Resume - Rowan Hick, Toronto based Sr Director Product Innovation (web/mobile technology).
I'm currently the Senior Director of (technology based) Product Innovation for the largest independent Marketing Agency in North America.
I have 15 years experience across all facets of the SDLC. First 7 years of career experience in business analysis and project management for enterprise scale software. The last 8+ years focused on design, developing and managing web applications, and their associated teams, ranging from startups to production web properties for Fortune 100 companies.
Experienced in international business, originally from New Zealand working in US, Australia, England and France, now based in Toronto, Canada.
Experience across all areas of the web development business through directorship of own company. Strong domain knowledge in Content publishing, Social Media, eCommerce, product configuration and now work force automation/operational optimisation.
Career objective: To continually help clients & key stakeholders run their businesses & ventures through effective, and efficient implementation of web systems/software. To build out systems from stakeholders visions into working reliable production ready systems utilising leading edge technologies.
Key strengths:
Effectively prioritise self, and teams, manage and deliver production systems.
Excellent interpersonal skills leading to strong client & team relationships.
Curious nature, ability to listen and understand problems with proven analysis background.
Technical know-how and can-do attitude to provide solutions to business problems.
Strong technical team leadership, having development skills, balanced with business acumen, and solid communication and personal leadership
Career
2011-Current - Senior Director Product Innovation, Mosaic Sales Solutions. Tasked with building out new technology based products, using lean methodologies. Evaluation, determination of ROI, concepting, market testing, business integration and adoption. Evaluation of bleeding edge technology stacks.
2010-2011 - Senior Director of Enterprise Development, Mosaic Sales Solutions. Over 18 months. Built and ran a large internal development team across North America, on leading edge web stacks (predominantly Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL). Moved from a closed source, waterfall development environment to open source, Agile (Scrum based) team under my leadership. Hired in and retained top RoR talent. Team focused on development of internal workforce scheduling, automation and data collection systems. Agile TDD development environment through to production deployment and maintenance. Technologies: RHEL, Apache, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, ESRI, Amazon Web Services (S3,EC2/VPC)
2008-2010 - Director of Technology, Mosaic Interactive, Mosaic Sales Solutions. Grew the development side of a new Interactive division from the ground up. Successfully executing consumer facing and client facing web applications for the largest brands out there, for both Canadian and US properties. Involved in all stages from concept, through to security & compliance reviews, to production systems. Technologies: Ubuntu, Apache, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL
2007-2008 - Product Development Manager, Small World Net. Brought a SaaS social media platform in Ruby on Rails into production. Managing a team of Development and UX professionals. Managing and building out platform for scalability, robustness and security. Responsibilities across the board from server configuration, system design, client meetings, task list management, development. Succesfully brought startup into production with live clients. Technologies: CentOS, Apache, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Amazon Web Services (S3)
2006-2007 - Web Projects Manager and Developer, Strategic Coach Ltd. Management of web projects & web team. Lead developer for Ruby On Rails based web infrastructure. Key success include leveraging legacy database through Rails to add a successful client 'portal', upskilling and streamling web development team / processes, implementing Rails based infrastructure. Technologies: OSX Server, Apache, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Amazon Web Services (S3)
1996-2006 Various Web and Software Development positions in NZ before moving to Canada. Refer to http://linkedin.com/in/rowanhick For more
Technology Experience
Ruby & Ruby on Rails, Merb, iOS, Android, PHP4 / PHP 5, Flex 2, XHTML/CSS, Prototype, jQuery, CouchDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL & PostGIS, MySQL, SQL Server, .NET, VBA, OS X, Linux, Apache, Passenger, ESRI
What others say:
"..His work product and attention to detail was excellent. He is an ambitious, considerate and well organized project manager..."
"..Rowan was my right hand man on some difficult projects. Rowan masterfully managed client expectations and facilitated clear communication between people of widely varying technical levels. Conscientious and thorough, he's an asset to any team."
"It's a pleasure working with a colleague like Rowan... someone who values results and gets them consistently without fear of getting their hands dirty. His ability to manage multiple projects and priorities while keeping users and management satisfaction high is invaluable.."
Side Projects
Every web application development guy has home projects to stay sharp. Certainly no exception.
www.rowanhick.com A.k.a the most ridiculously over engineered blog. Load balanced, replicated Rails 3 application running across a couple of MongoDB instances. Just for fun..
www.labicicletta.com Helped advise and get into production a Magento based eCommerce platform for a high end road bike store. Evaluated infrastructure, helped build and deploy new infrastructure along with fixing source control setup.
www.fastmount.com Ran eCommerce/B2B platform for 7 years. Built early system (see Career) in PHP/MySQL. Maintain Ruby on Rails System. Provide advise and application support. Direct other freelance developers.
www.mojozone.co.nz Built and ran the most active Rock Climbing Website in NZ for ~3-4 years before I moved to Canada in '05. Built originally in 2002 in PHP/MySQL, slowly increased traffic through forum and content creation. Peak traffic at one point exceeded some of the big name brand websites I've worked on!. In '06 handed the site and domain to the New Zealand Alpine Club to maintain.
