Product Development Professional

Stephanie Slater Roberts

Louisville, KY ***** 502-***-**** ******.**@*****.***

Innovative Product Leader with demonstrated success and passion for driving ideation, concepts, development, and launch of compelling new products resulting in exceptional customer engagement and satisfaction.

Analyzing business goals, market insights, and customer needs, envisioning, planning and executing strategies to deliver differentiated, high-impact products with a focus on efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Experienced leader of cross-functional teams, effectively collaborating to push product and service boundaries, delivering vision, goals, and actionable roadmaps that exceed business objectives.

Executing and analyzing competitive analysis, leveraging strategies to optimize market potential, maximizing sales and profit margins.

Forging and nurturing relationships with key stakeholders both internal and external to ensure seamless communication of vision, strategy, and project execution status.

Coaching and mentoring teams on best practices, inspiring proactive and growth mindsets in pursuit of top performance.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

UW Solutions, LLC (Formerly Universal Woods), Louisville, KY

Technical Business Development 2023- Present

Promoted to initiate and nurture strategic business relationships and forge alliances to significantly expand company's reach into new markets, fostering growth and diversification across all business divisions.

Initiated and successfully directed concurrent development of two distinct product platforms with first-year potential sales volume poised to elevate overall division sales by 9%, up to $3M.

Orchestrated seamless cross-functional collaboration, guaranteeing timely delivery and ensuring successful execution within designated timelines.

Director of Advanced Materials 2022-2023

Identified, researched, and analyzed emerging market opportunities, current and advanced technology capabilities to evaluate revenue potential and strategic alignment.

Conceptualized and pitched potential solutions to drive growth in current and adjacent markets.

Crafted visionary strategic plan for a $7M product funnel, leveraging market insights and business acumen to align with organizational objectives and drive revenue growth over 3 years.

Led transformative 5-year partner collaboration to conceptualize, develop, and commercialize disruptive technology, resulting in 2X lifespan of outdoor hard surface sublimation, positioning organization as market pioneer.

Effectively collaborated with organizational stakeholders to provide regular and timely updates on project status, key milestones, challenges, and next steps.

Partnered closely with influential customer to design and launch innovative product platform for a new application in just 5 months, generating $1.5M in first-year revenue and projecting a 25%+ CAGR over the next 5 years.

Product Engineering Manager 2015 – 2022

Conceptualized creation and launch of innovative new products to boost top brands and mentored 4-member engineering team resulting in over 15 successful launches.

Continuous product improvements and new product launches led to sales surge from $25M to $80M across 8 years.

Developed and implemented Stage-Gate product development process resulting in 14% reduction in time-to-market.

Refocused development efforts to create custom solutions for high-end customers resulting in 75% sales increase from $1M to $4M in 3 years.

Key contributor on team that developed and commercialized groundbreaking outdoor product extending expected life by 3X.

New Product Engineer 2012-2015

Responsible for competitive product evaluation for benchmarking, conducting new product research on new materials, components, technologies, and processes.

Decreased RFQ response time by over 50% while improving pricing consistency, margins and customer satisfaction.

Researched and adopted novel BOM set-up eliminating inconsistencies and improved production variances by over 80%.

EDUCATION

PURDUE UNIVERSITY, WEST LAFAYETTE, IN

MS Engineering Management and Leadership

INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON, IN

Certificate in Business Management

UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE LOUISVILLE, KY

BS Industrial Engineering

BES Mechanical Engineering

Publication: “ChromaLuxe and New Generation Digistar Helios Inks: Applications for Long Term Display of Photographic Images”. Leland Carlblom, Davide Dragoni, Paul Neumann, Stephanie Slater Roberts. Second Colour Photography and Film Conference, 2022.

Awards: SGIA Product of the Year/ Printing United Pinnacle Award winners: ChromaLuxe Tabletops (2013), ChromaLuxe EXT (2018), ChromaLuxe Textured Metal Prints (2020), Unisub Sublimation Acrylic (2024).

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