Ryan Wold

Technical consultant and strategic leader, with deep expertise in software development, cloud infrastructure, and business operations. Led innovation initiatives across the U.S. federal government, delivering and operating data platforms to improve customer experience and operational performance. Ryan led the development of a government-wide customer feedback system aligned with the President's Management Agenda, advancing the U.S. federal data strategy by managing data as a strategic asset.

• Full-stack Software Development: Hands-on experience in test-driven development, workflow design and process automation, information architecture, data reporting & publishing, and performance analytics.
• Product Management: Designs and organizes user research, requirements gathering, business modeling, and facilitating collaboration in formal and informal groups. Able to work effectively with individuals across various titles, skill sets, and knowledge levels.
• Business Process Improvement: Applies systems-thinking and workflow discipline to identify organizational efficiencies and develop sustainable, documented business processes.
• Consulting: Proven ability to consult with large enterprises, startups, and small businesses on business strategy, operations, business development, product design, management, and development.
• Leadership and Management: Director-level experience managing business and technical operations, including formulation and execution of executive and departmental strategies. Experienced managing teams of 2-30 people.

• Worked closely with OMB (Office of Management of Budget) supporting the PMA (President's Management Agenda) government-wide priority on CX (Customer Experience).
• Designed, developed, and launched the customer feedback and data collection tool, Touchpoints.
• Originated and grew Touchpoints to 4,200+ users, serving 100+ federal agency teams, collecting 9,500,000 responses, and managing 400 Data Collections.
• Led a pilot project for OMB to analyze open-text customer feedback data, to perform semantic analysis, trend analysis, and identify novel insights. Selected a contracted vendor and facilitated a data sharing agreement between agencies.
• Prototyped a web service to assess free-form user text data with zero-shot classification using Facebook's bart-large-mnli model
• Practiced user-centered design and iterative agile software delivery for new and existing products & product features by conducting many forms of user research, including: formal customer interviews, direct observation, quantitative and qualitative online feedback forms.
• Fostered productive relationships with executive staff, policy-makers, federal staff of all levels, Federal Community of Practice groups, Industry working groups, and users in the open-source community.
• Directly supported the Cross-Agency Priority of Customer Experience (CX), for two (2) Presidential Management's Agendas by collecting CX data, automating ETL processes, and publishing data and supporting narrative online.
• Initiated and navigated full-stack governance initiatives (involving legislative policy, organizational business processes, and technical operations) related to digital asset inventories (websites, social media accounts, mobile applications, services, and metadata for several other government domain-specific entities).
• Consolidated the U.S. Digital Registry into Touchpoints, saving more than $200k annually, eliminating an ATO boundary, and providing a more unified user experience for federal staff.
• Served as Technical Advisor analytics.usa.gov for 6 months while a contracting team transitioned on to support.
• Presented to several audiences on topics including: CX, Touchpoints, Managing product backlogs, Organizational design, Service Design, Business Process Design, and Software-development patterns for blockchain development.

• Consulted as a Product Manager to client executive and innovation teams; identifying customer needs and aligning product delivery in support of client business objectives.
• Coached client Product Managers and teams on agile (XP - extreme programming) processes and Service Design to improve feedback loops at the team, product, and organizational levels.
• Lead technical pre-sales efforts with State public sector clients; established partnership with international Systems Integrator.
• De-composed high-traffic monolith applications into micro-services, including live app and database migrations (examples: extracting a payment system, layering admin roles, permissions, and logging)
• Presented to technical audiences on topics including Business Process Management (BPMN), user-centered development and design systems, and agile development practices.

• Consulted on all phases of a software design and development engagements; including project inceptions, validation sprints, and longer-term software design/build projects.
• Rapidly-prototyped and launched an innovation project for Time Magazine in 8 weeks, acquiring 75+ users within 2 weeks after launch.
• Conducted formal and informal customer interviews. The research informed strategic business opportunities, software product development, and improvements to service offerings.
• Created custom landing pages with A/B variants, and drove traffic through Facebook, Google, Twitter ads, and Newsletters. Measured AARRR using funnels in Mixpanel and Google Analytics. Implemented Stripe for credit card payments.
• Wrote, released, and managed software applications; some of it open-source. Ruby 2+, Rails 4+, javascript/coffeescript, Ember.js, Postgres, Redis, Go.
  http://agile.pics is one example [update: Agile.pics displayed specially-formatted GitHub gists as visual diagrams (Sequence diagrams and graphviz Diagrams). The project is offline as of Jan 2022]

• Consulting to small and mid-size organizations, providing the following services: website design, web application and database programming, business strategy, online marketing, user-training, documentation, organizational workflow, and print design services.

• Development lead on Citizen Participation 2.0 software products. Developing desktop and mobile web tools using Ruby, Rails, jQuery, MongoDB, AWS, OAuth, Google and Facebook APIs.
• Organizational lead on internal knowledge management. Advocated for radical transparency in the workplace.
• Assigned to work on the first Office of the CTO project, to hone in-house practices of agile product prototyping and delivery, including organizational readiness.
• Worked directly with public staff of all levels - clerks, IT staff, department executives, and elected officials at the state, county, special district, state, and federal levels.
• Championed and fostered a repeatable, shared product design and delivery process, based on Dan Brown's book, Communicating Design .
• We used Chef, S3, EC2, Heroku, New Relic, Optimizely, RSpec, Shoulda, Test Unit in our projects and continuously deployed through Jenkins and Bamboo.

• Project lead on the university's internet and intranet portal re-design and launch. 500+ public pages, 3000+ documents and images, coordinating with 50+ primary web content publishers. Automated and streamlined internal business processes through documented workflow models. Proposed information architecture for the campus, including the management of personal, departmental, and campus-wide files and data - and including private and shared files

• Participated in organizational outreach, meeting with: eCitizen Foundation, e-Democracy.org, NPR, NY Senate - Office of the CIO, DC Council - Office of Mary Cheh Ward 3, Forum Foundation, OpenPlans, Tax Foundation, World Bank
• Wrote open-source Ruby data-scrapers for the National Data Catalog
• Designed a visualization of the relationships between 65,000+ nodes in the Federal body of law

• Responsible for all operations (technology, finance, and facilities) functions of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit Solano County Charter Middle and High School (700 students, 50+ staff, $5+ million annual budget)
• Developed, implemented and managed policies, processes and workflow strategy related to all organizational operations, including: school funding, grants management, student scheduling, attendance procedures, technology, system development and maintenance, licensing and configuration/change management and network security
• Improved financial reporting, attendance, and student reporting functionality to improve data integrity and timeliness
• Developed a Volunteer program using online tools to coordinate more than 1,000 parent and community volunteers during the 2009-10 school year
• Managed $1M+ federal ARRA grant funds, including: application, receipt, spending, and reporting
• Defined user-requirements and evaluated software solutions with committees, administrative staff and teachers, and aligned technologies with business and educational objectives
• Managed, coordinated and provided hands-on technology support and training with technical staff and teachers (grades 6-12)

• Managed long and short-term projects to completion: performed needs assessments and requirements gathering, created scope of work documents, developed flowcharts/process maps, and coordinated user-acceptance testing
• Developed and supported Sungard Bi-Tech’s IFAS (Integrated Financial Accounting System); expanded functionality of existing modules through programming (Ruby on Rails and ODBC), conducted formal system testing, analyzed user requirements, programmed interfaces, provided training for clerical and administrative system users, and served as sole contact for system issues for more than 400 users
• Wrote more than 200 financial reports for users using Bi-Tech’s report writer (CDD), SQL, and VBScript, with hooks into the MS Office API to automate user tasks
• Implemented: a custom document management system for 300,000+ scanned document images, Price-Waterhouse Coopers TeamMate audit software package, Maximus MaxCars Cost Allocation software, and an Intranet Wiki to promote knowledge transfer within the organization