Lauren Ober
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Littleton, CO, United States
Toptal member since January 12, 2022
Lauren has the lightning-fast ability to get up to speed on her clients' needs. Within days, she identifies key areas of opportunity related to any company or product. She is a results-oriented leader with 15+ years of experience in engineering, IT, operations, retail, and customer-facing environments. With a history of success in product management and business transformation, Lauren believes that all problems within a company can be solved by using technology combined with efficient processes.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Backlog Grooming
- Business Requirements
- IT Product Management
- Iterative Development
- Market Research & Analysis
- Software Implementation
- Technical Product Management
Work Experience
Consultant | Founder
Materialize - Freelance Consulting
- Consulted with senior executives on roadmap strategy and strategic planning. Provided recommendations on streamlining services regarding people, processes, and technology, including suggestions for automation and integration options.
- Assisted in creating prioritization mechanisms to uncover high-ROI initiatives and company goal alignment.
- Worked with companies to build efficient processes. Created strategies to implement effective organizational change management.
- Researched and implemented products that provide process efficiency gains - such as robotic process automation (RPA) software. Built automation logic to reduce manual work.
- Assessed security vulnerabilities and risks and implemented disaster recovery and business continuity processes that supported environment hardening and GDPR and CCPA best practices.
- Documented architecture and made suggestions for future architecture enhancements/streamlining.
- Gathered requirements for numerous projects and worked with the business and development teams on roadmap milestones, prioritization, and execution.
Senior Product Manager
Amazon.com
- Drove projects from inception to completion, owning the vision, strategy, and development of the products in collaboration with the design (UX) and development teams.
- Implemented processes that increased effectiveness within our department, including my team's conversion from Waterfall to Agile and Scrum methodologies.
- Managed several high-visibility software products within Amazon's ecosystem, including the comparison widget on the detail pages of all Amazon products and showcase widgets that help customers find products.
Senior Business & Process Analyst
Sports Authority
- Developed and managed multiple process improvement initiatives, including prioritization mechanisms and strategy.
- Documented requirements and workflow to implement new or enhancements to existing software solutions.
- Learned and configured Salesforce and BMC Remedyforce to create a new intake process and transfer approval process; created custom templates, objects, workflow, rules, and validations within Salesforce to build incidents with approval tickets.
- Assisted other teams with configurations for the BMC Remedyforce Change Management module/workflow; formed a user group to improve the existing CMDB architecture.
- Owned from ideation to implementation, a new process reducing internal store-to-store transfer spend, with an ROI of over $1M saved annually in freight and transfer costs.
Lead Business Analyst
Nelnet | 5280Solutions
- Gathered requirements and evaluated business request feasibility based on system capabilities or limitations. Created policies and processes to support telephony hardware and software.
- Implemented a new ticketing system that applied the ITIL methodology to incident and change management.
- Created technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, functional design documents, server baselines, instructional process documents, and quick-reference guides.
- Implemented a holistic change management plan and created a telephony QA environment directly responsible for a 35% reduction in incidents.
- Developed a curriculum and conducted custom training to support product implementations.
- Documented and coordinated business recovery planning and disaster recovery solutions.
- Built and applied solutions for application testing and stress testing on all patches and code prior to deployment.
Project History
Amazon Comparison Widget
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-85-Inch-Crystal-AU8000-Built/dp/B08Z28KXHT/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=tv&qid=1633974990&sr=8-4&th=1#HLCXComparisonWidget_feature_divManaged the comparison widget maintenance and R&D backlog, groomed and prioritized stories with the team, and spearheaded a new version of the comparison tool intended to live within search.
Store-to-store Transfer Reduction
Spearheaded and implemented a project to reduce excessive inter-company transfer spending, positively transforming culture and process, which was previously problematic and deeply ingrained throughout the company.
Certifications
Product Analytics Certified
Pendo
Neo4j Certified Professional
Neo4j
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Slack, Jira, Asana, Google Workspace, Figma
Paradigms
Iterative Development, Agile, User Testing, Agile Product Management, Change Management, Testing
Industry Expertise
Consumer Products
Other
Product Management, Product Strategy Consultant, Market Research & Analysis, Software Implementation, Strategic Planning & Execution, IT Product Management, Backlog Grooming, Technical Requirements, Business Requirements, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Project Timelines, Scope Management, Data Analysis, Backlog Management, Requirements, Scope of Work (SOW), Wireframing, Roadmaps, User Journeys, Business Analysis, Project Planning, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), User Experience (UX), UX Design, Software & Hardware Maintenance, A/B Testing, Microsoft, WordPress, Technical Product Management, Product Enhancement, Product Strategy, Strategy, eCommerce, New Product Development, Product Roadmaps, Web Applications, Ideation, Mobile Applications, Agile Program Management, Program Management, Graph Databases, Software Design, IT Strategy, Google, Process Flows, User Workflows, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Salesforce, Business Process Management (BPM), Process Improvement Project Management, Change Leadership, Workshops, Feature Backlog Prioritization, ITIL, Auditing, Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP), Business Continuity, Stress Testing, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Training, UML Diagrams, Website Redesign, Data-driven Dashboards, Data Visualization, Databases, Product Analytics, API Integration, Advertising Technology (Adtech), Mobile Apps, Content Management Systems (CMS)
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