Heather Cosby

Leading Data & ML/ Al, SRE & DevOps teams for Bethesda.net.

Focused on delivering technology solutions to complex business problems. Currently working on products using big data, ML, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and cloud operations to reach market faster with a bigger impact & to comply with Microsoft security standards & prioritization.

• Focused on creating an efficient Developer Experience that was secure & establishing engineering efficiency & optimization for all code changes, deployments.
• Optimized services to enhance stability, reliability, observability, scalability
• Building teams for cloud migration from AWS to Azure
• Ensuring the strategic goals and business outcomes are aligned
• Cost optimization and management in the cloud
• Managing vendor and contract relationships

Product Lead for Platform-as-a-Service by delivering real time events & telemetry for 2K games, supporting IT, Marketing & AI/ML. Alignment with verticals that includes SDK, security, commerce, promotions, advertising, multiplayer along with integration with admin tools to allow developers & the like to define event types & queues for their specific needs within the enterprise platform.

• Managed the feature development of the Telemetry & Cloud Services which capture in game user behavior, identifying anti-cheat pattern integration, heat mapping & on-line services (cloud)
• Partnered with other product teams to driveadoption of the Telemetry and Cloud integration& worked closely with Identity Teams to flag andsolution for COPPA and universal accounts.
• Prioritized product backlog to balance delivery of the most valuable features and long term strategic product initiatives
• Balance explicit business asks, competitive analysis and intuition to prioritize and develop product requirements in the form of diagrams, user stories, UX mocks and other documentation
• Drive adoption and investment by evangelizing current and future product capabilities through documentation, roadmaps, presentations and recorded demos
• Partner with engineering leadership to develop platform architecture and review interface and object model designs in order to ensure alignment with business requirements and platform scalability, security and observability.

Senior Technical PM on the PODIUM team (Product, Operations Research, Data Infrastructure, UX Management) responsible for projects in the Device Operations Costing space (Kindle, Firestick, Ring, Alexa, etc) for parts made in various countries.

• Crafted key documents such as Mission Statements, Tenets, Business Requirements, and others to articulate the product vision and secure organization-wide consensus.
• Led customer research initiatives, identifying business issues, defining use cases, and formulating requirements that directly address customer needs.
• Conceptualized and coordinated business requirements across various stakeholders for an extensive project encompassing device shipment across Amazon and third-party warehouses to support automation of accounting transactions and inventory tracking
• Orchestrated relationship management with stakeholders including Senior Leadership, Software Development teams, Design teams, Project Management Offices (PMO), and customers.

Facilitated organizational transformations and formulated enduring development plans.

Defined/Scoped of a new product to weave all of the task-based automation development that had been on-going for over a year to drive integration & requirements across 11 different team’s vs silo development.

• Demonstrated how to leverage Epics and Features that crossed these various teams in Rally, to provide transparency across all teams and enable pre-planning prior to Quarterly PI-Planning.
• Established all requirements & prioritized Features for 11 different teams on the release train & worked to refine requirements and validation with the engineering teams and business teams prior to the team committing to the work within any given Quarter.
• Oversaw 5 product owners, mentored & reviewed their quarterly vision & set high level priorities across their verticals.
• I worked closely with an Architect, Infrastructure Leadership to refine the scope and lay out the foundational work that was required and a testing strategy for MVP. Similarly, led working sessions/customer journey mapping sessions to understand where we were going and could plan for beyond MVP.

Led & defined scopes requirements for (5) Data Science/Data Engineering Teams/Analysts & Products including Machines Learning models representing aspects of fulfillment, replenishment, pdd & forecasting in various phases of development supporting commercial analytics & global supply chain logistics

• Implementing Scrum Ceremonies including Dailies Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Demos, Sprint Retrospective & backlog refinement
• Supporting & Driving the Implementation of GitHub best practices, release management, snowflake roles, separations of environment for testing and validation
• Coached Product Directors, Managers & Stakeholders on documenting requirements, epic, feature and story creation.
• Established Definition of Done & Ready with all teams to facilitate team understanding for when a story is done & shippable or ready to take into a Sprint.
• Created the first Backlog with a Hierarchy, i.e., Epics and Features (vs tasks) to enable backlog refinement, pre-planning and strategy across all of these teams.
• Moved teams towards scrum poker estimation, feature sizing to enable more realistic and confidence in our estimations prior to committing to work within a Quarter.
• Established cross squad/team scrum of scrums for PI planning along with SOS with Product and Engineering teams, to ensure that any Engineering specific deliverables were scoped, planned and included in Quarterly Planning.
• Achieved consistent on-time product releases by effectively managing resources and prioritizing tasks according to business goals.
• Facilitated effective decision-making among stakeholders through clear presentation of data-driven insights regarding project progress or challenges.
• Mitigated risks associated with product development through proactive identification, assessment, and management of potential issues or obstacles.
• Ensured seamless integration of new features with existing systems by working closely with software architects and developers.

Created a pilot team within the Infrastructure organization to determine if SCRUM methodology & roles would expedite the delivery of migration from on-prem to Azure could be done in a way that had not been done previously.

• Created Sprint Release Plans & Roadmap (quarterly, yearly & 3 year) for the Azure Platform
• Built Epics & Features from requirement gathering sessions with Stakeholders (LOBs & Subscription Owners 15 total groups)
• Ran & started stakeholder meetings which followed the sprint cadence (biweekly) for current input about progress& needs had a timely platform to address.
• Established Weekly Backlog Refinement& Storytime Sessions with Stakeholders & Scrum Team for backlog creation and sprint plans.
• Offshore Production Support HCL Team – Ran daily stand-up with 6 towers i.e., Windows, Linux, SQL, Monitoring, Tooling, Backups & Storage Teams to transition MVP to support teams from engineering
• Tracked Practice Criteria, runbook creation, Knowledge Transfer, Access thru Warranty Period.

CMS Creation & Platform Migration Project: PO/Scrum Master over (2) development teams (micro services, ci/cd pipeline, mobile app, bespoke CMS) developers, content producers, ux & design & qa on building a new content management system, DAM & simultaneously migrating a mix of 1000 bespoke, content created, auto-migrated web pages to the new adif platform.

• Responsible for Feature definition & user story decomposition, pre-grooming & grooming with both teams for estimations to aid in building quarterly plans. Including feature development per sprint within a quarter, roadmaps, prefilling 4 sprints beyond current sprint & release plans. Exception approvals for any adjustments, scope change for unknowns or delays & remediation plans to prevent going fwd if needed.
• Collaboration with front-end & back-end architects, sr design team & content teams as stakeholders for the new CMS system, validation and implementation of web page creation and enhancement.
• Working with development teams utilizing scrum /agile methodologies, with the exception that we have hard completion & release dates.
• Improved scrum processes, tasking, priority, removing roadblocks including unplanned work (cross team collaboration & shared dev resource management) to ensure the team meets their commitments.
• Working diligently with qa & analytics teams to improve hand off processes & story acceptances throughout the Sprint.
• Prioritized defects & assignment to developers & worked closely with dev manager to prioritize production support issues, cross team interdependencies, SME knowledge share, releases & dev performance issues.
• Systems: Rally, TFS, GitLab, Jira, confluence

Implementation of a new Front end & Marketing Experience for Games including Adobe Experience Management Migration (4 teams) + Adobe Campaign, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe target migration for omni channel (web, mobile, egm) booking engine migration & AWS customer SSO

• Drove Enterprise event management related to ML & other hospitality and gaming relating initiatives.
• Drove monthly marketing campaigns associated to marketed Games & Hospitality initiatives, UI updates and time based engine inputs across 20 different casinos.

Assigned to the company’s largest software implementation in the last 13 years, replacement of loan servicing software which integrates with our core enterprise software. This involves multiple secondary systems & cross functional departments (it, network engineering, Oracle dbas, sql dbas, dialer teams etc. This also included configuration of the new Loan Servicing Software, reworking of business processes for efficiency & compliance along with setup & requirements for said new integrated software.

• Process improvement, business efficiency are major factors when conceptualizing the best design to implement the business requirements. Working on post-drop applications support has really enhanced my ability to ask the appropriate questions the next time around, or when learning a process which touches a different area of the software.
• Application Support for Billing, Accounting, Loan Servicing business units & all subsequent systems, defects, business changes & any development effort I led. Payment processing via portal, IVR, credit card batching with SHIFT 4 and Wells Fargo, support for all integrations for said payments for timeshare ownership, loans, etc.
• Database relationships, sql queries are heavily used to understand how the data is stored, displayed so specs are accurately reflecting expected outcome & or data model changes required. I have experience working in both SQL & Oracle DB’s & have p/u PL sql in the last year, however, spent more time in Microsoft sql but enjoy both & data to drive decisions.
• Gathered requirements from multiple business units in financial services, document existing function for migration from legacy to new core enterprise software & write technical functional specifications for SDLC lifecycle compliance.
• Worked in a queue environment with developers & qa with collaboration in terms of best practices, brainstorming resolutions, enhancements as I simultaneously manage our IT distribution email for our respective business unit.
• Responsible for creating tickets which aligned with my project as well as general application support. Ran multiple scrum meetings for several different sub groups & projects.

“Know your customer” product including new buildout of an angular UI (including backend dynamic integration feeds) for Casinos CAGE to determine & flesh out who our customers are, if they’re banned (diminish money laundering) securing a heavily audited & regulated industry to ensure compliance with gambling board & US regulations.

• Created Software Development TFS Agile Template(s), custom fields & workflow for external development team (newly acquired)
• Responsible for writing technical requirements for new product, including Wireframes for UI design & function
• Visio workflows for process mirroring Wireframe design
• Project manager for API creation & documentation
• Reviewed current processes & documented existing functionality for two software applications to support legacy products once the new product & APIs are in place. Taking into consideration the merge to Angular & web access. Provide input regarding areas requiring improvement or could have potential exposure

SaaS Software Implementation & SQL Database Configuration specifically used in the issuance of both Workers Compensation & Property & Liability Insurance Products

• Simultaneously Managed Multiple-Projects & Product Development based on Road-Map, contracts, budgets & new Client Implementations
• Wrote User Stories, Test Cases, Acceptance Criteria for Development of Product Enhancements & Defects Using Agile, Scrum, Kanban Methodologies
• Tracked Client Specific Development Releases, Prioritized based on impact, Tested Prior to & immediately following deployment to Production
• Created detailed Requirements for Client consumption & approval prior to beginning Implementation or Development. Then documented Business Process Workflow for internal & external use of Software Application.
• Tech Support/Dev Ops: Tier 1, 2 & 3 Support (depending). Researched issues reported, validated, wrote bug/defect stories, identify inception date of bug, prioritize & decipher impact to users, inform clients of anticipated release & associated changes
• Complete UAT testing & provide sign off or feedback as to whether it was acceptable for upcoming Release. If not, worked with QA to define what was needed to perfect the fix often times converting a bug to a feature.
• Provided on-going Training prior to, during & after Implementation Phases completed - First point of contact for specific set of clients
• Crystal Reports - Created New & updated existing Crystal reports & design.
• Worked to improve performance of SQL Database File Extractor jobs/services for Client specific monthly, daily, weekly jobs

Implementation of Enterprise Software & non-propriety Software for all new States/Offices &/or development of any new functionality based on Business demands as it related to the issuance of Title Insurance Products. Directly manages over 60 employees & oversaw all Offshore Vendor Management.

• Documentation of all existing Business Workflow Processes & requirements for Internal Use for all Title employees, including responsible for creating any workaround in lieu of development fixes being immediate. Thus, communicating to users once the workaround is redundant & a fix will be released.
• SoftPro Product Owner -Restructured template use from individual states to a National template workflow which allowed internal customization. I accomplished cutting costs in half for time & material by moving work to be completed in-house (by myself) vs. outsourcing via work order with Softpro. This saved both time & money for the company & our clients·
• Maintained & Planned development backlog in Agile & Scrum environment; ensuring that each Sprint/Release included a Road-Map card, Bug (based on Priority), Enhancement, Client Customization
• Application Support/Dev Ops: Received all system & product related bugs/defects for all users; isolated core issue & worked towards a resolution with appropriate I.T. teams.
• Training All Users Inshore & Offshore remotely & on-site as needed