Strategic and results-driven executive with over [10] years of experience in program and project management within SaaS, Insurance, FinTech, Mobile and Web apps, Healthcare, e-Commerce, CRMs and more for non-profits, tech startups, agencies, and Fortune 500 companies. Proven track record of successfully leading large-scale software programs from conception to delivery, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and priorities. Expertise in implementing agile methodologies, driving process improvements, and fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. Strong leadership abilities with a focus on building and motivating high-performing teams to achieve excellence in software development and delivery. Demonstrated proficiency in stakeholder management, budget oversight, and risk mitigation to ensure the successful execution of software initiatives. Passionate about driving continuous improvement and leveraging technology to create impactful solutions that drive business growth and competitive advantage.
Hi, I’m
Alexandra Motoko Smith
Scottsdale,AZ
Summary
Overview
12
years of professional experience
1
Certification
Work History
Arizona Healthcare Supply & Golden Horizon Hospice
Operations and Client Success Consultant
08.2023 - Current
Job overview
- Established all business filings, permits, medical certifications, operation designs, and employment onboarding.
- Optimized customer support by establishing collaborative service environments through targeted operational initiatives.
- Reduced process inconsistencies and effectively trained nurse practitioners on best practices and protocols.
- Increased efficiency and performance by monitoring team member productivity and providing feedback.
Marsh
VP of IT Project Management
05.2021 - 07.2023
Job overview
- Led Agile transformation initiative across multiple product teams, resulting in a 30% increase in project delivery efficiency and a 20% reduction in time-to-market while staying within allocated budgets.
- Oversaw planning, alignment, execution, and delivery of large-scale programs and projects utilizing Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe, while effectively managing budgets.
- Restructured business intake process utilizing AI to remove manual hours that efficiently processed requests and informed stakeholders in real-time of progress. Resulted in budget savings, and improved clarity of requirements and satisfaction across business units.
- Provided strategic direction and coaching to Agile teams, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to ensure alignment with organizational objectives, Agile principles, and financial targets.
- Created and monitored metrics across all engineers for evaluating performances critical to organizing talent management and succession planning.
- Implemented Agile governance frameworks and metrics to monitor project progress, identify risks, and manage financial resources effectively, ensuring adherence to budget constraints and maximizing ROI.
- Collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize initiatives, resolve dependencies, and optimize resource allocation for maximum business value while managing financial implications.
- Managed budget planning and forecasting for Agile initiatives, ensuring accurate estimation, allocation, and utilization of financial resources to support program objectives.
- Conducted regular budget reviews and financial analyses, identifying cost-saving opportunities, mitigating financial risks, and ensuring transparency and accountability in budget management processes.
- Established and maintained relationships with key stakeholders, senior leadership, and external partners to drive consensus, facilitate decision-making, and ensure alignment with budgetary constraints and financial goals.
- Collaborated with directors and engineer leads to determine appropriate staffing and resource needs within department and product budgets, allocated resources, and following corporate guideline requirements for expenditure approvals.
- Maintained corporate and government compliance requirements while creating and managing project and architect documents.
- Played a pivotal role in fostering a culture of continuous improvement by facilitating retrospectives, implementing feedback mechanisms, and promoting cost-conscious decision-making within Agile teams.
Marsh
Agile Consultant - Scrum Master
08.2020 - 05.2021
Job overview
- Scrum Master for 5 product areas involving international teams consisting of developers, QA, UI/UX engineers, data engineers, cyber security and cloud engineers.
- Assessed and analyzed customer requirements to develop effective IT project plans.
- Developed product roadmaps and create user stories that improved efficiency of teams.
- Conducted quality assurance to verify accuracy of data used in projects.
- Developed metrics for tracking progress and measuring team performance against goals.
- Evangelized agile as strategic asset of culture and business value, inspiring teams in implementation of new tools and techniques.
CIT Bank
Agile Consultant - BI Division
03.2020 - 08.2020
Job overview
- Implemented best practices in change management to minimize disruption during transitions.
- Consulted on Agile process to Business Intelligence department of 30 engineers, implementing processes for organizing work intake and removing impediments for teams.
- Individualized processes and allocated resources that resulted in optimizing efficiency by around 50%. This decreased non-essential engineers' involvement in unrelated work to their specialties by 95%.
- Developed and maintained service-focused working relationships with operations, construction, and engineering partners.
- Measured performance using key metrics, enabling data-driven decision-making for continuous improvement.
Nerdery
PM - Scrum and Product Manager Consultant
04.2019 - 02.2020
Job overview
- Organized technical and business requirements into backlog work items via Epics, Features, and User Stories. – Coached on strategies for bugs and task management processes
- Assist in pre-go-live user acceptance testing (UAT) efforts and responded quickly to issues that arrived
- Strategized A/B testing, and Auto QA with quality assurance teams.
- Coached agile methodologies, agile estimation best practices, Jira, and Azure DevOps to clients and internally.
- Utilized unique Scrum metrics that provided accurate averages on remaining work, providing valuable reports that helped leadership with roadmaps
- Confidently organized and facilitated all project meetings
- Managed integration of vendors and client tasks while tracking deliverables
- Collaborate and edit architectural designs.
- Saved the company $100,000 in contract renegotiation on a project by well-organized project management and prioritization for client objectives.
- Highly client-facing, with excellent feedback from business partners
Mbira
Program Manager
11.2018 - 03.2019
Job overview
- Organized cross-functional teams deliverables through roadmaps, and team tasks through project plans and agile backlog in Jira.
- Primary program point of contact for communications between engineers, department managers, DevOps, data analytics, system admin, marketing, and legal teams for cross-functional projects - Increasing efficiency and productivity by at least 30%.
- Conducted Go-to-Market strategy with VP of marketing through market analysis, marketing selection/ customer profiling, brand positioning, and marketing plans
- Gathered requirements and ensured appropriate priority for ADA/WCAG, FDIC laws, FTC regulations, and GDPR.
- Lead software e-commerce and financing products on Kentico CMS.
- Re-implemented Scrum Framework, removing departmentalized teams.
- Lead swim-lane, dependency mapping, risk management, estimations, and sprint planning exercises
- Created resource roadmaps across the organization for executive-level insight into resource allocation preventing over-assigning.
- Taught newly defined POs how to utilize project plans and do estimation strategies to create roadmaps and prioritize backlogs.
- Wrote guidelines on how the organization should write tickets to prevent wrong estimates, wrong assumptions, or from being blocked due to unfilled requirements
- Implemented Kanban strategy for reducing bottleneck by 70%.
MedMatch
Product Manager
05.2018 - 11.2018
Job overview
- Led a fully remote team for medical recruiting software utilizing Contentful, an API-first CMS, or CaaS, for both web and mobile products.
- Produced presentations for market analysis, Go-To-Market strategy, and roadmaps for internal stakeholders and investors.
- Coached teams on self-organizing and best practices for continuous improvements through team exercises. Monitored velocity, commitment reliability formulas, capacity utilization, effort estimation variances, defect leakages, and backlog health to use for team and individual coaching
- Created Epics and features for all areas of pre-built product, then wrote all new requirements through user stories. Which was then coached to teams on how to break down into tasks for iterative sprint planning.
- Lead backlog creation, prioritization, daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospective meetings.
- Defined and prioritized requirements for projects by considering product-market fit involving data reports and A/B testing, combined with cost, dependencies, and estimated durations.
- Helped plan steps to build a highly decoupled data system (data in -> store -> process -> analyze -> answers)
- Created wireframes, defined branding requirements, and editor of UIUX mockups
LLT Group
Senior Project Manager
01.2018 - 05.2018
Job overview
- Taught client teams and in-house teams on Scrum, VSTS, and Jira
- Taught developers various testing techniques such as continuous testing: smoke testing, regression testing, UAT, etc. as client projects grew in complexity and began working with client QA teams
- Identified company issues and created an organizational change plan to implement Agile processes, divide resources into cross-functional teams, and mature the PM department through proper documentation and resource planning
- First project manager to create thorough project documentation such as project plans, RACI matrix, communication plans, technical and functional requirements, and dependency maps for web app & software projects – dramatically improved relations with clients such as Caterpillar, Bridgestone, OMSNIC, and Grubbage.
- Coached teams on how to estimate and improve estimation based on the team's historical work. After 3 sprints, estimations and testing matured and kept commitments 100% for just-in-time deployment.
JMGFX
Scrum Master
04.2014 - 08.2017
Job overview
- Ensured 100% client satisfaction from initiation to completion.
- Consulted on Go-to-Market strategy and branding recommendations.
- Wrote and organized Epics, Features, and user stories for all products.
- Successfully Implement Scrum adoption across the organization – built out Scrum of Scrums
- Led and coached during backlog creation, prioritization, daily standups, review meetings, retrospective meetings
- Coached teams on self-organizing and best practices for continuous improvements through team exercises. Monitored velocity, commitment reliability formulas, capacity utilization, effort estimation variances, defect leakages, and backlog health to use for team and individual coaching.
- Web apps tech stacks: React / Angular (JavaScript) on the front end, and a variety of Backend environments (.NET, Java, Python). Integrated Tableau on projects for data visualizations.
- iOS tech stacks: Swift, XCode, Objective-C, iOS SDK (API)
- Put together a best-use case guideline for different types of Data Stores (databases). This was a PM and Developer/Architect collaboration.
- Defined requirements for real-time analytics data streams: Amazon Kinesis Streams -> Kinesis Analytics -> Lambda / EMR / Spark Streams. Etc.
- Generate work plans, fee proposals, and project schedules in response to client's request.
- Coached team to better estimate the complexity of requests, and product owners to prioritize and plan workflow for design, development, and implementation.
- Clarified deliverables and assignments to the scrum team and removed impediments.
NIAPPI & IAFF (Indian Americans For Freedom)
Project Manager & Political Liaison
08.2012 - 04.2014
Job overview
- Successfully implemented Agile and Waterfall methods for internal SaaS, drastically increasing efficiency and improving communication across the organization
- Resource managed product team utilizing RAM and RACI Matrix charts; monitored scope by work completed against time.
- Wrote out a communication plan for a cross-functional organization
- Created and monitored project plans for development projects with an offshore team in India.
- Gathered requirements from Whip party leaders in DC and foreign party presidents
- Gained international news coverage for organizing CEOs and Congressional Whip leaders to visit Prime Minister candidate of India, Narendra Modi
- Led up to six teams and organized tasks for over 50 volunteers.
Education
University of Southern MississippiHattiesburg, MS
from Business Management
University Overview
Skills
- Agile Expert and Coach
- Expert project management
- Strategic Thinking - Conceptualizing complex problems and providing solutions
- Change management
- Process Improvement
- Account and Budget Management
- Resource Management
- Soft Skills - Negotiating, stakeholder satisfaction, team building, and coaching
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Expert in leading PM/ software management tools, including but not limited to, Jira, Azure DevOps, Smartsheets, and Workfront
- Leading large teams and creating processes/ architect diagrams for AWS and Azure AI, ML, and big data - data lakes, streaming, warehouse, and stores
Certification
2016 - Certified Scrum Master
2017 - PMP and PMI-ACP PDU's from Master of Project Academy – PMI Member
2018 - Product Charles University – Product Management
Charity Leadership and Volunteering
Charity Leadership and Volunteering
Founder and CEO of Legal Angels - A 501(c)3 charity for helping child trafficking cases
Timeline
Operations and Client Success Consultant
Arizona Healthcare Supply & Golden Horizon Hospice
08.2023 - Current
VP of IT Project Management
Marsh
05.2021 - 07.2023
Agile Consultant - Scrum Master
Marsh
08.2020 - 05.2021
Agile Consultant - BI Division
CIT Bank
03.2020 - 08.2020
PM - Scrum and Product Manager Consultant
Nerdery
04.2019 - 02.2020
Program Manager
Mbira
11.2018 - 03.2019
Product Manager
MedMatch
05.2018 - 11.2018
Senior Project Manager
LLT Group
01.2018 - 05.2018
Scrum Master
JMGFX
04.2014 - 08.2017
Project Manager & Political Liaison
NIAPPI & IAFF (Indian Americans For Freedom)
08.2012 - 04.2014
University of Southern Mississippi
from Business Management