United States

Branding and Identity Design

Service Design

Product Design

Customer Experience (CX)

Technical Product Management

Back-end

Full stack

Customer Success Management

Project Management

Content Strategy

Business Transformation

Cornell University

Bachelor’s Degree

Alan Lai

Founder

Newsletter writing

Product strategy

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Organisation skills

Presentation skills

Conflict resolution

Leadership

Project management

Negotiation

Analytical skills

AI/ML

Blog writing

Brand positioning

Cloud computing

Market research

Asana

Canva

ChatGPT

Jira

Notion

REST API

HTML

Stakeholder management

Chatbot

Design systems

LinkedIn writing

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

How to identify star candidates, evaluate technical ability, and close hires

Hiring software engineers

Decision making as a software engineer or lead - how to become better at making the right choices

Making better tech choices

Strategies for maximizing your design internship or co-op program.

Getting the most out of my internship

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

How to create personas, and leverage them in design.

Creating and leveraging user personas

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

For information about this exciting new AWS service and the team, please check out https://aws.amazon.com/mainframe-modernization/

Drive development of high volume, high performance distributed platform using leading edge technologies, including major modernization of marketing platforms. Built and managed global teams in US and India.  Engaged in all aspect of product development from concept to launch to support.  Great experience with micro-services, REST APIs, Kafka, AKKA, Spark.

Acquired by Adobe in Fall of 2018.  Leader of multiple components in marketing email systems, lead lifecycle management and third party integration.  Managed global teams in India and US.  Drove major initiatives using Agile/SCRUM.

Healthcare and SaaS startup providing unified patient financial experience management for US hospitals.  First engagement manager hired; instrumental in establishing the engagement management practice, including process design, collateral creation, staffing, on-boarding and program management. Successfully led large-scale implementation involving customer's teams, development team in Israel, and business teams.

Through natural language processing, machine learning, text analytic and sentiment analysis, I help companies make sense of their customer sentiment, needs and wants, so they can provide a better customer experience at every touchpoints and drive improvements in product development, sales and marketing, customer care and operations.  I am my customer's biggest advocate and a trusted adviser.  

In my EM role, I am in charge of solution design and delivery to my clients throughout the customer life cycle.  I lead teams of data analysts, data architects, technical consultants, and trainers on large and small implementation projects.  I work closely with customer leadership in defining customer experience strategies, roadmaps and programs.  I also collaborate internally with my senior management, services, sales, product development, engineering, operations, customer support, marketing and finance on ensuring the successful adoption of our technology and solution in the customer's environment.
            

    
    

    
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•	I spent three years at a Fortune 50 software client, building and scaling a consulting practice consisted of product managers, data architects, and business analysts in support of a multi-year cross-functional client initiative that transformed the entire way of distributing software over the cloud and through digital partners
•	I also handled client account development including account strategy and plan execution, client relationship cultivation, contract/SOW negotiation and management, 3rd party vendor/partner management 
•	I led all aspects of business and program operations ($20M+ per year) which included optimizing the IT investment portfolio, authoring business cases, seeking funding, establishing PMO and steering committee, building teams, tracking finance/forecast, managing risks and delivering results
•	I co-authored award winning whitepapers with my customers on digital licensing for subscription based business model
•	I owned the delivery of solutions around business intelligence, digital distribution, product activation; managed entire solution delivery life cycle
•	I Handled entire department's business operations and financial management, managed solution portfolio ($50M+) and led business planning cycle; developed strong business cases for funding

            

    
    

    
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I was part of a small elite team of business strategy consultants hired from McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture and other consulting firms to bootstrap the consulting arm of Wipro.  As an engagement manager, I led small consulting teams consists of business analysts and senior consultants on business critical projects for Fortune 100 customers

Analyzed internal and external market and financial data for Cisco’s $10B enterprise solutions business.  Performed Segmentation, competition, and product gap analysis. Developed market models that were the basis for Cisco’s Global Market Viewer (GMV) Tool. Retained as consultant after completion of internship.

Managed the entire product lifecycle of a voice-activating telematics product 
•	Expertise:  product management, MRD/PRD,  competitive analysis, marketing  research, focus group
•	Technology:  voice recognition, wireless network, Bluetooth
•	Designed patent-pending product features that greatly enhanced product’s marketability

OmniSky was a Mobile Service Provider for PDAs and Smartphones.  I managed releases of wireless services and analyzed web performance for content partners
•	Expertise:  customer analytics; technology management; release management
•	Technology:  PDA, smart phones, wireless web, business intelligence
•	Effort led to increasing portal traffic by 400% (32K+ customers) and increasing advertisement revenue by more than 100%

Envive was a Test-as-a-Service company.  I managed an engineering staff in developing company’s flagship products; acted as technology liaison between the company and partners such as HP, IBM, and BMC, accelerating integration efforts and enhancing cross-selling capabilities

Alan Lai🇺🇸