Payal Patel

adjm4q@r.postjobfree.com 848-***-**** Seattle, WA http://www.linkedin.com/in/payalpatel18 Conscientious, enthusiastic, and results-driven Program Manager/Scrum Master with a strong Quality Assurance background and a keen focus on team collaboration, empowerment of contributing individuals that easily adapts to company culture. Bridging the gap between business and technology, I enjoy the facilitation and coordination of complex projects. Experience working with globally distributed teams and partners to meet strategic goals while balancing schedules, cost, features, quality, and business goals. Key Strengths include:

• 7+ years as a ScrumMaster/Program Manager within a diverse culture and global/cross-functional teams.

• Different technology stacks with on-prem and AWS cloud deployments with 3rd party integrations.

• 10+ years of web-based projects in an Agile environment (Scrum and Kanban).

• Excellent communication (interpersonal, verbal, and written) and presentation skills across all levels of business and technology.

• Adept at initiating conversations to resolve conflicts and leading discussions on difficult subjects.

• Skilled at anticipating, avoiding, and managing risks for multiple projects and teams.

• Solid understanding of SDLC and DevOps (CI/CD).

• Well versed in object-oriented design/programming and have strong analytical and debugging skills. Work Experience

People Connect, Seattle, WA 2016-Present

Scrum Master/Program Manager

I manage projects for 2 brands, Intelius.com and Classmates.com. I’ve onboarded/expanded offshore teams and aligned them with the local team processes which substantially improved team throughput. I’ve driven planning, grooming, standups, retrospectives, scheduling, milestone tracking, escalation, and status communication for projects spanning multiple technology stacks with resources having conflicting priorities.

● Using a servant-leader management style, planned and completed company-wide efforts to implement a DevOps culture by facilitating training and providing guidance to teams on integrating best practices for their team. The additional monitoring and creation of runbooks created resulted in empowered developers in more agile and flexible teams.

● Proactively identified risks and dependencies and escalated to Product Owner and management.

● Tracked and reported team progress and velocity by using burn up and burn down and control charts.

● Identified impediments and roadblocks, and lead key resources to determine best course of action.

● Drove implementation of DataDome, a bot management solution, across 9 websites. I coordinated implementation efforts across both internal and external teams, resulting in better customer experience, less team disruption, cleaner reporting data, and improved site stability.

● I formalized user story template so different product owners to help efficient grooming.

● Improved the release process and coordinated complex software releases by working with technology leaders to define key milestones, identify dependencies between local and offshore teams, managed overall scope, and communicated status to executives.

● Influenced the design and feature delivery of various products across the organization without direct authority.

● Led the subscription billing platform’s API certification process with 3 teams. This certification was a pre- requisite to start migrating sensitive data onto the vendor database and Go Live while ensuring efficient use of the Vendor APIs and optimal performance.

Classmates.com, Seattle, WA 2012 –2015

Scrum Master/ Senior Quality Engineer

Conducted Scrum Master duties and performed testing in the Yearbooks and Core-UI teams. Running efficient standups, grooming, planning, and retrospective meetings led to the delivery of quality features by the teams. I used tools like Rally and Jira to track velocity and burndown reports.

● As a Scrum Master, trained new product owners on Scrum processes, writing clear/detailed stories. This aided in efficient grooming meetings. Facilitated and tested the new yearbook viewer feature delivery which directly increased revenue by 10%.

● Facilitated porting the redesigned ‘Guestbook visits’ feature on to the new UI architecture (node JS framework). The redesign increased upgrades by 15% and the new architecture enabled continuous delivery of code. I also helped reduced debugging time by lobbying for and managing efforts for error handling, monitoring, and health checks.

● Classmates Photos Project: created a Jira Dashboard that provided enhanced visibility for stakeholders, and gave the team tools to help bug triage, see current status, and identify impediments.

● Navigated the integration of an offshore team into the new node JS framework development process through conflict resolution (code reviews, team forming), process improvement (enhanced tech spec meetings), and updating team structure (lobbying for a new team lead).

● Performed web testing across multiple platforms including web services testing (REST), database testing, functionality testing, automation, unit testing, integration testing, component testing, and regression testing.

Classmates.com 2009 - 2011

Quality Engineer/ Scrum Master

As a new Scrum Master, I was enthusiastic about running grooming, sprint planning, and retrospective meetings, tracking velocity and escalating impediments in the Scrum of Scrums. I trained new hires on the Scrum processes and constantly mentored teams on best practices and processes.

• As a QA Member, I performed web testing (black box and white box), ran automation tests and wrote unit tests. I contributed to requirement gathering, specification reviews, and tech design to promote quality in the early stages of a project by working closely with Developers, Technical Project Managers, and Business Owners.

Classmates.com 2006 - 2008

Quality Engineer

• I wrote and peer-reviewed test cases, performed web testing, bug triage. Communicated status reports and escalated issues as the QA lead on long-term projects (waterfall methodology). Education

● Bachelor's Degree – Mumbai University

● Certified Scrum Master – Scrum Alliance

● Certificate in Program Management – University of Washington

● Post Diploma Certificate in computer applications – NIIT

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