STEVEN PAYNE

Mission-driven product and program leader with 10+ years delivering large-scale defense systems, including leading a $154M U.S. Army recruiting transformation supporting 8,000+ users. Trusted partner to Pentagon and senior military leadership with a track record of translating operational needs into scalable technology solutions and delivering mission-critical systems at national scale.

• Served as the Product Manager and Recruiting SME for the $154M Accessions Information Environment (AIE) project, overseeing the implementation of Salesforce using Agile methodologies.
• Maintained mission-critical continuity of operations during a government shutdown by proactively assuming the roles of six absent staff members, ensuring the program’s critical path remained uninterrupted.
• Established the Soldier Data Import (SDI) working group, defining the functional business logic and data models required to successfully migrate 32,000+ leads into the production environment.
• Enabled the integration of the SSG Star chatbot into AIE, which provided an on-demand knowledge base that reduced user research time by 75% and aimed to cut Tier 1 help desk tickets by 50%.
• Executed Solution Train Engineer (STE) responsibilities on a temporary basis, ensuring team alignment and flow during a critical leadership transition.
• Spearheaded the AI Working Group to develop and deploy an automated feature decomposition tool, significantly accelerating the conversion of features into actionable user stories and test cases.
• Validated the successful delivery of MVCR 1.0 and critical production interfaces after conducting comprehensive functional testing.
• Facilitated the AIE Soldier Community Design Experience, leading 30 Early Adopters at Fort Knox to identify and log over 100+ critical feedback items and system enhancements.
• Directed a recruiting office to achieve 300% of mission requirements, outperforming the entire Battalion during his tenure as an Assistant Center Commander.
• Re-engineered recruiting processing procedures to achieve a 34% quality improvement, raising the standard from 64% to 98%.
• Identified and reported critical bugs during a testing phase, which directly enhanced code quality and accelerated defect resolution.
• Created a "bridging strategy roadmap" that established essential timelines and feature development milestones for new development teams before the program's infrastructure was fully established.
• Developed and refined end-to-end roadmaps for the enlisted recruiting mission, successfully integrating functional prioritization into technical delivery schedules.
• Authored and secured approval for Innovation and Planning (IP) Sprint schedules, enabling development teams to build backlogs and prepare for critical Program Increment (PI) planning events.
• Revamped Agile team ceremonies to establish a more productive battle rhythm, empowering lower-level teams to make autonomous decisions and increasing operational velocity.
• Initiated the development of Operational Mission Scenarios to support AIE’s end-to-end test strategy, ensuring comprehensive validation upon development completion.
• Developed forecasting burndown charts to plot future schedules, providing leadership with data-driven insights for strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
• Managed structured onboarding for new development teams, providing program overviews and operating frameworks that accelerated initial team productivity.
• Analyzed over 65 features for leadership planning sessions, ensuring requirement baseline and epic traceability with functional teams.
• Prepared and conducted training for United States Army Recruiting Division (USARD) Master Trainers, enabling them to facilitate system training for end users within the Indianapolis Battalion

• SAFe Product Manager / SAFe Agilist
• Cornell Project Management Certificate

Selected as the Distinguished Leadership Award for demonstrating those qualities of leadership and characteristics of BE, KNOW, DO found in the Noncommissioned Officer. Provided extraordinary leadership skills as the Platoon Sergeant. Ensured all tasks were understood and accomplished them beyond expectations. Developed a brilliant working rapport with his classmates by being totally committed to the team effort through sharing personal experiences and contributing ideas to the group. Graduated with a 100% GPA which ranked top in the class.