HELLO! I’M MARIA WEST
ABOUT ME
My résumé will tell you I have:
An MSBA from Quinnipiac University.
A certificate in Product Management from the Product School.
A certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from the University of Washington.
A B.A. in Journalism from Seton Hall University.
2 years of product management experience.
8 years of marketing experience.
What my résumé won’t tell you is:
I’m a quick learner.
I’m not afraid of hard work. In fact, I crave challenges.
I’m unfazed by tight deadlines and thrive under pressure.
I have an obsessive attention to detail.
I possess a recipe for juggling multiple projects that I compare to cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Ask me about it.
EXPERIENCE
April 2022 - Present
PRODUCT MANAGER II, THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Product Management
Product manager and engineer for operational data and reporting in the Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology organization, specializing in executive reporting initiatives.
Outbound Product Manager for the DROID Data Warehousing Platform DROID performs large-scale ELT on data sources such as Jira, Workforce, ServiceNow, Smartsheet, among others, to provide blended analytics for insights around people, cost, and delivery for employees and leaders within the company. We are working to serve as the single source of truth for all operational data within Disney Media Entertainment & Distribution, providing data for teams and services like domestic and international ESPN and ABC networks, FOX, FX, and National Geographic.
Data & Reporting
Product manager, designer, and engineer for the Major Incident Management report which incorporates incident and problem management data to provide follow-up notes on root cause and status for remediation of business critical incidents spanning the Disney Media Entertainment & Distribution and Disney Streaming organizations. The snapshot is sent in a weekly cadence to executive leadership including the CTO.
Extra Curriculars
Volunteered as an ally to help plan the Walt Disney Company’s participation in the Seattle Pride Parade in 2022 and 2023, serving as a communications lead in addition to planning logistics and organization for the event.
Served as a mentor for new team members and interns by setting 1:1 meetings for guidance and reviewing projects, performance, and processes.
Represented the Walt Disney Company at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference in 2022, recruiting from the pool of attendees and sharing my experience with interested candidates.
April 2021 - April 2022
SOLUTIONS ENGINEER II, THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Data & Reporting
Designed and developed a programmatically driven status report that eliminated the redundancy of status updates in multiple locations, and provided a single location for executives, managers, and individuals to track project work on initiative, objective, epic, and story levels. The report included visualizations on what teams have accomplished, what's in progress, and what work is planned.
Problem Management
Collaborated with program owner, process architect, and problem manager on the development of a problem management process for the Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution software engineering org.
Drove weekly meetings with multiple business groups to intake, route, monitor tasks, and resolve problems.
Investigated critical incidents to coordinate, communicate, and deliver an RCA.
Designed, compiled, and deployed the weekly problem management report.
Developed metrics to measure POC value and success.
Outbound Product Manager
Gathered requirements, established acceptance criteria, and collaborated with inbound product managers, software engineers, and architects to deliver products for data and reporting services.
March 2020 - April 2021
ASSOCIATE SOLUTIONS ENGINEER, THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Data & Reporting
Built multiple custom automated KPI dashboards in Tableau to measure engineering performance against each team’s unique SLAs.
Created data visualizations to discover and illustrate trends in critical issues like top impacted products and services, plus their fluctuations over time.
Wrote calculations in Tableau for requested KPIs using raw data piped in from a database.
Replaced manually created reports with customizable automated reports to simplify the preparation process and establish consistency in reporting.
Introduced real-time strategic review process where engineering teams and executives leveraged the dashboards to identify gaps and successes, while also identifying areas to push for improvements in process and product stability.
Product Operations
Evangelized, educated, and recorded feedback for the migration of the National Geographic apps and web experience to a custom built platform, an endeavor our CTO deemed "one of our most significant accomplishments since acquiring Fox."
Lead 36 trainings spanning over 44 hours to onboard 200+ users to a new CMS.
April 2018 - March 2020
MARKETING COORDINATOR, COSTCO BUSINESS CENTER
Collaborated with buyers, vendors, management, and design teams to align visions for marketing pieces.
Worked with a design team to produce all email campaigns from content coordination to deployment.
Developed an original dashboard in Google Data Studio to display and analyze email campaign performance, KPIs, and A/B test results.
Contributed to marketing strategy for location openings and created all print materials to introduce Costco Business Center in new and saturated markets.
Wrote instructional material for internal teams detailing best practices for marketing materials.
April 2019 - June 2019
STUDENT INTERN, T-MOBILE
Assigned to T-Mobile as part of a final client project for the Digital Marketing Analytics Certificate program. This entailed analyzing previously untouched T-Mobile Tuesdays app data to deliver customer insights gleaned from in-app survey data, and make business recommendations for meaningful improvement.
Deliverables included creating a deck of Tableau visualizations that illustrated findings, providing documentation on how to extract data from Apptentive, preparing data in Tableau Prep, and inputting clean data in Tableau.
Analysis was performed to make qualitative data quantitative. Example: survey responses that included the phrase “love t-mobile” occurred 150 times in a given time period, and had an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
September 2017 - April 2018
MARKETING SPECIALIST, COSTCO.COM
Worked with 17 departments to coordinate the content production and scheduling of marketing for over 80 categories and subcategories across Costco.com.
Edited HTML code, managed subscriber lists, created segmentation, and deployed B2C emails from Costco.com to over 20 million subscribers.
Created and maintained an analytics report in Adobe Analytics that monitored website traffic to various categories. Findings were used to support decisions on artwork production.
Volunteered to write documentation on processes, as this did not previously exist.
March 2016 - September 2017
MARKETING COORDINATOR, COSTCO BUSINESS CENTER
Learned the role in 2 weeks when the two people in the department transitioned to outside positions.
Handled all marketing responsibilities for Costco Business Center as the sole member of the department working under the director for six months until we were able to grow the team by three people.
Developed and wrote best practices documentation for recurring projects.
Coordinated photo shoots by writing shot lists, selecting items to be photographed, scouting locations, and setting up shots.
Reconciled marketing budgets for 14 Business Centers each period.
September 2015 - March 2016
WEB CONTENT SPECIALIST, COSTCO BUSINESS CENTER
Spearheaded the Webcollage and Sellpoints content roll out for CostcoBusinessDelivery.com.
Adjusted search capabilities of CostcoBusinessDelivery.com to provide more accurate results, writing documentation on discoveries made by exploring and experimenting with the tools.
Audited and updated item descriptions across CostcoBusinessDelivery.com to conform to the product style guide.
April 2013 - April 2015
PRODUCER, RETAIL ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN
Directed workflow for the production of in-store entertainment including audio and video content for two accounts.
Interacted directly with clients to gather project requirements and translate that information into work orders for the internal creative team.
Built an entirely new in-store branded media program that launched in over 300 motorcycle dealerships in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
March 2012 - April 2013
MEDIA ACQUISITIONS ASSISTANT, RETAIL ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN
Utilized Excel daily to record, review, and manage incoming assets including movie trailers and music videos.
Performed quality control reviews on final programming by proofreading all copy.
July 2010 - October 2010
PUBLIC RELATIONS INTERN, TINA TANG
Maintained Tina Tang's presence on social media outlets such as Blogger, Facebook and Twitter.
Contributed two entries to Tina’s blog each week covering fashion, trends, and daily observations.
Reached out to editors of magazines like Lucky, Seventeen, O, The Oprah Magazine, InStyle, Self and more to secure placements in future issues.
Researched and planned upcoming projects and sales events.
Increased Tina Tang's Twitter following by 6.4 percent and her Facebook fans by 2.6 percent during my three month internship.
January 2009 - May 2009
EDITORIAL INTERN, CMJ
Wrote music news stories and album reviews published on CMJ.com, all articles included appropriate HTML tags.
Attended and reviewed concerts in New York and New Jersey.
Interviewed artists for news and feature stories.
October 2008 – May 2009
Contributed one article per week to the News section with two cover stories published.
STAFF WRITER, THE SETONIAN
October 2008 – May 2009
DJ/NEWSCASTER, 89.5 FM WSOU
Broadcasted local traffic, weather and headlines every 20 minutes.
DJ'd drive-time and overnight shifts for a total of seven hours each week speaking on air, taking requests, and creating playlists.
EDUCATION
QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY
May 2023
M.S. Business Analytics
TIER 3 SAS ACADEMIC SPECIALIZATION
May 2023
SAS-Quinnipiac University Graduate Academic Specialization in Business Analytics
PRODUCT SCHOOL
June 2022
Product Manager Certificate (PMC)
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
May 2019
Certificate in Marketing Analytics
SETON HALL UNIVERSITY
May 2010
Bachelor of Arts in Journalism
ANALYTICS PROJECTS
ISSUE MANAGEMENT
(Click image to expand)
A few sample visualizations built in Tableau for product engineering teams to measure performance against SLAs and investigate trends in critical issues. Findings are used to push for improvements in process and product stability. The dashboards were created to replace a manually created report which not only simplified the preparation process but established consistency in reporting. Automation allowed for better dynamic scalability, enabled a live data connection, and flexible visualizations. Not pictured: Time to Mitigation, Ticket Volume, and Impacted Product Families.
EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
(Click image to expand)
This dashboard was built in Google Data Studio to display and analyze email campaign performance, KPIs, and A/B test results. Performance can be compared week-over-week and year-over-year. Industry averages are also provided as a benchmark for comparison. The dashboard was linked to a metrics tracking Google Sheet, which allowed newly entered data to appear once refreshed.
CUSTOMER SENTIMENT
(Click image to expand)
This analysis was built in Tableau and used short answer text responses from an in-app survey to quantify customer sentiment through the measurement of key words and phrases. The words and phrases were also linked to the numerical customer rating given to act as a measure. Example: survey responses that included the phrase “love (company name)” occurred 150 times in the given time period and had an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
I created a decision making tool for a resident of Washington state who is interested in purchasing an electric vehicle. The tool is an interactive guide intended to assist with the decision by covering topics like budget, battery range, popular models, and charging locations.
REVIEWS
"A large part of working on different marketing projects is combining multiple ideas from many different sources. Often, these ideas conflict. When leading projects, Maria ensures that all contributors have been heard and are happy with the final results."
"She demonstrates sound judgement in all areas of her job and takes ownership of her actions. She holds herself to a very high standard and continues to try to improve everyday. Her dedication to producing quality results does not go unnoticed and is greatly appreciated."
"Her ability to keep the big picture in mind while working on this and other projects has helped her be an extremely effective member of our team."
"Maria thrives on pressure, working calmly in situations where there are few guidelines and many risks. She makes reliable decisions even with a minimal amount of information and is both creative and flexible in solving problems."
LET’S CONNECT
Bellevue, WA