accelerating results

I joined Modus Create to explore how small teams can deliver digital solutions with the highest business impact with the least cost, time, code, and risk. And since we learn best by building real products people want to buy, I dove into our delivery teams first.

After 20+ years in software development, I had experienced many companies achieving various degrees of success at delivering digital value. All of them had room for improvement. I moved to Modus because I wanted to work at the limit of what is possible. This way I could experience and shape it firsthand, then share these practices with aspiring organizations.

The goals were lofty, though in the daily reality a typical Modus project involves little lead time and no red carpet. Day one is joining the stand-up to meet the team and day two is reporting on what have you done for us lately - and make it count. As the founder of Modus would remind us, fast plus good equals good.

In order to meet these goals, every day we applied design thinking, user research, empathy, lean product strategy, agile finance, rapid validation, and best practices in engineering, security, reliability, and DevOps. All of these helped drive out risk and reduce the time, money, and code needed to achieve results.

Each of our customers across industries brought distinct strengths as well as gaps our consulting and support would fill. And through close collaboration and cooperation, we built great digital products as well as new skills and capacity within our customer teams.

A platform for Personal Success

Many companies encourage employee development as a means to retain and grow their available talent. At Modus Create, employee development is expected. And while talent retention is encouraged, so is healthy, planned turnover, along with the release of inspired talent into other companies.

I joined Modus with a few “bucket list” goals I wanted to achieve during my service - including managing engineers, publishing a few thoughts, and pushing the limits of rapid value delivery. After I achieved my initial goals, I found new horizons and internal mentors to take me beyond my resume. Along the way, I was able to carry and exceed sales quotas, help open a new international office, and promote emerging models of behavioral and emotionally aware product design. And I created a key role in the organization to manage customer relationships. That initial Modus Client Partner role has since grown into a successful team of outstanding servant leaders.

Modus Create continues to attract outstanding talent worldwide thanks to this authentic interest in individual success. In fact, when I onboard new talent, I start by asking “What do you want to be next?” and their answers continue to inspire me every day.

Sample Advisory and Digital Projects

Over the past 20+ years, I’ve helped advise and deliver results for companies across a range of industries. In every case, the principles of user-centered design, agile finance, modern development, and rapid validation saved us time, money, and code. By focusing our solutions precisely on the most important problems for the people we served, we reduced initial and future costs by eliminating low-value code and scrapping well-intentioned “good ideas” that mattered more to us than to our audiences.

Example projects include:

  • Fintech - mobile employee engagement and earned-wage access for unbanked earners

  • Pharmaceutical - personalized marketing asset delivery for the worldwide sales team

  • Publishing - user research-driven redesign and tech rebuild for a global education publisher

  • Social Services - major re-plaforming to Azure to scale nutrition delivery for homebound

  • Technology Services - refactoring code and migrating data center to optimize on AWS cloud

  • Food & Beverage - urban chain launch with an innovative employee ownership model

  • Higher Education - driving completion through mentoring, nudges, and mindset analytics

  • Travel - climate-aware and carbon-optimized travel advisory services

  • Healthcare - chronic pain support through emotionally aware digital interactions

  • Medical Manufacturing - real-time device-integrated tablet systems for doctors

  • Defense - User-centered design to demystify technically complex systems of systems

  • Risk Management - deep learning-based tropical weather forecasting

  • Senior Services - franchising concierge senior care and life transition planning

  • Leadership Development - emotionally aware coaching app for manager mentors

  • K-12 Education - digital community, mentoring, and social platform for homeschooling parents

  • Insurance - mobile and cloud-based tools to streamline field adjustment and data capture

  • Public Safety - virtual graduation and COVID-aware mobile campus access tools for students

  • Tourism - regional partnerships to extend reach, efficiency, and range of advertising spend

Managing Success

At SunGard, we were growing fast, organically and through acquisition. During this time, I was asked by our executives to serve on a cross-organizational team creating a 5-year plan to double our revenue to $1B for our new private investors. At the same time, I worked with newly acquired divisions to find synergies, align strategy, and introduce new teams to our culture. And as we grew, I helped define common job families and competencies across our organization.

We also needed to mature processes in key areas and to create patterns that would help us scale across the entire organization. So I worked with leadership and business teams to streamline processes for solution ideation, launch, and sunset. I also worked with internal and outside counsel, and our compliance team to improve protocols for anti-trust and export compliance. And I helped my teams transition from waterfall to lean agile product development, and from local to global R&D. For these and other results, I was awarded recognition and wide-ranging responsibilities within the company along the way.

 

Leading partnerships

To meet our revenue and margin goals at Ellucian and SunGard, we needed to partner well and thoughtfully manage those partnerships. As Product Manager for Common Components, I led some of our most successful partnerships, consistently setting high expectations with our sponsors and then leading our teams, our partners, and our customers to excellence.

In one example, directed by leadership to create reliable, non-dilutive revenue growth for our investors in an area outside our core competency, I led an integrated OEM solution to consistent 30% or greater annual growth over several years to $15MM in annual revenue - our largest partnership outside of our primary platform vendor.

My roles included identifying partners and opportunities, defining and negotiating terms for new partnerships and renewals, engaging customers, and managing operational success. As our market penetration increased for these successful solutions, I helped our teams and partners expand our value so we could generate compelling new offers while retaining our customers and growing revenue. And where we had solutions that produced less value over time or became unsustainable, I helped identify paths forward that retained customer loyalty while allowing us to evolve our vision for the business, including sunsets, replacements, and repositionings guided by close collaboration.

Along the way, I actively managed nearly every form of partnership we maintained - co-marketing, lead generation, resale, OEM, ISV, implementation and managed services, and channel sales - working closely with Sales, Business Development, Marketing, Services, Finance, and Legal for our teams and partners. From this experience, I grew to love partnerships and shared successes.

 

Analytics at Work

My degrees are in applied math and physics, with graduate studies in machine learning, vision, and data visualization. These skills were helpful at Ultimate Software where I was product manager for our predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions for talent managers. Among my responsibilities, I helped customers overcome their unfamiliarity with machine predictors and prescriptive analytics, turning doubters into believers.

These were also some of my favorite solutions because I could use my math education as well as my digital product leadership skills to generate great customer results. For example, one customer, based on our product’s predictions, was able to proactively prepare for and ultimately prevent a top performer from resigning. For these and other solutions designed to develop new managers into leaders, we were consistently applauded by analysts and investors in our space.

 

Analytics at Home

In our community and across the state of Florida, public schools were suffering from years of cuts to the capital budgets used for building safety and systems maintenance. So a group of us worked to form a sensible plan for providing capital revenue and public oversight for our school district’s 73,000 learners. And then we delivered.

To raise public support for this measure, which had failed on past ballots, we worked with large public voter data sets and analytics tools like Tableau to visualize and guide decisions leading to our success. In particular, through analytics, we were able to determine how best to direct our time and resources most effectively. And just as importantly, armed with evidence and visualization, we could show others that winning was possible, and earn their support for a winnable, worthy cause.

Thanks to smart, data-centric storytelling and lots of teamwork and sweat equity, the measure passed, raising an anticipated $200MM for local public education over its six year duration.

 

Counseling and Helping Others

While in college, I typically worked more than one job at a time to pay for education expenses.  Along the way, I served as a tutor for students who were struggling academically, often in math or science, and as a campus counselor for students who were struggling to find their way through college.

Having experienced personal challenges and setbacks in my own academic journey, I had empathy for others and relevant experiences to share. Through counseling and tutoring, I learned that I enjoyed helping others realize their potential. Turning aspiration into action and helping people help others have been themes in my professional and personal service ever since.

 

Service leadership and advocacy

I serve on the board of the Brevard Schools Foundation to help ensure sustainable excellence within our public schools. I have also been privileged to serve in other community leadership roles supporting local aspirations for arts, culture, destination, workforce, and economic development through strategic partnerships and smart investment of public resources.

Periodically, I travel around the state to share our aspirations with business and community leaders and our elected officials. And I regularly meet with state officials to provide evidence and advocacy for targeted public funding to seed innovative partnerships and productive programs.

In November 2017, Matt Reed and I explored some of these themes on “Brevard Watch”. We discussed how the Brevard Schools Foundation supports innovation, engages our community, and changes lives. We examined the impacts of strategic public funding for arts, culture, revitalization, and tourism development. And we looked at how our community is helping students and families displaced by storms and climate issues.