KAREN SHIELDS

• Partnered with Vice President, his staff, and organization to be a 'force multiplier' and magnify leadership effectiveness.
• Managed the Business Operations team, ensuring that processes supported both business and engagement goals.
• Direct leadership of PayPal's strategic top-priority initiatives at the enterprise level, covering multiple capabilities and teams, while optimizing the delivery of the customer experience
• A strong partner with leadership teams to build exciting online merchant checkout and retail products
• Key player in fostering an inspirational and creative culture, developing & implanting strategic new processes to improve productivity and ignite cross-organization collaboration.
• Helped grow PayPal Merchant from 600 to 3000+ employees in 2 years by implementing new hiring processes that incorporated career growth potential and a top-quality internship program.
• Spearheaded Enterprise-wide programs (pitched strategies, defined OKRs and KPIs, prioritized roadmap deliverables, secured funding, built Enterprise-wide networks, simplified processes and launched across PayPal Product organization).
• Implemented people-focused mentorship and shadow programs which breathed new life into the careers of employees and leaders to counteract potential low engagement or high employee churn during large-scale growth; drove employee-centric engagement efforts to address areas employee improvement areas.
• Highlighted Results:
• Fully sustainable and implemented programs which saved $1.5M in developer time waste, improved quality of released product by 25%, and increased developer EPS by 3 points. (And which are now official and highly valued components of the PDLC strategy.)
• An extreme notable difference in calibre of candidates attracted & hired, which in turn helped expand multiple practices across the Product & Technology organization, diversity numbers exceeded company goals, and 95% of interns accepted full-time employment offers
• PayPal Merchant engagement scores increased on average of 4.5 EPS and regrettable attrition dropped by 20%.

Consistent promotion and progressive growth within 17 years of tenure for eBay.

• Built a team to support infrastructure for a new program possessing the charter to evaluate and triage employee interactions, collaborations, and ideas, and then find and tailor just the right technologies, teams, or processes to launch those that were of highest priority to the organization as smoothly, quickly, and productively as possible. What began as a pilot for one organization, grew into a working system that was then leveraged by an increasing number of teams across the company. My direction allowed this program to increase employee engagement and productivity, which are key pillars for a strong company culture.
• Acted as air traffic controller for VP and senior team, integrating and connecting work streams and taking on the role of communicator linking the leadership team with the organization.
• Drove cross-functional initiatives and managed multiple efforts. Included were all facets of planning and execution: framed, structured and prioritized business problems to assist in identification and implementation of solutions.
• Identified and implemented new and more effective tools which improved processes, while destroying outdated ones, with the goal of reaching engineering excellence.
• Led a distributed team of Quality Engineers over a portfolio of cutting-edge products. Detailed quality testing of multiscreen efforts on various platforms, Load & Performance Testing (client and middleware), Automation (services and UI), as well as Build and Release (iOS, Android, wearables). Team was run lean (atypical dev->QE ratio) by leveraging in-the-wild testing for black-box efforts.
• Built a process and tooling which allowed employees to report productivity or engagement concerns and vote on the top 3 to prioritize for executive review which was then used to initiate new projects to adopt.
• Implemented Google docs, sheets and slides starting with a pilot and expanding across the whole of ebay's Product & Technology organization.
• Orchestrated annual events which allowed teams to cross-collaborate in a natural way, which created the opportunity for organic discussions to flow. These in turn helped the product & technology teams along with their partners to be less siloed.
• Lead Program Manager of Red, Bold, Underlined programs which were critical, fast-paced and executive sponsored.
• Lead Software Engineer on key components of ebay's billing flows (Direct Debit, Credit Card and EFT)

• Phi Theta Kappa
• Honor Roll [Semester and Year]