quarterly roadmaps.
• Presented findings to teams and leadership, using demonstrations to make stronger practices concrete.

Teams got a sequenced path toward stronger automation, quality controls, release practices, and monitoring, rather than a one-time assessment score.

Problem. Scaling delivery required scaling capability: clear roles, shared standards, and practical training, not only process.

• Co-created Delta Dental's Product Management Toolkit and delivered guidance and training for product definition, prioritization, business cases, and delivery readiness.
• Lead contributor to Product Manager job-family definitions at Delta Dental and to Product Management and Business Analyst job-family definitions at Salesforce; contributed to Delta Dental's Scrum Master role guidelines.
• At Salesforce, designed role-specific capability programs, internal certifications, and onboarding, and founded the Product Owner and Scrum Master Communities of Practice; hosted more than 72 multi-day events reaching approximately 1,300 attendees.

Problem. Many transitions change board labels and meeting names without changing how teams manage waiting, handoffs, blockers, or work in progress (WIP). I developed a six-to-twelve-month model that treats Kanban as an organizational capability.

• Begin with truthful active, ready, waiting, pending, blocked, and handoff columns.
• Shift the daily stand-up toward flow, aging work, unresolved dependencies, and team ownership of blockers.
• Introduce Expedite, Small, Medium, and Large swim lanes when the team is ready, rather than on a fixed calendar.
• Use filtered control charts (how long each item actually took) to compare active and waiting time, isolate functional delays, compare like-sized work, and cluster recurring blocker causes.
• Build cross-functional response capability before introducing meaningful WIP limits.

A detailed write-up of the full method is available on request.

Problem. AI can draft product artifacts quickly, but errors compound when each step feeds the next without structure or review.

• Built the steps from persona and journey mapping through intake, business cases, business documents, prioritization, roadmap, backlog, and batch planning for regular delivery cycles of 2 days to 2 weeks.
• Added human review gates and deterministic validation checks between steps, so AI output is inspected before it moves downstream.
• Evaluated with a small group of practitioners. These are working prototypes, not production systems.

See the workflow prototypes and The Four Guardrails, on keeping an AI pipeline from compounding errors.

Problem. DisplayTune, a calibration interface bundled with premium LCD monitors from OEM customers including Fujitsu-Siemens, Hyundai, Acer, iiyama, and Sony, had to ship inside tight, overlapping OEM launch windows.

• Owned consumer software product management, including requirements and release planning, and guided OEM firmware teams to build the hooks that expanded software functionality.
• Managed two-to-six-week production windows, schedules, support-site delivery, feature tradeoffs, validation, and release readiness.
• Partnered daily with another Product Manager and the VP of Sales and Product to re-sequence work across overlapping OEM launches.

1. Diagnose the system: Understand the actual workflow, decision paths, incentives, handoffs, and constraints before prescribing a framework.
2. Frame the decision: Clarify what leaders or product teams need to decide, what evidence matters, and what tradeoffs are real.
3. Design the mechanism: Create the roadmap, playbook, dashboard, workflow, business case, assessment, or operating model that makes the decision executable.
4. Pilot and learn: Test the approach with willing teams, inspect the results, and adjust before broader adoption.
5. Build capability: Teach the system, create reusable guidance, and transfer ownership so progress does not depend on the person who introduced the change.
6. Reduce management complexity: Standardize the parts of the operating model that benefit from consistency while preserving local judgment where it adds value.

Partnered on dozens of business cases across my Agile coaching work at Salesforce and Delta Dental, and trained business stakeholders, Business Analysts, and Product Managers to distinguish direct business value, opportunity enablement, and risk reduction, expressed through revenue, cost savings, avoided loss, or enabled future value.

Translated external research, support-center feedback, product reviews, survey and Net Promoter Score (NPS) data, and internal-customer interviews into prioritized product and operating decisions. Journey and process mapping, draft Business Model Canvases, and facilitated alignment workshops.

Created OKRs and KPIs for organizational transformation initiatives; trained dozens of Product Owners to define meaningful measures; taught hundreds of practitioners to distinguish outcome-oriented key results from ongoing performance indicators; and introduced AI-assisted methods for drafting and refining OKRs and KPIs. Facilitated North Star and Pirate Metrics (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue) workshops, helping teams choose measures that fit the maturity of a product, service, or program.

Co-created technical-design specifications with engineers, designed reusable specification templates, and used AI to generate first drafts for review and refinement. Direct authorship was primarily for updated versions of existing products where technical architecture and constraints were already established.

• Customer-facing products, portals, mobile applications, and support experiences
• Delivery for enterprise applications including Salesforce, Workday, Concur, Adobe Experience Manager, and finance and billing platforms
• Developer platforms and third-party ecosystems
• Claims, support, ticketing, document management, and mixed planned-and-service-demand environments
• Globally distributed organizations across the United States, Ireland, and India
• Rapid-growth, regulated, acquisition-integration, and enterprise-transformation contexts

The common thread is helping organizations make better decisions, reduce avoidable complexity, and move important work from intent to measurable value.