Bill Albert

Program Leadership

• Led programs end-to-end, demonstrating effective decision-making, organizational skills, and transparent collaboration, ensuring proactive and successful completion of milestones.
• Enterprise Checkout: Collaborated closely with cross-functional teams across 4 business units to deliver a single-pane view of all purchases, achieving a high-quality integrated product in 6 months.
• Digital Auction Platform: Led the development of a best-in-market auction platform within 6 months post Carvana's acquisition of ADESA, focusing on milestones, delivering value, and developing a technical playbook for seamless expansion.
• Cycle Time Initiatives: Led the program to break down auction operations into Value Streams, applying Theory of Constraints to improve cycle time and reduce bottlenecks. Achieved targets for the first two value streams and delivered metrics reports to all auction sites to stay ahead of any drift.
• Fisker Initiative: Spearheaded delivery of the initiative resulting in a $3.6 million new revenue stream, collaborating with infrastructure, operations, and dev teams, as well as stakeholders from ADESA, Carvana, and Fisker, ensuring a smooth prioritized flow of vehicles.

Scrum Master Responsibilities

• I was the glue for a high-performing scrum team, applying agile principles to ensure effective ceremonies, resolve impediments, and achieve the highest-priority work that aligned with the product vision.
• Established strong cross-functional relationships, resolving conflicts and unblocking impediments collaboratively, ensuring alignment across teams and stakeholders.
• Coached the team in agile methodologies, driving greater value, speed, and engagement, resulting in the successful completion of the first phase of the organization-wide Enterprise Checkout initiative on time and with high quality.
• Fostered a culture of continuous learning and improvement, shaping teams through experimentation and adapting from Scrum to Kanban, resulting in the delivery of the most advanced, customer-focused Digital Auction Platform in the market within 6 months.
• Advocated for DevSecOps practices, enabling a smooth flow of value in the Enterprise Checkout initiative, where direct feedback from alpha to production was efficiently, incorporated with automated tests and deployments.
• Streamlined processes to reduce waste, enhance team autonomy, nimbleness, and focus on highest-priority work and value delivery.

Led our team through a complete DevOps transformation.

Improving Flow - Organized teams around value streams with full ownership including requirements, implementation, testing, security, deployment, monitoring, and support. Deployments went from monthly releases fraught with angst and issues to an automated, self-service, during the day, on demand deployment.

Enabling Feedback - weekly release retros ensured that issues were understood and prevention encoded in our release validation automation. Logging, monitoring, and alerting ensured we stayed ahead of production issues and consistently lowered our MTTR.

Continual Learning and Experimentation - Brought devs, QA, Product and Platform together for a book club to gain shared knowledge on how we wanted to improve: DevOps Handbook, Accelerate, Project to Product, The Lean Startup, and Clean Code.

As dev manager I emphasized continuous improvement with each developer, using daily interaction, 1-1’s, and analytics in a transparent way to home in on areas of opportunity.

● Led developers across five scrum teams building Enterprise level marketing software.
● Rebuilt the technical team as well as the morale and focus after a mass exodus in early 2014.
● Champion of Agile culture including self-organizing teams, continuous improvement, and organizational learning.
● Collaborated closely with QA, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, and DevOps to transform the organization:

• Yearlong release cycles reduced to two-week deliveries.
• On-premise and hosted customers migrated to a SaaS environment in Azure.

● Led the development of the next generation web-based Automotive CRM.

● Designed and implemented the agile/scrum process to focus on quality and teamwork.

● Collaborated closely with Product and IT to ensure the application met business needs and was deployed successfully.
● Managed three scrum teams:

• New Product Development: 12 onshore developers
• Maintenance: 6 developers in Costa Rica
• QA: 3 onshore manual testers, 3 onshore automation testers, 4 manual testers in India
  

• Managed the software development teams that supported marketing, for both the member and service provider websites.
• My responsibilities included hiring, reviews, technical and career coaching, requirements, scoping, and resource allocation.
• My strong communication skills and focus on teamwork allowed me to work effectively with Product Managers, Marketing, QA, IT Operations and developers to bring projects in on time, with high quality.
• In addition to my managerial duties, I remained hands-on doing web development and troubleshooting.

• Worked on a variety of web development projects for all of Angie’s List sites, including Pricing Engine Team Lead and developer. The Pricing Engine allows A/B testing of prices by member segments.
• The development environment was ASP.NET C# with Visual Studio, and included JavaScript, jQuery, SQL Server, svn, and NetTiers.

• ObTech developed medical software for women’s healthcare professionals.
• As one of three principals in the startup company, I was involved in all aspects of the business including strategy, marketing, sales, financials, and customer support.
• Lead software designer and developer of ObGynPocketPro (PDA), and ObGynPCpro (desktop computer).
  ObGynPocketPro was awarded Best Healthcare Software 2004 by PocketPC Magazine.
• Managed various teams of student programmers.
• Developed and maintained the ObTech e-commerce website as well as backend database development. Developed integration between ObGynPocketPro and the ObTech web server for registration, On-Call Schedule synchronization, and product upgrades and updates.