Product and Program Leader

**** **** *** ** #***

Seattle, WA *****

Home:206-***-****

adf0pe@r.postjobfree.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherwheeler

https://wheelertechservices.com/

Christopher Alan Wheeler

Wheeler Technologies Seattle, WA

(Sole Proprietorship)

Technical Product, Program, People Consultant (5/17-Present)

Provide strategic guidance and direct output in areas such as eCommerce, SaaS, AI, FR, and messaging technology product and program functions for stealth startups; interim Principal Product and Program Manager for Amazon eCommerce Services division; and mentoring individuals on business and technology related themes. Took features to market with HBO, T-Mobile, and SAFR (start-up via RealNetworks).

Starbucks Director, Technical Product Management (11/17-3/18) Seattle, WA

Managed and guided a team of 9 Technical Product Managers (people managers and individual contributors) to strategize, author, execute, and shepherd the entire SDLC workflow working with onsite and outsourced engineers.

Contributed to “think tank” sessions with other Starbucks Technology leadership (up to and including the SVP and EVP/CTO) to crystalize a 1 year, 2 year, and 5 year plan for how the future of emerging and mature technologies could be used to accelerate Starbucks’ go-to-market goal with a new, redesigned and modernized eCommerce platform to support both domestic and international efforts.

Owned expanding Starbucks mobile features to delight customers to over 4000 licensee stores and 3000 internal Starbucks owned stores, via in café, window, and mobile ordering lanes.

Proudly promoted one member (partner) of my team to Principal and actively mentored other teammates and colleagues on how to build their career.

Oracle Principal Technical Program Manager, IaaS Cloud (10/16-4/17) Seattle, WA

Founding and eventual managing member of the Infrastructure Platform Services (IPS) TPM Organization representing: entire hardware ingestion workflow, configuration management, Hypervisor (compute control plane) provisioning and capacity pipeline for the rest of Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services (OBMCS). Kept IPS foundation from blocking critical path for external customer facing operation of products such as Compute, Block Storage, and DBaaS, to build dependent services in a reliable, scalable, and secure manner.

As product owner, created the first IPS scoped roadmap and presented to leadership after grooming and culling 3 different team independent lists of projects. Division key initiative projects green lit.

With zero downtime or impact to OBMCS or external customer services, successfully completed migration of internal accounts (UIDs and GIDs) to managed Linux space within Chef data bags, versus ad hoc CLI file editing – a total of 50 different unique users and 30 hostclass groups over a staggered 1 month schedule – strengthening the security promise to end customers on who and what systems have access where in the service enclave substrate.

Led cross-company coalition to determine and produce programmatic solution for capacity management and forecasting, across multiple vectors per IO, DIM, HDD, CPU, etc., saving OBMCS over $5MM of excess capacity charges and avoiding procuring soon to be end of life bare metal hosts.

Wholly responsible for managing relationships and driving solutions for security, compliance, finance, product management (both in and outbound), Data Center HW procurement, and solution architecture team with IPS.

Acted as a “Bar Tender” – OBMCS’ version of ensuring a high hiring bar is consistently maintained – after nominated and approved for pilot program. In 3 months, I’ve BT’d over 30 interviews.

Kicked off the first Oracle LGBTQ+ affinity group in the PNW, collaborating with employees across 3 different states and over 5 distinct, otherwise disparate areas within Oracle.

Amazon.com Technical Advisor and Chief of Staff to CTO, Intl Retail Tech (9/14-9/16) Seattle, WA

At request of CTO, rejoined Amazon to assist with new international development initiative per Jeff Bezos.

Accelerated launch, onsite visits, and inculcation of 14 international engineering centers of excellence by 50% per new site.

Built out process for worldwide goal tracking, metrics benchmarking, and customer communication strategy for new releases.

Assisted the CTO in daily operations, including headcount tracking, budgetary guidance with classic and virtual hardware, scaling projections to meet forecasts (internationally), and liaising between senior executive leadership (SVPs and Executive Customer Councils) and team to ensure alignment on top down and bottom up goals.

Orchestrating new “one customer” global culture of 300 staff members into a newly formed organization.

Acted as proxy for the CTO when he was unavailable.

Successfully launched over 15 different customer-facing features after authoring and co-authoring white papers proving efficacy of such features which added up to > $500MM expected revenue over 5 years.

Head of Product, Fire Phone Digital Store Platform (9/13-8/14) Seattle, WA

Built out an entire team from scratch (including engineers, product managers and development managers) as the founding member of the team and eventually directly managing up to 30 team members.

Program and product managed integrating the Book and Periodical store into the Amazon Fire Phone Android OS, a Pri0 feature, taking the feature from red to green in 3 months.

Facilitated training for local new hires (technical and non-technical) and other satellite sites to espouse Amazon culture and empower employees to realize their potential.

Head of Product, Community (12/12-8/13) Seattle, WA

Program managed the new “Customer Questions & Answers” feature on the Retail website and grew adoption by 15x in less than a year, allowing customers to ask with the security of safely tapping into their fellow customer base for meaningful pre and post purchase event questions. As customer engagement went up, so did conversions and prevented returns. See it live in production here.

Launched 3rd party Marketplace sellers as a viable answering community.

Expanded types of crowdsourced answers for product questions to Vendors, Customer Service, Manufacturers, Amazon Mechanical Turk and other organizations.

Built out the “tastemakers” Pinterest-like pilot through Amazon Collections to test whether customers with exceptional taste in a genre would drive customer retention and feature discovery.

Owned roadmap vision and blocking and tackling across the company for our engineering teams to minimize thrash, hold engineering teams to deadlines, and communicate status to partners, stakeholders, and leadership. During the last executive quarterly review, we missed no goals.

Built out features for the site including integration with the human content moderation review and Seller Central teams for 3rd party marketplace seller success.

As a personal goal, focused on developing Amazon employees in their career: mentoring 3 TPMs; training new engineering staff on development best practices; facilitating new hire orientation and Amazon introduction for all new hire roles; led core team to plan, coordinate and launch TPMCon – first of it’s kind Amazon TPM-centric conference with over 650 attendees (I also presented by moderating an executive panel).

Presenting proposals to disparate teams with splintered alignment across organizations (such as Vendor and MTurk Q&A). To date within the Communities organization, I’ve presented to 3 SVPs (reporting to Jeff Bezos), parlaying into successful outcomes.

Head of Product, Email (6/10-12/12) Seattle, WA

Brought Amazon Simple Email Service, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product, to market by owning delivery of: initial architectural design; threat, abuse and fraud models; principal software, security and scalability reviews; prototyping; price scoping; budget management; technical architecture; senior executive management business and ops meeting representation; code reviews; and marketing and customer documentation program build out.

Directly managed 4 teammates responsible for deliverability, marketing and tech writing for the service.

Directed each customer and internally facing feature release, and authored detailed release plan used by other AWS teams in their feature launches.

Evangelized Amazon SES as the public “face” online and at conferences. See my AWS Report here: http://youtu.be/qePJIXUpiBo and my AWS re:Invent Conference presentation here: http://youtu.be/f3xncKCdI_0. I also created the Amazon SES blog and provided multiple, relevant posts during my tenure (link).

Designed the technical requirements for and assisted with functionality parity assessments, testing and signoff with both cross-organizational features (such as integration with the AWS Management Console UI) and features native to Amazon SES only (such as Easy DKIM).

Led the internal migration from the Amazon proprietary, legacy mail system to Amazon SES, which included switching all marketing and transactional customer bound email with no downtime. Out of the billions of messages ported, we experienced a TP99.9 success rate.

Provided business and technical leadership of Amazon SES by conducting internal and external training, driving the development team to execute on strategic initiatives, and handling all vendor and customer relationships working with the Business Development, Legal and Marketing teams. I traveled internationally and exposed Amazon SES to the global AWS sites to better equip the regional sales floors.

Drove Amazon SES to be cash flow positive after just 2 short years on the market with a low margin, commodity service and a lean program team.

Directly managed deliverability for all of Amazon international customer email in addition to the Amazon SES role. Authored whitepaper on sending email mail the right way soup to nuts: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Amazon_SES_Best_Practices.pdf

Bronto Software Director of Deliverability (6/09-2/10) Durham, NC

(Acquired by Oracle)

Owned deliverability for company, assisting in all aspects of product creation, design and market adoption.

Created and managed the first billable deliverability consulting team.

Datran Media Director of Deliverability Services (8/08-5/09) Austin, TX

(Acquired by PulsePoint)

Increased client service billable hours by 30% while leading organization in client satisfaction for top tier customers like Disney, Turner Broadcasting and MTV.

Managing team of 4 email user engineers while owning the role of the external face of Datran by evangelizing email technology, deliverability and best practices industry wide.

Amazon.com Technical Product & Program Manager (7/07-7/08) Seattle, WA

Guided the Email Platform Team in-house outbound email technology services.

Fulfilled role of Email Deliverability and ISP Relations Evangelist with documented deliverability increases of 30% on incremental GMS, lift and profit company wide.

Drove email reputation enhancements and legal compliance for all customer facing Amazon email (including transactional, marketing and subscription channels) thus increasing revenue over $1MM/yr.

Onboarded email related vendors with budget over $200k/yr and coordinating procurement, finance and legal efforts.

Managed IronPort (Cisco) MTA hardware infrastructure and Amazon network topology.

Interfaced with senior management and internal customers to ensure product vision matched expectations by authoring requirements and user documentation for team.

Quality Assurance Engineer (4/06-6/07) Seattle, WA

Owned software QA process for Automated Targeted Email team (10 software engineers) responsible for all outgoing customer facing email averaging over 10 million daily send events.

Managed team of 2 Software Development Engineers directly for Java test automation using JUnit and JSystem.

Developed over 40 Perl hybrid internal automated alarms for instant system health feedback.

Created and implemented founding QA best practices for email engineering team.

Triaged bug defects, coordinated UAT with international and domestic stakeholders, verifying fixes and suggesting enhancements on all development team projects.

Powered, Inc. Quality Assurance Engineer (3/05-3/06) Austin, TX

(Acquired by Dachis Group)

Created and led process to utilize test harnesses measuring load, stress and “gold” certification of builds using WebLOAD, and writing/executing test cases from repository.

Owned process of verifying all client side defect/enhancement issues in iterative development/QA cycle for > 11 nationally recognized industry leading clients utilizing Bugzilla.

PerformanceRetail, Inc. Austin, TX

(Acquired by Dresser)

Quality Assurance Engineer (12/03-3/05)

Fulfilled project lead role for POS (Radiant, Ruby, Nucleus) and RMS compatibility testing.

Tested over 100 technical implementations from PVCS issue tracking software.

Interfaced as client advocate with all functional areas of company (including accounting, finance, marketing, client services and operations) while driving issue resolution.

Led UAT efforts for client initiated releases.

American YouthWorks Austin, TX

(Federal contract expired)

Community Technology Instructor (8/02-11/03)

Teaching a variety of technology, English as a Second Language (ESL), and business classes to a spectrum of students including county prison inmates, low income Austin area residents, immigrants, and college students.

Community Experience

Techstars Seattle, TX

Mentor (3/13-Present)

Mentoring startups to help them become powerhouse self-sufficient organizations.

Executive Office of the President, The White House Washington, DC

Technical Advisor (8/15-1/17)

Served as member of select advisory panel to increase opportunity to and awareness of technology in the LGBTQ+ community as directed by the President of the United States.

AmeriCorps Austin, TX

Student Educational Assistant (8/98-7/99)

Worked with underprivileged children in math and reading to achieve proficiency in the impoverished Austin public elementary education system.

Patents

Round-robin e-mail scheduling (US 9,824,377)

Opting whether to receive communications (US 9,773,257)

Remotely stored bookmarks embedded as webpage content (US 9,141,590)

Deliverability-based e-mail sending (US 9,230,245)

Providing feedback-based rate adjustment for electronic communication services (US 9,262,751)

Determining user information from automated replies (US 9,313,151)

Awards

AWS Start-Up Challenge Judge (October 2011) Seattle, WA

Amazon AWS Executive Leadership

Selected to judge international contestants with the best technology use cases for AWS and the start-up ecosystem (http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge/).

Danny Award (February 2012) Seattle, WA

Vice President, Amazon Website Application Platform

Recognized by division management for showing exceptional performance in Amazon core leadership values of frugality and ownership.

Education The University of Texas at Austin

Bachelor of Business Administration

Management Information Systems

Western Governors University

Master of Business Administration

Information Technology Management

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