Alex Sirota

Current

• Manager, Electronic Service Delivery at Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (Ontario Government)
• Founder at NewPath Network

Past

• Product Manager at FloNetwork
• Product Manager at EveryWare Development
• Programmer and Support Specialist at Apple Computer

• Summer Intern at Apple Computer

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1 more...

Education

• University of Michigan
• Groves

Recommended

48 people have recommended Alex

Connections

432 connections

Industry

Government Administration

Alex Sirota’s Summary

I am an experienced product and project manager who specializes in designing systems that enable ordinary people to take advantage of advanced technology. I have a keen understanding of the capabilities of technology to make complicated processes easy to understand and use. I've worked at Apple Computer as a software developer at the Austin TX-based Apple call centre. I have also worked at 2 Internet startups in the Toronto area. The first product was a web analytics package for EveryWare Development and the second was a commercial, large-scale email marketing system for FloNetwork. Most recently I've managed staff in the public sector and non profit organizations to build content management and workflow/grant management systems. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor's of Computer Science. I am fluent in English and have speaking fluency in Russian.

I am also particularly interested in new project management paradigms that take a more organic approach to planning and executing. Specifically I am a big supporter of agile work and practice the agile methodologies regularly and often. (www.agileadvice.com + www.controlchaos.com).

Alex Sirota’s Specialties:

- Project Management
- Product Management
- Creative and Business Writing
- Organizational Development
- Leadership Coaching
- Web Site Design
- Web Development and Programming
- Usability Engineering
- e-Commerce
- Business Development and Strategy
- Agile work

Alex Sirota’s Experience

• Manager, Electronic Service Delivery

  Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (Ontario Government)

  (Government Administration industry)

  August 2002 — Present (7 years 5 months)

  I lead a team of business analysts, consultants and developers to convert government processes (grant applications, electronic service products) into electronic processes. The benefits of this work are varied:
  
  - manage the scalability of the Summer Company program (www.ontario.ca/summercompany)
  - streamline operations of programs
  - develop online marketing strategy that can be used year over year to attract young entrepreneurs
  - measure the effectiveness of the programs
  
  An agile work process is used to develop our applications. SCRUM techniques were applied heavily during v3 and v4 of the Summer Company system.
  
  I have led the development and redesign of our website at www.sbe.gov.on.ca.
  
  I have also been involved representing our Ministry in the design of the ontario.ca/business portal.

• Founder

  NewPath Network

  (Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

  September 2000 — Present (9 years 4 months)

  I started NewPath as a way for independent consultants to meet, greet and share experiences. We help them develop business as well as develop their abilities to execute on marketing and sales inititatives. We also help people who have ideas they wish to execute by providing resources who can form focus groups for thorough feedback from *all* angles, not just technology.

• Product Manager

  FloNetwork

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; FLO; Computer Software industry)

  September 1999 — July 2000 (11 months)

  FloNetwork (initially MediaSynergy) was a Canadian .com story. After rebranding in November of 1999, we went from 20 people to over 200 people in 18 months. We developed an email marketing system that eventually became best-of-breed. Our application was offered to our customers on a demand-basis, allowing their staff or our account managers to login to our servers and execute campaigns of any size. Companies like CNET, Barnes & Noble, Continental Airlines and hundreds of others emailed offers to their opt-in lists and tracked performance in realtime. Since May 1998 over 100 clients used the FloNetwork system to deploy their email marketing. Our tracking reports were industry standard. FloNetwork did not go public after filing in spring of 2000 with NASDAQ, and was bought by DoubleClick Inc (DCLK) shortly after I left to start my own company.
  
  Being product manager on such a ride taught me a few important lessons about growth, the need for quality people, and work-life balance.

• Product Manager

  EveryWare Development

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; EVY; Computer Software industry)

  December 1996 — September 1999 (2 years 10 months)

  Product manager for software analytics package called Bolero. I ran a development/QA/marketing team of about 10 people to ship a Windows based, real-time web traffic analytics system. The system used ISAPI/NSAPI plugins to collect traffic data from one or more webservers and push the data into a relational DBMS, summarizing the results into a data warehouse.
  
  In April of 1997 we shipped this revolutionary product to great appraise.
  
  Archived reviews and PR is available here:
  
  http://www.findarticles.com/p/search?qt=everyware+bolero&tb=art&qf=all

• Programmer and Support Specialist

  Apple Computer

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; AAPL; Computer Hardware industry)

  June 1993 — December 1996 (3 years 7 months)

  At Apple I worked in the Direct Response Centre supporting technologies like A/UX, AppleTalk Remove Access, AppleShare, System 7 Pro (ooh), DAL (Apple's attempt at SQL independence) and other enterprise systems like the fabled Workgroup Server 95. I worked with some of the best support people Apple Computer had ever had including Andy Masuo, Carl de Cordova, Ben Chuang, Mike Erwin, Jack Simonton, Howard Hudson and many many others.
  
  After my support stint I entered a group called Support Tools & Information run by my favorite manager, David Mutter. We developed tools for the 800-SOS-APPL call center. In this role I developed a reporting system for all our call centre operations. The system culled data from several regional call centres and aggregated all results into Oracle7. The results were run through Adobe Acrobat Distiller to produce a daily 1 page PDF snapshot of call center activity. Every month we handled over 700,000 calls for Apple's free support operation.

• Summer Intern

  Apple Computer

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; AAPL; Computer Hardware industry)

  May 1992 — August 1992 (4 months)

  I worked as a Summer Intern for the Apple USA Data Warehousing project. I was involved in putting together a data dictionary in a FileMaker Pro database. The work was to automate the documentation of the dictionary so that data warehouse users were able to understand what information was contained and could be used for reporting purposes.
  
  The skills I used included programming in FileMaker Pro, collecting information from the database engineers working on the project and accessing the VAX system that contained the database system.
  
  I was also involved in testing of the Apple Speech Recognition software, code named Casper, when it was being developed.

Alex Sirota’s Education

• University of Michigan

  BSc , Computer Science, Russian , 1989 — 1993

  Activities and Societies:

  Residence Adviser Couzens Hall, Information Technology Division support staff, University of Michigan Marching Band member, GO BLUE!

• Groves

Alex Sirota’s Contact Settings

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