Hey
👋
I'm Joe Ward

Operational Excellence

Bus. Intelligence & Growth

People & Project Manager

Executive Partner

I'm a creative, detail-oriented, and technical business partner who's worked with teams from small non-profits, to the Fortune 500, to cutting-edge tech companies - helping them implement sustainable ops and get the most from what they have.

Together, we can establish ground-level ops (ex: process mapping; identifying KPIs and leading indicators (and building useful views); defining and enabling SOPs), or identify and tackle the more complex and tailored Operations improvements needed to hit ever-more challenging targets (ex: Deep-Dives and Forecasting; Tool or Process Evaluation + Migration; or other large projects).

TD Ameritrade Rotational Program

As a poli-sci major (aka graduating undecided), TD Ameritrade's rotational program stuck out for the broad exposure it promised. And I've been building on the tools I learned in this program ever since.

Lean Consulting: Increased Client-facing (call) Time by ~5% for national sales branch after analyzing call and response patterns.

Retail Strategy & Ops: Increased Education products' retention by ~10% for new users by IDing correlation between course types and retention. President's Club award.

Project Portfolio Mgt: Converted 100% of existing reporting from Sharepoint to a SQL schema I managed; data visualized and auto-refreshed in Tableau. T2 Spot award.

2013

2014

2015

Practice Benefit Corp.

At the time a non-profit called Practice Makes Perfect where I had previously volunteered; I joined as a consultant to help professionalize operations and implement best practices while working towards Educational Equity.

Created Value Stream Maps and KPIs for all roles, which where then used for hiring (what aspects are you familiar with, what would you change?) and quarterly reviews (for identifying continuous improvement opportunities).

Swapped payroll providers and led 401k enrollments; Led hiring and onboarding for all new hires; Created annual sales calendar; and otherwise contributed as needed.

2016

TD Ameritrade Procurement

After two years in the Project Management office, I opted to help my old manager build up their Procurement ops over re-joining the Lean team.

PMed the development of an internal webapp where anyone could submit new vendor requests. This created total visibility and automated data capture for us and our partners (including RFP status, risk scoring, cycle times by stage), and removed multiple hours of weekly admin times for all Category Managers (~40) and partner Risk teams.

As PM, worked with risk and legal teams and other relevant partners to carve out PO-only exceptions (no MSA for specific cases like Facilities emergencies), create new self-serve Catalogues, and make other policy updates. Overall, reduced administrative weight of ~10% of purchases and $120m in spend by up to 100%, allowing the team to spend more time on Strategic Sourcing opportunities.

2017

2018

2019

Charles Schwab Procurement

Schwab bought TD Ameritrade, and - after helping with regulatory reporting for the merger, identifying contract redundancies, and setting up the newly combined reporting environment - I began learning to code and looking for roles.

Handled all procurement-related regulatory reporting, providing the SEC and others reports to assess conflicts of interest, etc.

Partner for Vendor synergies analysis and strategy - identifying contractual overlap and obligations, and options for which contracts to renegotiate, terminate, or otherwise prioritize for renewal.

Automated combined Schwab+TDA procurement reporting with Alteryx.

2020

2021

Vercel: CS Ops

After the Schwab transition was complete, I moved to Vercel, which I had been using to learn to code (and use to host this website).

Led CSM migration to Salesforce - Design, testing, enablement, and post-launch monitoring.

Designed and enabled new Renewals processto solve for high-volume of late renewals.

Solved for long-standing lack of data by getting Snowflake + DBT access and creating views for AEs and CSMs to understand how a customer is using our product, see if they're on pace for overages, and understand their broader portfolios better as well.

Platform admin for Salesforce, Gong, Fivetran.

2022

Vercel: GTM Analytics

Manage a team of 3 analysts, with a mandate to provide analytics and strategic support to the GTM field teams.

Built base views for partners (Sales, CS, Marketing) before expanding to views for experiments, campaigns, lead conversions...

Pricing Analyses: Single-product forecasts and a deep-dive for full pricing revamp (April 2024), IDing how many and who would see increases/decreases and helping field teams plan accordingly.

Developed logic to ID customer production launches with ~80% accuracy; used Koala and other tools to tweak Lead scoring and partnered with Marketing + SDRs on new Lead Attribution model.

Support needs for Board calls, quarterly planning, pipeline reviews, and regularly present findings to teams.

2023

2024

Timeline