Michael Poythress

ROLE: Remote Work Consultant

With more than 20 years of experience in full-time remote work, I have been an integral part of forming and leading teams in partially remote, mostly remote, remote-first, and 100% remote structures.

I have learned best-practices (and what NOT to do) through personal experience at more than a dozen organizations, ranging from startups with more than ten employees to medium/large enterprises with more than 500 employees.

My first-hand contributions include (but are not limited to) the following activities:

• Evaluated and selected tools for remote team productivity.
• Established and introduced policies and practices for remote team communication and engagement.
• Interviewed, hired, trained, supervised and terminated staff and contractors, across multiple continents and time zones.
• Maintained data security and regulatory compliance.

This project set out to create a software-based service that would provide a simple, painless, no-cost option for retail businesses to get online orders.

While coordinating with—and catering to—more than ten distinct user groups, our team developed an elegant and user-friendly interface for a very complex set of tools used to do a variety of tasks:
• Manage products.
• Publish product listings on marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and eBay.
• Adjust prices automatically based on real-time competitive market prices.
• Select the best supplier for each order based on stock availability.
• Select shipping carriers for an order based on the best cost and service.

This PHP/Laravel enterprise platform is now successfully handling eCommerce sales for hundreds of companies, using algorithms, machine learning, APIs, financial processing, security, reporting, and big data; additional features and capabilities are also being continually added.

This is a regional product merchandising company with a staff of over 250 people that manages the product layouts for a major US retailer. Each employee submits an average of 5-10 task and status reports per week to the home office. These were being submitted via paper, email, phone, faxes, etc.—and then manually entered into spreadsheets for reporting.

As the project manager, I led the discovery process to define and document the business needs and requirements and worked closely with the business owner and executives to develop a multi-year project plan (including schedule and roadmap) that would digitize the entire business with a web and mobile application.

I then led a team of UX designers and programmers to produce that application using agile development processes, with bi-weekly sprints and progress reviews.

The project was a success—meeting or exceeding every goal the client had—giving them greater efficiency and profitability through new products and services.

Here, I worked closely with founders to understand the product vision from a conceptual stage and then expand that into a full set of detailed project documents—including user/stakeholder definitions, user stories, feature requirements and roadmap, timeline and milestones, and budget.

I then populated that data into online project management tickets for use by programmers and other project collaborators.

Essentially the project is a privacy-oriented mobile and desktop browser that uses blockchain technologies for security and anonymity and an ad marketplace to provide user rewards for enabling opt-in advertising

With no prior "large warehouse" or fulfillment center inventory management experience, I was assigned to lead a team in inventorying all the products in a 100,000 square foot warehouse and obtain data that had been integrated to an eCommerce platform for immediate sale and fulfillment.

Using an agile development process, I led programmers to rapidly deliver a functional MVP and the stock-taker team was able to begin using it in the warehouse the very next day. This inventory management system has been gradually enhanced and is still in active use.

As the project manager, I used Kanban and Waterfall processes to locate, select, and coordinate the efforts of a product designer, packaging designer, manufacturer, product photographer, and distribution partners.

The products were manufactured internationally, then imported to and sold in the US through multiple outlets, including Amazon.com.

My role also involved reviewing and giving feedback on multiple design prototype iterations, meeting "retail-ready" packaging standards, arranging international freight/shipping logistics, US customs, warehousing, and fulfillment.

A mid-size customer appreciation gift company was unable to grow further, due to using a series of time-consuming manual processes to transfer information between completely disconnected software tools—for accounting, inventory management, CRM, shipping, surveys and responses, product customization, and order processing.

I led a team to design and build a custom web application to streamline the business processes—all within a firm budget—using Agile methodologies.

The new application met and exceeded the owners' goals, and has enabled a new wave of growth and profitability through new products and services. Five of the previous software tools were completely replaced, and the remaining two are now tightly coupled with the main application through API integrations.

Working closely with the product owner, I led a team of front-end and back-end engineers to create a fully functional application based on a set of visual mockups.

The project was on a very tight deadline to be complete in time for a trade show and utilized Agile development methodology with weekly sprints and progress reviews.

Built primarily with PHP and JavaScript, the project involved interfacing with multiple vendors and complex technologies for video processing/transcoding, adaptive bitrate video streaming, complex PCI-compliant payment processing (split transaction) models, and customizable design themes for client sites—responsive for use on both desktop and mobile devices.

The platform was successfully launched and our team also handled the setup of a second video platform, utilizing this code, under license, as a foundation.

Here, I worked closely with the managing director of a small regional lender to define the requirements for—and build—a web-based portfolio management system.

Built primarily with PHP and MySQL, the "core banking" system was engineered as a double-entry accounting primary ledger, to track borrower profiles and their accounts. It also handled the tracking of accrued interest, payment processing via ACH/bank network, and included a customer-facing login site.

Our team successfully created and launched an online service that could be added to a user's Twitter account and connect with the user's PayPal account and/or credit card to initiate payments by posting a tweet including a hashtag (#makeitrain) or username, and an amount.

Designed as an alternative to "text to give," specifically for social cause marketing and raising awareness for needs, we coordinated a roll-out with a handful of non-profits and celebrities.

As the project manager, I led engineers and a graphic designer to a rapid launch using lean, Agile development processes and coordinated the application and audit processes for service partners.

Here, I selected and led a team of engineers to deliver features on time, to meet business-critical contractual deadlines for a large national bank.

The application tracks thousands of data points for each of 7 million+ accounts and passed a SAS 70 (now SSAE 16) audit.

As the engineering project manager, I implemented Agile methodologies and tools to coordinate the efforts of multiple teams and vendors as we prioritized and completed the backlog of requests.

There were numerous stakeholders and expectations to manage—in a high-stakes, high-stress scenario—but we did it successfully and launched the application on time.

The owner of a local Groupon competitor had a large email list and was fed up with the technology he was trying to use for his flash-sale site.

Our team worked closely with this business owner to develop a new application using Agile methodologies. After launch, we used a Kanban process to provide ongoing maintenance and operational support.

The project included working with designers, engineers, and multiple vendors (payment processors, email delivery, local franchisees) to maintain a very high up-time under high traffic load, and on strict schedule deadlines.

This platform served email lists of approximately 200,000 addresses, and successfully processed thousands of financial transactions per day.

The business and website began as manually-created HTML pages created by two people, serving a single city.

I led a small team of developers and designers—over a period of several years—to meet the needs of three different stakeholder groups and evolved the site into a database-driven platform serving multiple cities and states with the content being maintained by many non-technical local representatives.

Our team was one of the earliest users of data feeds and content scraping. All done in the efforts to increase marketing reach through an online content syndication network.