Ryan C. Starks
Product Management
Atlanta,GA
Summary
Over 20 years of professional experience with strong background in product management, ready to drive innovation and achieve strategic goals. Skilled in agile methodologies, market analysis, and stakeholder communication. Known for fostering team collaboration and adapting to dynamic environments. Consistently focused on delivering high-quality results and meeting business objectives. Experienced in Scrum Agile SDLC and I’m a Certified Scrum Product Owner with an M.B.A.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
2
2
Certification
Work History
Senior Product Owner - Contractor
Georgia-Pacific
03.2023 - Current
- Led the development and launch of internally used products, resulting in new technological capabilities and increased customer satisfaction
- Managed product backlogs for 3 high-priority projects/Teams, ensuring effective prioritization and timely delivery
- Facilitated requirements gathering sessions and translated business needs into actionable user stories for technical teams
- Created product documentation, including requirements, workflows and mockups
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to drive product vision and strategy
Lead Product Manager, Personalization – Contractor
AT&T
02.2019 - 03.2023
- Generated new capabilities, features and user stories based on strategic company objectives for the Personalization product development roadmap
- Owned the product innovation roadmap from inception through implementation, establishes success metrics and drives execution
- Breaking down features into smaller chunks of work using minimal viable product, speed to market and iterative development practices
- Crafting detailed user stories, acceptance criteria and providing extensive verbal communication of product requirements to the development team
- Maintaining and continually grooming product development backlog to ensure a steady release of the highest priority capabilities and features
- Conducts comparative analysis against competitors and identifies new digital opportunities to fill product gaps that drive growth
- Creates buy-in for the product vision with key stakeholders
- Working with business partners to balance business & technical objectives and technology partners to deliver the product that meets reliability, scalability, and performance goals
- Monitor product for all defined KPIs to ensure best-in-class customer experience
- Acting as a product evangelist to build awareness and understanding across teams
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to convert consumer insights and performance data into high impact product initiatives
- Experience with Scaled Agile Framework and/or Agile development and Lean Portfolio Management principles
- Familiar with machine learning concepts and its application in scaling personalization decision making across millions of customer interactions
- Knowledge of microservice architecture and continuous integration/continuous deployment techniques
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with demonstrated ability to present complex technical information in a clear manner to peers, developers, and senior leaders
Senior Product Owner - Contractor
Paya
08.2019 - 03.2020
- Partner with the Product Manager to understand the product goals, develop the product roadmap (6-12 months horizon), and to evolve the milestones based on customer feedback and team capacity
- Devise product vision/strategy and plans in collaboration with the product management and strategy teams and communicate the plans to the delivery teams effectively to ensure full understanding of customer needs
- Ensure the proper prioritization, sequencing, and dependency mitigation by communicating with various delivery and customer service teams
- Prioritize the backlog on a quarterly basis, have conversations with business and product partners regarding trade-offs when needed and bring clarity to short, mid, and long-term goals
- Establish Change Management, Product Readiness and Organizational Readiness processes for systematic delivery of high valued software
- Provide day-to-day product ownership activities including writing and prioritizing stories, hosting estimation and grooming sessions with delivery team(s), sprint reviews, and attending team standups, retrospectives and other team meetings
- Establish relationship with customers to enhance knowledge of the customer needs and opportunities while gathering feedback
- Be a champion for the product, the delivery team and their goals
- Be available to respond very quickly to client issues and assist the team for quick formulation of resolutions to customer problems
- Supervise and mentor junior product owners
Product Owner - Contractor
Equifax
06.2018 - 01.2019
- As an IT Product Owner, my role was to understand business needs and priorities at a tactical and a strategic level, providing communication and coordination between the relevant business partners and the product development teams
- Owned the product and its capabilities and ensured that business priorities reflect the committed work of the development team
- Responsible for ensuring that the product value proposition and desired business capabilities were reflected in the product developed to ensure the success of the business endeavor
- As part of the IT Development Team, I developed the Product Roadmap of Feature and capabilities to ensure alignment of product development efforts with strategic business plans
- Managed a team of 5 developers working closely to ensure the direction was clear and I removed impediments as required
- Partnered closely with the Professional Services and other team members building and maintaining the product functionality backlog
- Worked with Product Management to define larger and more complex solution components for IT departments, and broke them down into logical, discrete units for development
- Authenticated technical integration across multiple enterprise software systems
- Communicated the vision and goals at the beginning of every release and sprint
- Elaborated user stories for implementation
- Ensured that the Product Backlog was constantly prioritized to secure delivery of maximum business value
- Engaged with key customer contacts and with Product Managers as required to ensure that all relevant inputs to the Product Backlog have been collected and prioritized
- Participated in Backlog grooming, team planning meetings and provided advice, clarification and guidance during the execution of each Sprint
- Inspected, accepted or rejected completed work from the development Sprint
- Demonstrated completed product functionality to the internal business partners at the completion of each Sprint
Project Business Analyst \ Product Manager - Contractor
Paya
08.2017 - 05.2018
- Collaborating with product, project, and development stakeholders and teams to gather requirements, coordinate dependencies, and identify risks and opportunities
- Managing to the Product Roadmap and implementing features for the Product in a phased approach
- Serving as a SME for a specific product or group of products (Virtual Terminal, Level 2 and Level 3 credit card processing)
- Working as the product manager with one or more Agile development teams by setting priorities and translating product inputs into well-defined User Stories and functional requirements
- Translating product strategy into EPICs, requirement documents, uses cases and process flows
- Ensured the product is aligned with company, stakeholder and end-user priorities to drive sales, improve efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction
- Formulate, test and refined assumptions and hypotheses through user research and testing
- Condenses complex technical concepts into non-technical language for stakeholders
- Conducted end user research to help identify user stories and help determine Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Foster collaboration with team members (Engineering, User Experience Designers) to drive value and collectively identify and resolve impediments
- Acting as a proponent of modern software development practices (Dual Track Agile)
Business Consultant – Full Time Employee
Tech Mahindra
04.2017 - 08.2017
- Company Overview: T.DATA is real-time analytics and targeting platform that ingests and analyzes vast amounts of customer and product data to enable AT&T to provide dynamic and relevant Mobility & Entertainment Group offers, content, and solutions to its customer base
- Leveraging TDATA platform to support the Digital Experience and Wireless Mobility business groups
- Authored Feature Sets (User Stories) that represented capabilities and enhancements for the Big Data Targeting and Analytics application framework known as TDATA
- Enhanced AT&T Digital Properties into destination websites that provide a personalized browsing experience with curated content in the form of news, videos, multimedia and social media
- Wrote Features for Web personalization by associating customer segmentation attributes to internal profile definitions (Customer Persona)
- Optimized the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) based on behavioral, contextual and technical data
- Research and Analysis to support enhancements to AT&T Digital properties including 3rd party IT Vendor demonstrations, Proof of concept analysis, Request for proposals (RFP) and (RFI)
- Performing Data mining analysis to understand and discover patterns in the datasets
- Prospect User Journey mapping \ storyboarding
- Propensity model analysis to support and understand customer triggers for probability of action
- Used 1st and 3rd party customer segmentation attributes and datasets to gain customer engagement on digital properties
- T.DATA is real-time analytics and targeting platform that ingests and analyzes vast amounts of customer and product data to enable AT&T to provide dynamic and relevant Mobility & Entertainment Group offers, content, and solutions to its customer base
Business Systems Analyst \ Consultant – Full Time Employee
Cignium Technologies
01.2015 - 02.2017
- Engaged in project deliverables and new system enhancements from conception to design, testing and delivery
- Created prototype workflow processes for review by key stakeholders
- Responsible for re-engineering and integrating Legacy applications to existing Parent company architecture
- Facilitated requirements elicitation sessions with various members of the enterprise e.g.: Sales, Customer Service, Operations, I.T., Legal and QA to ensure all voices were heard and understood to meet the project objectives
- Analyze system business requirement documents
- Collaborate with business partners and stakeholders to define system requirements, which include requirements around the user interface and customer experience
- Author Requirement Documents, User Stories and Use Cases which includes details on the customer experience (flows/customer actions), and interface details (APIs/XML Data)
- Worked with Product Owners and management to evaluate and prioritize the Product Backlog to ensure robust and timely backlog velocity and delivery
- Ownership of projects assigned which requires creating/managing multiple project deliverables such as Business Requirements, User Stories, Use Cases, Process Flows, LOEs, Project Status, Issue Resolution, Tracking Milestone Dates/Deliveries, Updating Jira and Confluence (project tracking tool)
Education
MBA - Concentration in Human Resources
Keller Graduate School of Management
Orlando, FL06.2006
B.S. - Computer Information Systems
DeVry University
Kansas City, MO10.2000
Skills
- Product Owner
- CRM
- Software Development
- Research
- Application Configuration
- Cross Functional Teams
- Business Analysis
- Process Engineering
- QA Testing
- Product Management
- JIRA
- Project Management
- Product Backlog Prioritization
- Product Demos
- UI Mockups
- Azure DevOps ADO
- User story creation
- Strategic visioning
- Design thinking
- Data-driven decision making
- Customer empathy
- Scrum framework
- Stakeholder management
- Technical acumen
- Feature definition
- Acceptance criteria development
- Innovation management
- Agile frameworks
- Roadmap development
- Problem identification
- Risk assessments
- Agile methodology
- Business analysis
Certification
- Scrum Fundamentals Certified
- Scrum Product Owner Certified
Timeline
Senior Product Owner - Contractor
Georgia-Pacific
03.2023 - Current
Senior Product Owner - Contractor
Paya
08.2019 - 03.2020
Lead Product Manager, Personalization – Contractor
AT&T
02.2019 - 03.2023
Product Owner - Contractor
Equifax
06.2018 - 01.2019
Project Business Analyst \ Product Manager - Contractor
Paya
08.2017 - 05.2018
Business Consultant – Full Time Employee
Tech Mahindra
04.2017 - 08.2017
Business Systems Analyst \ Consultant – Full Time Employee
Cignium Technologies
01.2015 - 02.2017
B.S. - Computer Information Systems
DeVry University
- Scrum Fundamentals Certified
- Scrum Product Owner Certified
MBA - Concentration in Human Resources
Keller Graduate School of Management
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