Profile

Ian Birch

Ian Birch

Technical Product and Engineering leader | ex-Meta

LinkedIn:View my profile

“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Curriculum Vitae

Sr. TPM | Facebook/Messenger, Meta

February 2022 - present

Launched new Community Chats product on Messenger and Facebook globally by partnering with and coordinating efforts across Engineering, Product, Content/Design, and Data Science/Engineering to define the technical roadmap, long-term product strategy, and product market fit.

Launched MVP for new social and broadcast channels messaging products on Messenger and Facebook semi-globally and drove initiatives to improve the performance, reliability, efficiency, and quality within these product areas.

Established 0-to-1 programs and led multiple XFN teams to grow Community Messaging products on Facebook and Messenger by gathering technical requirements, defining scope, and building consensus between teams.

Drove product, engineering, and XFN partnerships between Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Wellbeing, and Integrity organizations to deliver cohesive experiences across messaging products with a focus on quality, performance, and scalability.

Managed interdependent product roadmaps as a collective program and aligned product requirements and dependencies across partner teams.

Improved product feature tracking systems and enhanced process structures to help the team move faster, minimize manual effort, and provide support to XFN teams.

Managed communication between partner teams, stakeholders, and engineering management and developed strategies for efficiently driving milestone execution and delivery to achieve aggressive growth goals.

Co-Founder, TrueWeb

January 2020 - February 2022

Productized a web middleware solution that enables businesses to apply enhancements to any web application, whether it’s SaaS, cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or homegrown software. This allows enterprises to transcend the limitations and complexities of digital transformation, improve operational effectiveness, and derive increased value from their existing web applications.

Key functionality includes:

  1. robust APIs to easily integrate with enterprises’ existing technology, enabling leaders to deliver innovative solutions to enhance the experience for external users with increased capabilities and ease of use, while also providing admins increased security and control.
  2. admin tools that provide an additional layer of functionality and security, allowing enterprise leaders to curate a seamless and consistent user experience for internal users across all web applications in their portfolio.

Principal Solutions Architect, Surfly

January 2020 - September 2021

Developed product integration middleware using real-time messaging infrastructure to facilitate real-time communication between different contact center platforms and products.

Created partner integrations and demo tools for NICE, Genesys, Zendesk, Salesforce, Amazon Connect.

Develop policies, strategies, and best practices for product implementation and partner software integration.

Participate in the collection of project requirements and produce technical designs, plans, and strategies throughout the customer engagement process.

Develop and maintain strong customer relations by acting as a senior technical resource during pre-sales engagement, and by providing technical solutions for various customer use cases.

Own solution design and delivery as lead architect.

Systems Software Architect, TTEC

November 2017 - January 2020

Designed internal tool to monitor agent productivity and provide real-time and historical reporting which provided a cost savings of 60% by eliminating the need for third-party software licenses.

Designed internal enterprise solution to provide dynamically translated web applications with full management over the translated strings which resulted in a cost savings of 80% by eliminating third-party professional services and licensing.

Developed automated process for restoring critical business services reducing MTTR by 38%

Designed SaaS product which provides real-time analysis and visualization of agent productivity within web-based applications for voice, chat, and back-office work.

Develop, refine, and implement architecture for enterprise applications, and service as an ongoing point of contact during the product development lifecycle.

Create service delivery roadmaps for new products and tools. Develop architecture blueprints for new products and services that involve on-premise or cloud-based applications.

Advise leadership on the design of updates to existing systems and propose forward-thinking solutions to plan for future state.

Consult and build consensus among many stakeholders regarding opportunities for continuous process and productivity improvements.

Workforce Manager, Morgan Stanley

August 2017 - November 2017

Automated manual workforce processes which saved time and reduced error.

Improved internal documentation of workforce management procedures and principles for team development.

Performed forecasting and scheduling tasks, and monitored real-time service level management in a multi-site, multi-skill contact center.

Responsible for agent skilling, capacity planning, optimization, performance reporting, and analytics.

Collaborated with business partners and stakeholders to ensure accurate and timely completion of initiatives.

Infrastructure Support Manager, UK2 Group

March 2016 - August 2017

Increased customer satisfaction by 15% YoY

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  1. Implemented new analytics for customer satisfaction surveys. Results showed:
    • 74% of positive feedback was attributed to a definitive resolution
    • 52% of positive feedback was attributed to a fast response time
    • 68% of negative feedback was attributed to a lack of resolution
    • 21% of negative feedback was attributed to a slow response time.
  2. Devised a new model for scheduling technicians, which improved their ability to efficiently respond to tickets raised by clients. Results were:
    3. Decrease in time to first response by 57% YoY
    Decrease in average case resolve time by 21% YoY
    Decrease in average queue size by over 50% YoY

Improved support operations reducing agent occupancy

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  1. Leveraged new live chat software, which improved automatic routing and allocation of live chat requests. Results were:
    • 9% of total inbound support requests shifted to live chat.
    • Greater ability to help multiple clients concurrently
    • Reduced repeat support requests by accelerating case resolution.
  2. Optimized staffing across different communication channels to adapt to the shift in chat volume and ensure maximum availability. Results were:
    3. Decrease in total support requests per active service by 3% YoY
    Increase in overall team efficiency by 2% YoY
    Increase in customer satisfaction by 3% YoY

Consolidated siloed support teams and applications reducing staff and increasing productivity

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  1. Implemented the following for a successful transition into one consolidated team:
    • Organizing mentoring sessions with senior technicians
    • Creating new internal documentation
    • Organizing shift swaps between technicians on different teams
    • Standardizing various internal tools and scripts
    • Implementing a progressive training procedure including a proficiency checklist
  2. Communicated new team expectations to all team members.
  3. The successful consolidation of the two teams resulted in:
    Reduction in staff by 6% YoY
    Increase in overall team productivity by 17% YoY

Accelerated onboarding process for new hires by over 50%

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  1. Created a new hire training platform, which replaced mulitple disparate, legacy training platforms. This provided:
    • Online video resources
    • Written training material provided by existing team of technicians
    • Training activities using mock support requests
    • Structured 1-on-1 sessions shadowing other technicians
    • Module evaluations
  2. The new training process dramatically reduced the time required to onboard and train new hires

Championed project to implement a Cloud Contact Center solution with company savings over 16%

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  1. Analyzed internal system architecture to evaluate what solution would have the greatest success within the company environment.
  2. Explored various "best-of-breed" enterprise systems, and evaluated various Contact Center providers for both on-premise and hosted solutions.
  3. Planned and orchestrated technical integration of the Contact Center into the customer service organization.
    4. This solution improves the customer experience by:
    • Allowing the company to meet SLA requirements and provide premium service offerings.
    • Providing self-service options within the IVR.
    • Increasing first contact resolution rate through skills-based routing.
    • Projected increase in customer satisfaction over 6% within 6 months of deployment.
    It improves the agent experience by:
    • Reducing the number of internal systems needed to support the client.
    • Using screen-pops to maximize efficiency.
    • Increasing client self-service and reducing the overall workload of the agents.
    It also improves the managment experience by:
    • Providing WFO and WFM technology.
    • Providing live statistical reporting and deeper insight into the needs of clients.
    • Reducing overhead for managing the team.

Automated manual reporting processes creating labor savings of 10%

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  1. Worked with the business intelligence team and organized a procedure to ensure the consistency of statistical performance reports
  2. Improved the accuracy of productivity metrics by incorporating adjustments for time spent in meetings or developing technical skills
  3. Automated the calculation and delivery of key performance indicators to the individual technicians

Used gamification to increase team productivity by 27%

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  1. Created and implemented a new method of scoring and ranking technicians based on productivity. I used this to:
    • Recognize and reward top performers
    • Focus on working with under-performing technicians
    • Increase individual accountability for weekly performance
    • Create healthy competition by introducing gamification of team performance metrics
  2. The new performance scoring method boosted overall team performance by 27% within 8 weeks

Led various individual projects to continuously improve the support organization

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  1. Set aside an hour every week for each technician to focus on developing their professional skills and to work on one of many team projects
  2. Encouraged technicians to come up with creative and innovative ways to improve their day-to-day tasks. This led to:
    • Development of a web tool to categorize support requests and provide insightful data regarding the reasons why clients contact support.
      • The technician who primarily worked on this project was promoted to a developer position.
    • Development of a command line tool that enabled technicians to perform various administrative functions within a single terminal session.
    • Improvement of various command line tools that helped to accelerate troubleshooting processes.
      • The technician who primarily worked on this project was promoted to a tier 2 technical position.
    • Creation of additional modules for the new hire training site.
    • Consolidation and organization of internal documentation into a single, centralized knowledgebase.
    • Improvement of public facing knowledgebase articles to provide current and accurate information.
    • Development of Autohotkey templates to improve speed and accuracy of the technicians' written communication.

Implemented process of tracking support requests to provide more proactive service

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  1. Led project to develop and incorporate a web tool that allows technians to classify and categorize the support requests received throughout the day.
  2. The web tool is designed to fit easily into the technicians' workflow and to be useful to the support technicians, as well as upper management.
  3. The data within the tool has allowed for more descriptive and prescriptive analytics, which enables management to:
    • Identify top drivers of support requests in order to automate or eliminate them.
    • Improve incident and problem management by identifying trends and performing root cause anlysis.
    • Mitigate effects of planned changes in infrastructure, service plans, etc.
  4. The tool has provided the company a clearer insight into the needs of customers.

Systems Administrator, UK2 Group

November 2014 - March 2016

Recieved company recognition for client service excellence

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  • At the beginning of 2016, I received an award from UK2 Group that is given annually to an employee with superior client satisfaction ratings.

Provided weekly training sessions to mentor other admins and engineers

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  • Once a week, I would answer questions, teach how to compose scripts, and how various Linux command line utilitites can be applied in our daily activities.
  • This helped the others to develop their professional skills and improved their troubleshooting abilities.

Proactively resolved escalations while working as a junior admin

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  • As a junior admin, I would go through the incident and request queue resolving many of the issues that had been escalated by other junior admins.
  • This helped to me to gain additional experience and highligted my aptitude to quickly learn new concepts and adapt to new technologies.

Led junior and senior teams in incident resolution

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Employed excellent problem-solving skills and multi-tasking abilities which enabled me to:
  • Achieve 102% higher productivity than the team average as a junior sys admin
  • Achieve 26% higher productivity than the team average as a senior sys admin

Composed complex BASH scripts to automate tasks and increase efficiency

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These scripts included ones that would:
  • Find websites that have databases using innodb tables and provide the hosting account with the appropriate database.
  • Scan shared servers for dedicated IPs that don't have PTR records configured with the server hostname.
  • Calculate X and Y coordinates to be inserted into the code for a javascript pie chart based on the radius and angle.

Management Trainee, Hertz

May 2013 - October 2014

Assisted branch manager in opening and operating a new office in Twin Falls, ID

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  • Ensured vehicle availability to meet projected customer demand.
  • Organized process for preparing returned vehicles for subsequent rentals.
  • Oversaw daily office activities in the absence of the manager with little instruction and supervision.
  • Performed transactions manually and appropriately filed paperwork while the office was without any computers.

Led northern Utah area in sales

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  • By selling rental insurance and upselling customers, I maintained the highest revenue per day out of all of the local offices in northern Utah.

Helped organize and direct office activities in order to meet weekly and monthly branch goals

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  • Communicated effectively with team members and worked with branch manager to prioritize daily responsibilities and tasks.

Testimonials

Patrick Redding

July 2017
Systems Engineer, UK2 Group

Ian demonstrated numerous instances of leadership as my manager that others could learn from. He implemented projects and ideas that cut our work load in half while boosting the quality of our services. He cares about every single person he works with and am proud to have worked with him.

Adam Croshaw

May 2017
Sr. Director Client Services, UK2 Group

Ian is a very competent, capable and driven individual. Regardless of the task, Ian, is willing to get it done and make sure it is done correctly. Everything from taking on a difficult client escalation to driving change within an organization are tasks where Ian delivers exceptional results. Ian recongizes that in order to achieve excellent results he has to involve those around him and give them the tools and resources to achieve excellence.

Wyatt Mickelsen

May 2017
Systems Engineer, UK2 Group

I have worked with Ian for nearly 3 years. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time working with him, and came to know him as a truly valuable asset to absolutely any team. He is honest, dependable, empathetic, and extremely hard-working. Beyond that he is an incredible mentor to his team. Besides completing his own duties he would take the time to lift his whole team up so that everyone was happy, productive, and always moving forward in their own goals or the company's. For me personally he has been by far the best manager I have ever had. By teaching me a variety of aspects of the business from managerial tasks to technical knowledge and customer client relations, I can honestly say I would not be the success I am today without Ian's great leadership and managerial skills.

Tyler Strohl

April 2017
Systems Engineer, UK2 Group

Ian is a tremendous asset to both the company and to his fellow colleagues and staff. He is very balanced in making sure that both the company's needs or goals are met in addition to his staff's needs.

Leo Hernandez

March 2017
Systems Engineer, UK2 Group

Ian doesn't micromanage, and he treats his employees as equals. He actually cares about his employees on a personal level.

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