Matt Schouten - Independent Consultant,

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Work Background

Schouten Coaching SolutionsManagement and Leadership Coach

Jan. 2025Coaching leaders and their teams to improved outcomes and exceptional performance. In this role, I support, encourage, resource, and build up managers and individual contributors alike, leveraging 20+ years of experience building software, teams, and performance. https://www.cybadger.com/coaching/

WP EngineSenior Manager, Web Development

Mar. 2022 - Jan. 2025In this role, I managed a remote, distributed team of web developers in the Marketing department. This role was all about change. In my time at WP Engine, we have had changes in Marketing leadership, acquired another company, restructured, and rebuilt our website on new technology. Embracing the good parts of change while keeping the team focused on the needed outcomes was a big part of the work. - Reduced large accrued backlog of security work to bring sites into compliance with internal security policies. - Oversaw development work involved in rebuilding wpengine.com from a traditional WordPress site to a "headless" WordPress site, providing a better experience for visitors. - Assimilated employees and sites acquired from Delicious Brains into WP Engine, resulting in a unified development team. - Effectively led my team through several leadership changes and organizational restructuring. - Served as interim manager of Product Management team during the manager's leave; maintained momentum on project management efforts. - Raised expectations and engineering discipline within Marketing Web Development.

TriumphPaySenior Engineer

Sep. 2021 - Mar. 2022In this role, I worked on a system that managed trucking payments and paperwork. It's a far more complex domain than I'd imagined! In addition to the technical work, I created a new onboarding program and began work on improvements to the organization that would help with sharing knowledge about our systems and the business domain.

Home InsteadTechnical Lead

Aug. 2019 - Aug. 2021In this role, I worked remotely across multiple departments at Home Instead to improve processes and open up new business opportunities. Developed cloud-based software (Azure, serverless, SQL Server) in an agile, DevOps, team-based, buzzword-compliant environment. Influence toward iterative, product-centric work. Influence technical parts of the organization toward positive team dynamics and high quality. Operate, maintain, and troubleshoot software and systems owned by my team. This was a continuation of my role as Technical Lead at HI Digital Solutions when HI Digital was absorbed by Home Instead December 1, 2020. - Reduced volume of support desk requests for external user SSO issues by adding SMS identity and user experience improvements (Azure B2C, HTML, Javascript). - Reduced time to create new internal Azure application skeleton from 1-2 days to deployed in less than 1 hour (Bash, Terraform, Azure CLI, Azure DevOps, .NET templates).

HI Digital SolutionsTechnical Lead

Aug. 2019 - Nov. 2020Remote position. Responsibilities: Provide technical leadership to a small development team while focusing on business goals. Architect and implement software (C#, Python, Docker, Azure, SQL Server). Teach less-experienced developers and influence the culture of client and parent organizations. Lead from influence rather than authority. - Implemented software to recover recurring licensing costs. Recovered over $100,000 in first month of operation. - Provided recommendations to not implement several projects based on cost-benefit analysis. - Delivered platform to aggregate data from international franchise partners to permit broader-context decision making. On-budget. - Led internal project to define engineering career ladder and per-level expectations. - Mentored and paired with very junior developer while maintaining team productivity.

Herzog Technologies, IncSenior Director of Product Development

Aug. 2010 - Aug. 2019Cedar Rapids, Iowa AreaSENIOR DIRECTOR - PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT (June 2016-Present) DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT (February 2015-June 2016) Responsible for development teams and software development practices - Managed and provided technical direction to development team that produced a PTC Back Office Server (BOS) and MDM Server. Both applications deployed for multiple customers in Herzog PTC Hosting environment. - Led development and integration effort of Herzog’s PTC Key Exchange Service (KES), a required PTC system component. Deployed for multiple customers, on-site and in Herzog PTC Hosting environment. - Designed and led development and deployment of “Switchboard”, a PTC track data exchange platform. - Supported key Herzog PTC Hosting customer in weekly technical integration teleconferences. Solved several conflicts stemming from initial misunderstandings and established technical trust and organizational rapport. - Managed development of prototype PTC Critical Feature Verification and Validation tool. The tool provides repeatability and verifiability to a manual, judgment-based system. - Systematized on-boarding process for GIS technicians. This reduced training time to 3 months (down from 6) and sharply reduced turnover. - Consistently provided technical insight and problem-solving assistance to my and other teams to improve development speed and quality. PRINCIPAL ENGINEER (August 2010-February 2015) Performed both systems and software work as company needs dictated - Developed and documented comprehensive PTC Configuration Management process - Developed and maintained several software tools to post-process video and GPS data for the SpeedTrax video survey system - Developed software to generate railroad track from PTC Data Model GIS format - Performed a wide variety of additional process- and product-development activities (including tool development and ArcGIS development) - Introduced Scrum process to scale development activity as dev team size increased

Rockwell CollinsSoftware Engineer

Sep. 2008 - Aug. 2010Cedar Rapids, Iowa Area- Developed and maintained a variety of software, ranging from flight-worthy embedded applications (C and Ada) to desktop software (Java) - Provided long-term, day-to-day technical and process guidance to engineering teams at Rockwell Collins India Design Center - Coordinated engineering effort to bring a product family up to DO-178B certifiability standards (design assurance levels D and A) - Served as Project Engineer for departmental efforts on cross-functional internal R&D program

Express Auto DeliverySoftware Engineer

Jan. 2008 - Aug. 2008Cedar Rapids, Iowa Area- Developed, maintained, and extended EAD's custom enterprise resource planning web application, used daily by virtually the entire staff. - Developed customer-facing and carrier-facing websites to increase business efficiency - Developed internal web services to support customer- and carrier-facing websites - Designed, documented, and built interfaces to partner auctions to allow customers of partner auctions to easily book vehicle shipping online

Wabtec Railway ElectronicsSoftware Engineer

Jan. 2003 - Jan. 2008A little of everything. Some highlights, with most recent first: - Systems and software expert on "Back Office Server" component of train control systems. (Systems and software work; software development in C; database work with Oracle and Informix) - Created internal tools to significantly aid systems and software testers by "single-sourcing" test documentation and executable test scripts. Enhanced those tools with web-based test status reporting. (Single source tools using XML, XML schema, XSLT, Word XML format; Reporting tools using Perl, Python, C++) - Developed tools and documentation for Wabtec's train control track model; helped develop and maintain track model; presented track model internally and to customers. (Tools in C++, Java, Excel VBA) - Software and systems testing (influenced later tool development).

Wabtec Railway ElectronicsIntern - Software Engineering

Jun. 2002 - Aug. 2002Extended an existing message-generating test tool to support dynamic message definitions. Used Java and XML.