Resume

Education

Syracuse University – Martin J. Whitman School of Management

Masters of Business Administration, Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies
December 2018

Fontbonne University

B.A., Management
May 2009

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

B.A., Music History & Literature; Music Business
May 2004


Experience

Mastercard Logo
Mastercard

Principal Product Manager - Technical – Mastercard

July 2021 – Present

  • Establish and develop deep, strategic relationships with Franchise and Data Strategy senior business and product stakeholders to provide technology consulting services for key global and regional initiatives.
  • Produce forward-looking technology proposals / presentations leveraging technology capabilities inside and outside of Mastercard to bring comprehensive technology solutions to solve business and regulatory challenges.
  • Facilitate pre-sales workshops as the technology SME, involving client technology teams.
  • Lead and support the RFP process by confirming or defining the business and technology challenges, needs, and solutions.
  • Leverage a variety of technology frameworks and methods to develop and promote technology architecture that drives strategic alignment of IT with business.
  • Drive the technical solution and provide technical and advisory support to ensure the development and implementation of applications that provide adherence to business requirements.
  • Oversee the development of strategic business capabilities with the purpose of driving innovative, forward-thinking technical solutions.

Director, Customer Experience & Engagement – Mastercard

March 2020 – July 2021

  • Leads customer experience and engagement efforts to increase engagement, maximize retention, and improve service experience.
  • Recommends customer and consumer relationship expansion as well as retention tactics and communicates them cross-functionally to drive a customer-centric approach to interactions.
  • Supports organizational efforts to participate in market-facing engagements internally and externally.
  • Serves as internal consultant to Global Customer Care as well as other strategic internal partners.
  • Regularly reviews and reports on customer retention, business opportunities and market trends in customer engagement.
  • Directs prototyping and testing of new products to refine both products and services based on customer feedback.
  • Directs the use of experience data to identify sources of dissatisfaction and influence the design of products, services and programs to improve.
  • Collaborates with other business leaders to promote consistency in customer service across all channels of customer interaction.
  • Performs financial planning, forecasting, and budget tracking as well as resource and capacity for a team.
  • Formally supervises and coaches a large group and/or teams and ensures compliance to goal setting and performance appraisal process.
  • Helps identify and coach top talent within own teams.

Senior Consultant, User Experience – Mastercard

April 2019 - March 2020

  • Co-create and inspect the research, user flows, wireframes, designs, journey maps, and execution metrics to assess risks and prioritize work based on customer and business impact.
  • Evolve Mastercard’s design thinking to solve business, product and user problems.
  • Provide thought leadership for the organization while mentoring peers on the User Experience team and across teams and functions in best-practice User Experience approaches.
  • Showcase the team’s work to customers in Mastercard’s tech hubs in Sydney, Pune, New York, and St. Louis.
  • Partner with senior product decision makers to align UX vision and strategy across the company.
  • Define the structures and operating mechanisms to build and run the organization while shifting to a data-driven and continuous learning culture across the user experience team.
  • Foster career development and growth paths for design and research leaders while sourcing, attracting and hiring in the best talent.
Emerson Electric Co.

Director of Digital Operations – Emerson

October 2018 – April 2019

  • Lead the implementation of the emerson.com website and e-site roadmaps for enhancements, new capabilities and global rollout across business units.
  • Provide strategic vision and thought leadership in key areas such as digital technologies, digital channels (web, mobile, social, eCommerce, etc.) and emerging digital technologies.
  • Partner with business owners to shape the roadmap based on user insights, customer needs, and business priorities. Defines, prioritizes, and maintains the website and digital enhancement roadmap ensuring alignment to the digital strategy, business needs, and business priorities.
  • Work with Business Units and Platform Marketing to clearly define customer experience, business requirements, and user requirements.
  • Work with Corporate and Platform IT to ensure that marketing and business needs are met, and are the drivers of technology solutions, workflows, and SLAs.
  • Maintain knowledge of digital technologies and their application, and identifies ways digital can drive competitive advantage, unlock customer value or serve long-term business needs.
  • Identify solutions at the forefront of technology within the ever-changing digital landscape and maintains a strong understanding of the organization’s technology products and technical architecture.

User Experience Lead – Emerson

June 2015 – October 2018

  • Establish a User Experience practice within Emerson’s Residential Retail division of Commercial and Residential Solutions. Drive experience design culture and best practices throughout product management, marketing, and new product development.
  • Product design contributions of both hardware and software for Sensi, a top-rated rated Wi-Fi Thermostat on Amazon.com and winner of the 2016 J.D. Power Smart Thermostat Satisfaction Report. Work included collaborative design studio sessions, holistic experience, and service design, and reusable software design pattern library for web, iOS, & Android platforms.
  • Lead experience design efforts and partner with like teams at Amazon, Google, and Apple for product portfolio integration into Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit connected home platforms.
Bayer Crop Sciences

Design Lead – Monsanto/Bayer

October 2013 – June 2015

  • Establish a User Experience and Interface Design practice for Monsanto’s Research & Development I.T. division with a focus on reducing the cycle time between ideation of new products to commercialization.
  • Creation and customer validation of Velocity, a user interface design system and UX pattern library for web and mobile applications, which led to reduced development cycle time and consistency across multiple channels. Data-driven decisions ascertained from qualitative and quantitative research.
  • Created extensive journey and ecosystem maps for various customer profiles which led to a stronger understanding of customer needs and identified several latent needs for digital product improvements.
World Wide Technology

Sr. UX Designer – Asynchrony/World Wide Technology

December 2011 – January 2013

  • Integrate with agile scrum teams for experience design of several web and mobile applications for Fortune 500 clients like Sotheby’s International Realty, Kaiser Permanente Healthcare, and Bridgewater and Associates.
  • Supported custom, enterprise-grade mobile application suite with complete experience design treatment, including requirements gathering, ethnographic research, persona development, wireframes, prototypes, usability evaluations and journey maps.
  • Experience and service design of an app store submission portal for the United States Army and United States Department of Defense (U.S. Army Marketplace).
Sigma-Aldrich

User-Centered Designer – Sigma-Aldrich

June 2008 – December 2011

  • Redesign of Sigma-Aldrich.com. Work included ethnographic research, journey mapping, persona development, wireframes, usability evaluations, and co-located development coordination with offshore teams in Pune and Bangalore, India.
  • Continuous improvement through the agile design of chemical synthesis and life science eCommerce content and related online marketing vehicles with an average transactional volume of $2.1M USD/day.
  • Agile experience design and customer validation for an user-centered custom product configurator application with top-line revenue impacts of $5.2M USD/year.
You've successfully subscribed to Stephen Bolen
Great! Next, complete checkout to get full access to all premium content.
Error! Could not sign up. invalid link.
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Error! Could not sign in. Please try again.
Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.
Error! Stripe checkout failed.
Success! Your billing info is updated.
Error! Billing info update failed.