Steven W.

Organizational coaching and consulting services for midsize businesses and late stage startups. Delivering practical operations experience earned while scaling Mailchimp from $10M to $1B ARR. The OpEx Coach enables high-growth outcomes by enhancing operational strategies.

• Innovative consulting methods tailored to the tech industry, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and growth potential for clients.
• A decade of cross-functional leadership experience offering comprehensive solutions across various organizational layers, driving substantial improvements in client outcomes.

The largest retail natural gas provider in Georgia and the Southeastern U.S., serving nearly 500,000 customers across 14 States. Led the business transformation to agile ways of working, implementing an operating models for cross-functional collaboration, planning, execution, and delivery.

• Streamlined the prioritization and planning processes for system capabilities—boosting throughput, cutting waste, improving application stability and increasing the delivery of customer requests by 25% in just one quarter.
• Directed the integration of product, project, and business analysis functions into one high-performing team, driving a 63% increase in team alignment and engagement through clear vision, structure, and leadership.

Business Operations and Strategy in support of a 1,000 person cross-functional organization spanning Engineering, Product, Design, & Data functions.

• Led the end-to-end process for hiring and allocation onto cross-functional teams, taking ownership of the budget planning, prioritization, and tracking leading reduced time to fill from 55 to 45 days.
• Designed and implemented a 12-week apprenticeship program that increased employee mobility and strengthened talent pipelines by 85%.
• Creation of budget processes for department operations, producing quarterly forecasts, pattern analysis, and actionable recommendations for improvement.

Acting Chief of Staff for Chief Product Officer, managing strategic programs and the operations & growth of the Product department, consisting of 120 full-time employees in Project and Product Management, Customer Research, and Data Analytics.

• Designed the core competency framework to assess product leaders' effectiveness, leading activities on incentives, performance calibration, and talent management strategies.
• Up-leveled Talent Acquisition and employee retention practices through the in-depth analyses of compensation practices, job descriptions, and offerings to recruit and retain high-quality, diverse candidates.

Executive level reporting and visibility for cross-functional GTM initiatives that enhance predictability and surface ares for coordination across 420 employees and 11 product lines.

• Implemented the planning framework used for dependency management to improve visibility across team execution and developing a centralized roadmap of all program initiatives.

Served as the first Project Manager at Mailchimp, pioneering the processes and frameworks to support more than 420 full time employees and filling the dual responsibilities of Scrum Master and Program Manager.

• Facilitated the executive-level reporting for team roadmaps, deliverables, and commitments across Engineering, Product Management, and Design teams to support GTM plans for strategic business initiatives.

Directed four elevated teams leading specialist programs and training with the objective of scaling up Mailchimp's customer support, including the 2014 Webby-award-nominated Social Media support team.

• Led the project and product management of support requirements for new product initiatives and customer offerings, including the 2014 launch of Mailchimp Pro and "prioritized support" as a capability to achieve 1 day SLA for high value customers.
• Implemented a process for tracking and prioritizing engineering requests on behalf of customers through an in-house tracking tool, reducing ticket creation and providing visibility on priority issues in need of development support.

Hiring and training of technical support staff for the growth and scale of department structure to 24 hours, 6 days a week, managing up to 11 direct reports across shifts as a team leader.

• Implemented training and workshops to reduce the escalation of customer requests, reducing manager interventions by 25%.
• Documented customer pain points in the application to create feedback loops for Research & Development teams to effectively prioritize, and in some cases document, customer-specific scenarios.