Success AcademyHead of Product
Oct. 2014 - Sep. 2016Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest charter school operator in New York City.
• Led the organization’s transition from offsite technical consultants to in-house design and development teams. This resulted in lower costs and more predictable deliveries.
• Hired the majority of the new in-house software department — 34 employees — spread between 4 teams; Data Science, Automation (custom software development), Customer Service and Infrastructure (system administration and hardware).
• New in-house software department was responsible for over 70 products and services.
• Worked with new in-house product teams and stakeholders to transition from a waterfall to an agile methodology to help with the rapid growth and changes in the organization.
• Managed product teams that worked on a variety of different products ranging from IT infrastructure and warehouse management, to workflow automation and front-facing tools used by school staff and the general public.
• Created professional development opportunities, and improved department culture to reduce high churn rate.
• Operating budget for the department was 20m+ USD per annum.
• Core software stack consisted of Python, AngularJS and AWS.