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
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY
Product Management
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Outbound product manager responsible for product managing (and sometimes engineering) operational data, reporting, and AI initiatives for the Biz Ops Tools team under the Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology organization, specializing in executive reporting initiatives.
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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
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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
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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.
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Served as a mentor for new team members and interns by setting 1:1 meetings for guidance and reviewing projects, performance, and processes.
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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
M.S. BUSINESS ANALYTICS, QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY
January 2021 - May 2023
A 33-credit online program with a curriculum that focuses on the visualization, mining, management and warehousing of data as well as statistical analysis; information technology project management; predictive modeling; and other highly specialized and sophisticated analytical skills. Elective courses include: Introduction to Python, Big Data & Hadoop, and Optimization.
PRODUCT MANAGER CERTIFICATE (PMC), PRODUCT SCHOOL
June 2022
The Product Manager Certificate is awarded after completion of our 8-week course that prepares students to successfully build software products with a team of designers and engineers. Students learn from real-world Product Managers at top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
CERTIFICATE, DIGITAL MARKETING ANALYTICS, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
March 2020 - April 2021
Course Curriculum:
The types of data produced by different kinds of digital marketing activities during each stage of the customer journey.
Techniques for developing and executing a measurement plan for a marketing campaign.
How to combine various types of marketing data and apply common analytical methods to generate helpful insights.
Principles of information design and data visualization.
Programs Used:
Tableau
Google Analytics
Google Data Studio
B.A. JOURNALISM, SETON HALL UNIVERSITY
September 2006 - May 2010
Activities and societies: The Setonian, 89.5 FM WSOU, Entrepreneurship ClubActivities and societies: The Setonian, 89.5 FM WSOU, Entrepreneurship Club
Received an academic scholarship from the University, 2006. Minored in English.
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.
VOLUNTEERING
July 2023 - Present
BOARD MEMBER & VOLUNTEER,
KING COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM FOUNDATION
Sat on the Impact Committee where I reviewed, evaluated, and approved grants to fund programs that propel optimum and equitable access for advancement to all people across King County communities.
Coordinated outreach and optimized planning to bring together award-winning authors, community leaders, and local businesses for fundraising efforts to benefit the King County Library System.
Contributed to the creation and and implementation of a comprehensive marketing plan for the annual Literary Lions Gala, tailored for media coverage and strategic placement in local publications with the goal of extending reach and impact year over year.
April 2022 - Present
PARADE PLANNING LEAD, SEATTLE PRIDE PARADE
I have been one of four planning leads for The Walt Disney Company's participation in the Seattle Pride Parade since 2022, a role I will maintain for the upcoming 2024 parade. I act as a communications lead in addition to planning logistics and organization for the event, including day-of leadership
December 2022 - Present
VOLUNTEER, MARY'S PLACE
I have been volunteering through the Walt Disney Company's VoluntEARs program at Mary's Place since 2022, bringing the Disney magic for special events at their Regrade family shelter. This includes brainstorming, preparing, and leading themed crafting activities for the kids and families.
December 2022
MENTOR,
WINFO 11TH ANNUAL HACKATHON
In the role of a mentor I acted as a knowledge resource and provided feedback for collegiate teams at the University of Washington at a one-day event hosted by Women in Informatics (WINFO) as students developed thoughtful, technology-based solutions that positively impact the world. Throughout the event I gave professional guidance on the development of student products and allowed them the opportunity to leverage my expertise by making myself available to answer questions. I provided recommendations for which teams should advance to the next round based on design, impact, and overall production.
May 2021
SOLUTIONS ENGINEER,
COYOTE CENTRAL
On May 14, 2021, I had the privilege of participating in the Disney VoluntEARS Virtual Skills-Based Marathon, a unique, one-day virtual skills-based volunteering event. I applied for consideration and was selected from a pool of candidates to support the Seattle non-profit partner Coyote Central on a data dashboard development project.
Coyote Central is a youth arts organization offering pay-what-you-can courses to students ages 10-15 in the Seattle area, with a mission to reach students from all backgrounds and incomes. Students apply and strengthen knowledge of core academic material through hands-on projects like video game production, welding, podcasts, fiction-writing, photography, and more. Coyote Central was looking to improve their current data reporting process that highlights the most pertinent student and enrollment data for the organization.
Based on the project description provided that outlined Coyote Central’s current Excel-based process, challenges, and desired deliverables, I worked on a team with four other Disney analysts and engineers to develop a solution that replicated their reports in the Google Suite in order to automate and optimize data entry and visualization. The data in Google Sheets connected to a Google Data Studio dashboard that refreshed automatically to populate the same reports they were used to — but with added features for flexible visualizations and more ways to slice and dice data.
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
Seattle, WA