Adam Zachary Wasserman

Agreed to take on the most challenging customer relationship in the entire business unit.

First, I analyzed the root causes:
• Power imbalance—the customer was responsible for at least ten times more budget and scope than our equivalent position.
• Misaligned delivery—we served a customer with two teams with two financial models; the customer would play both sides against each other.
• Unplanned work—emergency requests regularly derail a team working on a fixed budget and capacity.
• Source code management policies led to regularly occurring emergencies.
• Deployment policies led to regularly occurring emergencies.

Then I remediated:
• Pushed back while maintaining a productive, mutually respectful relationship.
• Merged the two teams and aligned their incentives.
• Moved key team members to the customer’s site with a very large kanban board to make the impact of emergency requests visible.
• Influenced the customer to switch to early merge and deployment from trunk.
• Influenced the customer to start moving to daytime deployments.

Results:
• A mutually respectful relationship built on trust.
• Improved mutual respect and trust at the level of managers and team members.
• Improved value delivered.

Given a budget to hire two dozen developers, I chose instead to create a toolset that enabled a team of four to support the production of up to a dozen mobile apps concurrently.

This was achieved by rationalizing the codebase and improving the source-code strategy, creating two in-house no-code platforms, one for mobile apps and one for content authoring.

Achieved the ability to dynamically reconfigure (while the app was running, without additional push-to-store) most aspects of native mobile apps (content, styles, branding, navigation, localization, accessibility, and activation and deactivation) without violating Apple App Store guidelines.

Built a team of six account directors responsible for end-to-end customer success.

• Articulated a new vision to improve enterprise delivery and successfully built consensus with all stakeholders.
• Mapped customer journey by touchpoint and drove buy-in from all stakeholders.
• Selected and implemented HubSpot CRM system.
• Taught customer success directors enterprise land-and-expand strategies.
• Taught the sales team to support clients in the creation of Gate 3 business cases during proposal development.
• Worked closely with channel partners to drive inbound leads.
• Landed the largest sale of 2019 in a single phone call by identifying the key decision maker and demonstrating deep understanding and commitment.
• Recruited, hired, and fired remote workers in two countries. Directly managed six CS directors and matrix-managed 35 teams in six clusters in two countries, using 100% Agile and SAFe methodologies.

The project was to replace SSO with no disruption in services. Because of tight coupling with upstream and downstream systems, bugs and technical debt had risen to unmanageable levels.

I paused development for one sprint to do an analysis and engineer solution. I implemented a facade pattern (abstraction layer) to decouple dependent systems and allow progressive cutover over one year. Achieved additional benefit of business flexibility in selecting and replacing partners without severe business impact.

A specialty foods distributor learned that its eCommerce platform, Handshake, would be shut down before the end of that year. They selected a replacement platform and initiated a six-month project to re-platform the service. At the end of six months, with the project stalled, I agreed to take on the challenge of rescuing the project.

I mapped the business process and determined that it was not that the business wanted more; they needed less. The optimal scenario for the company was: no change, no disruptions of any sort, and business as usual. The business’ dissatisfaction with the selected new platform was due to features that existed out-of-the-box that they found either unnecessary and confusing to the users or implemented in an overly complicated fashion.

With 12 weeks before the termination of the project, an immediate decision was essential. I assessed that the integrator was having difficulty simplifying the out-of-the-box workflow.

I found a reasonably priced, well-designed, B2B eCommerce SaaS that had pivoted its business to rescuing former Handshake customers. Because of their focus on this niche, they could commit to a fixed fee implementation in just days. The project was delivered under budget and on time.

I led seven managers and 100 engineers in five cities and three countries to deliver a B2B portal for Canada’s most established telecom provider. Teams were located in Montreal, Toronto, Erfurt, Bangalore, and Chennai.

The project involved re-platforming to a Java-based framework and integration to legacy back-end OSS/BSS systems.

Managed over 100 developers responsible for developing and operating all new technology-based products and services.

Redesigned, redeveloped, and operated ICH (IATA Clearing House) platform.

Designed, delivered, and operated iiNET: Electronic Data Exchange System
for transmitting settlement/banking instructions in the airline industry.

Designed, delivered, and operated CargoIS: Business intelligence reporting volumes and market share on O/D pairs for air cargo.

I managed three Agile teams migrating on-prem data to the cloud (AWS and Snowflake). I defined the following two-quarter goals for data governance. I also supported VPs in the overall objective setting for cloud migration and Agile transformation.

I wrote a Python program to automate very high-volume integration with VirusTotal, which required the use of concurrency to achieve the necessary throughput. I wrote Python to automate the non-destructive anonymization of email addresses in unstructured data (referrer logs) before the submission to public fraud prevention databases such as VirusTotal. Achieved 5 9’s reliability (as measured by false negatives) on data sets of trillions of lines. The performance achieved allowed processing of one million lines per minute on a laptop. I wrote a Python program to reduce URLs and hostnames to a registered domain with de-duping. I wrote a Python program to look up new certs from the crt.sh database. I used supervised machine learning to identify domain names infringing upon trademarks and x-index referrer logs from legitimate domains for early identification of phishing activity.

I managed a team of contractors to define and deliver a highly customized implementation based on the Microsoft Dynamics 360 platform. Started with a customized workflow in Dynamics CRM, and expanded out to ERP, BI, and custom applications built on Power Platform and the Dataverse.

I managed all aspects of the project, coordinating interior designers (for office space), engineers for airflow and HVAC, power plant, network and telephony (wireline and wireless), warehouse layout, and equipment.

The project included a challenging underground environment for warm failover contingencies, including a 20,000 generator, redundant fiber, and multi-homed Internet.

Wrote custom software application to automate the process of allocating unsold media time blocks to preferred customers using a company-specific set of business rules.

The process took 40 hours a week per month, with four people working as a group for 2.5 hours a week when it was manual. The software completed the process in 40 seconds, freeing up a significant amount of resource time.

Managed alignment of data sub-projects across the entire organization for a $12 billion electronic controls and sensors firm headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. Directly managed a dozen specialists based in Canada and the USA.

Mid-tier EMS company: hired by CFO to provide post-merger integration, Profitability improvement (as well as cash and balance sheet improvement), and strategy consulting before delivering six months of engagement management defining, planning, and delivering BPI, change management, and ERP rollout across two companies merged by a private equity firm.