Al Mays

Crownpeak’s AI-led and fully accessible Digital Experience Platform puts content and commerce at the forefront of the buyer’s journey. With personalized content at scale, AI-driven commerce search, merch and recommendations, the customer always wins with the best experience possible.

Responsible for developing and leading product strategy, management, software development, cloud operations, customer support, corporate IT, and information security across Crownpeak’s product portfolio

• Oversee a product portfolio built through acquisitions consisting of 4 major product lines with 16 products across 6 disparate technology stacks
  • Implemented a product management leadership operating model to:
    • Drive better decision making within product lines through a team of cross-functional experts responsible for tackling day-to-day operations including product management, sales, customers success, marketing, engineering and customer support.
    • Drive engineering efficiency through the development of a platform to reduce product capability duplication, speed innovation, and fuel AI development through consolidate expertise, data and ML pipelines across the different products.
• Lead a globally distributed multidisciplinary team of 170+ members
  • Team members are balanced between FTE expertise in the US, UK, DE, FR, NL, BG, and AU along with low cost region partners in Eastern Europe and India
  • Executed multiple workforce transformations to drive EBITDA efficiency driven by product line revenue projections and acquisition integrations.
• Lead the product and technical evaluations for Merger & Acquisitions (M&A)
  • Identified, acquired and integrated two European based companies that increased the companies global footprint, partner base and revenue by greater than 2.5x.
• Oversee a significant amount of companies annual operating budget
  • Implemented a budget strategy based on an investment allocation model that aligns cost of goods (COGs) and R&D spend based on a product lines revenue, growth potential and profit contribution.
• Ensured the seamless operation of cloud infrastructure and services
  • Minimizing downtime and maximizing system performance and availability.
  • Established a FinOps model to drive continuous improvement in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) computing costs to increase margins
  • Applied FinOps model during acquisition integrations, including driving a 50% improvement in a product’s cloud computing costs within one-year
• Built an exceptional 24/7 follow the sun customer support organization
  • Resolving complex technical issues across 4 major product lines promptly and within budget.
  • Maintaining greater than 99% response SLA adherence and customer satisfaction ratings.
• Implemented a robust information security practice, safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations
  • Driven from stakeholder buy-in with guidance from fractional CISO services
  • Implemented a 24/7 security operations center (SOC) with SEIM 
  • Supporting ISO27001 and SOC2 Type 2
• Maintained clear and effective communication with stakeholders including c-suite partners and board of directors
  • Presenting technical concepts and organizational strategies in a concise and understandable manner.
  • Contribute to overall business strategy and operational design planning

ClickFox, Inc., The Journey Company, offers a one-of-a-kind platform that connects data from ANY source into sequential journeys over time, allowing the business to analyze and syndicate connected journeys. Analyzing customer, patient, employee, and device journeys has proven to be the most effective way to make informed business decisions and surface tangible opportunities from big data. By leveraging ClickFox's proprietary journey algorithms and Journey Science approach, Fortune 500 clients have gained insights leading to significant customer experience improvement and billions in cost savings and revenue growth.  ClickFox was later renamed BryterCX.

Responsible for developing and leading product strategy, management, software development and data engineering of all ClickFox products

• Lead the design and development of ClickFox's next generation journey platform FOX that launched in Nov. 2017
  • FOX accelerates speed to value for users by over 30% compared to the legacy CEA platform
• Built-out new UI team focused on new technology stack including Angular2 and Redux
  
  • Partnered with Pivotal Labs to put in place a new foundation including beginning development, training newly acquired talent and upgrading practices.
• Advanced SDLC through introduction of new processes and technologies
  • User research and design sprint methodology, leveraging Marvel, Validately, Canny, etc.
  • Story and knowledge base management through JIRA and Confluence
  • Code repo and branch management through GitLab 
• Upgraded architecture and technologies
  • Oversaw final completion of data storage and processing backbone transition to Hadoop from Greenplum  
  • Creation of RESTful API services leveraging Swagger framework
  • Introduction of Spark in FOX for data processing
  • Introduction of Apache NiFi for data movement and manipulation for our private cloud customers
  • Created partnership with Zoomdata to enable Watch visualization application

Responsible for developing and leading the teams responsible for delivery of the ClickFox CEA platform with the goal of increasing efficiency to drive higher product and services margin

• Upgraded teams and processes enabling delivery capacity to be increased by 40% 
  • Introduced Agile project management framework across teams enabling organization to quickly pivot based on the needs of the business on a weekly basis
  • Upgraded data operations practice through talent upgrades, role restructuring and process automation enabling team growth to stay level while the number of clients increased
  • In 2014 also oversaw platform operations including application support and data center management functions for our private cloud enabling the group to adopt platform delivery talent and process upgrades
• Upgraded talent not only to increase platform delivery efficiency, but also to fuel other areas of the business and individuals careers
  • Introduced entry level positions designed to grow highly skilled early career talent into other areas of the company including infrastructure management, engineering and QA
  • Redefined role mix across project management and information architecture to scale fully enabled Agile teams 

• Advanced technology to increase scaling capacity
  • Pioneered and partnered with engineering to design and have a new proprietary language developed to drive the manipulation of enterprise data into journeys that decreased delivery LOE by 40%
  • Introduced the use of Pentaho Data Integrator (PDI) to standardize data integration and reduce delivery LOE.  As a result new employee recruiting and on boarding costs reduced as well

Responsible for leading the creation of the Information Architecture practice driving the design of how enterprise data is transformed into journeys for ClickFox's CEA platform

• Designed practice responsibilities, roles, processes and technology direction
• Recruited and acquired talent to build practice   
• Oversaw and integrated existing offshore data analyst team with new practice
• Balanced current delivery as individual contributor while growing practice 

Responsible for partnering with sales representatives to develop the sales strategy, pitch, demo products and design data implementation solutions

• Served as liaison between sales, technology operation, services and engineering
• Designed data integration solutions and partnered with offshore teams to delivery both proof of concept and production deployments
• Managed statement of work development

Ticketmaster is the world's largest ticket marketplace, and we partner with Event Organizers to make their tickets available through our marketplace, which includes websites, apps and Fan Support centers across 29 countries.

Responsible for setting strategy and managing day to day operations for Ticketmaster's voice self-service platform; that included business operations, systems management and application development which supported business units consisting of 3000 agents, 40 million calls a year, with a yearly operating budget of 70M

• Project Managed and supported installation of 768 Genesys GVP ports spread across three geographical locations in the United States, 193 GVP ports in Canada and 288 GVP ports in the United Kingdom
• Negotiated purchase of global speech recognition software licensing modal
• Worked with Quality Assurance Department to launch IVR QA program that evaluates both the system performance as well as the performance of the data management team
• Oversaw the launch of Ticketmaster Express, automated only purchasing line
• Designed future Business work flow to support new speech self-service application

• Part of team that reviewed and analyzed IVR vendors and ultimately made the decision to use Genesys Voice Portal to retire our legacy proprietary IVR, Hermes

• Designed and developed database Hermes, system moved from using flat file data storage to utilizing data real-time from a database.
• Co designed and began development on the IVR Administrator Application; windows based GUI application to manipulate IVR business logic data written in Visual Basic.NET

BB&T WVIAC Senior Scholar Athlete Award