Hire me!

Samantha Lynn Harms
highfiredanger limited
Setting your business on fire–in a good way!
720-663-1369
Email me

Background
I have a diverse set of software product management skills that allow me to offer a variety of contract services for web and mobile applications. I specialize in early-stage startups as well as beginner and novice technology users. View some of my recommendations on LinkedIn.

Services

  • Product design specifications and product development — be prepared with full product specs before going to a developer or before seeking funding.
  • Quality Assurance — short-term QA for your web and mobile applications; test case development and implementation for those starting out with testing plans.
  • Customer engagement — Get to know your target market better and reach them more effectively.
  • Technical writing — support documentation for internal or customer use.
  • Websites and web portals for businesses
  • Custom Wordpress, Joomla, or other CMS installations.
  • Site copy writing — website text, marketing copy, and even tweeting on behalf of your company.
  • General Contracting and Project Management — do you want someone to manage your project? Can’t seem to find the contractor you need? I can help!

Experience
Marketing Manager, SurveyGizmo
October 2009 – February 2010

  • Manager of company email marketing campaigns
  • Manager of contact list of over 69,000 customers
  • Writing and editing copy for company website
  • Chief manager of Beta testers
  • Manager of email list of over 69,000 customers
  • Issue tracker configuration and administration
  • Affiliate customer management
  • Nonprofit account management and administration
  • Competitive and market analysis
  • Student account management and administration
  • Answering phones and support tickets
  • Real-time marketing management, such as managing company presence on Twitter, and the main contributing author for the company blog

Product Quality Manager, PublicEarth
April 2008 – October 2009

  • Defined functional specifications for several products
  • Wrote requirements documentation for company-wide distribution
  • Issue tracker configuration and administration
  • Authored high-level use cases, detailed use cases, and alternate-path use cases
  • Helped manage initial development of site by creating tickets and supporting developers
  • Produced over two dozen wireframes for use by designer
  • Helped define the scope of our releases and iterations
  • Created and maintained initial master list of site functionality
  • Created process diagrams for several products
  • Authored competitor analysis white papers to make recommendations for feature implementation
  • Produced more than a dozen documents detailing my research on competitors’ functionality for use in meetings, including documents about Facebook Connect, alternative means of user authentication like OAuth, and extensions of site functionality with third-party applications like Google FriendConnect.
  • Ran development team scrums
  • Authored and assigned issue and feature tickets
  • Administrator of internal Ad Hoc iPhone application distribution
  • Produced first complete spec for device connector
  • First QA tester for PublicEarth, only dedicated tester for 3 months
  • Wrote first full test suite for PublicEarth application, device connector & iPhone application.
  • Solo maintenance of full application and device test suites for 3 months
  • Organized and managed other team members for regression testing efforts
  • Executed full application regression testing at the end of each two-week iteration
  • One of two QA engineers that averaged 40 issues per testing period in each 2 week iteration
  • Assisted in selection process and hiring of second QA Engineer in January 2009
  • Maintained equal workload with QA Engineer of 5 years’ experience
  • Pre-release verification of features in development environment
  • Post-live release verification after pushes to production
  • Ongoing logging of issues found by employees and users in production
  • Dedicated tester of iPhone application
  • Posted majority of employee replies to feedback and problems from users on Get Satisfaction

Product Support & Community Manager for iggli, inc.
August 2007 – April 2008

  • Facilitated the release of a mobile web application in under two weeks
  • Worked with the Director of Products to write use cases and alternate-path use cases
  • Produced wireframes and process diagrams for site features
  • Worked with designers to meet design needs
  • Defined functional specifications for the web site
  • Entered and managed requirements as Agile user stories in feature tracker
  • Competitor analysis
  • Assisted Director of Products with feedback email address to log defects and user stories
  • Wrote and executed test cases
  • Logged defects in issue tracker
  • Managed members of the company during testing of website iterations
  • Hired more than a dozen bloggers nationally, including Boulder, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Boston
  • Conducted weekly meetings with 15 local, with some of the 23 out of state attending virtually via video and voice
  • Supervised employed bloggers;
  • Mediated their online content, addressing and responding to quality issues
  • Oversaw and gathered hours and passed them to accounts payable
  • Assisted in the amicable release of bloggers when they could no longer work with company
  • Contact point for bloggers for site outages and tasked with updating them in a timely manner
  • Maintained bloggers’ connections to the company by making myself available daily on Skype, Instant Messenger, responding to emails, individual calls, regular video chats and conference calls
  • Motivated bloggers with suggestions for post topics and websites of interest
  • Emailed national mailing list regularly with company updates
  • Ongoing contributor to FAQ topics
  • Creator and moderator of iggli blogger Google group and blogger Facebook group

Software & Hardware
Mac OSX, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox, Safari, Flock, Zendesk, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, XCode, VMWare, Terminal, Apple iPhone Developer Portal, Redmine, Rally, Mingle, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Apple iPhone,  Garmin GPS devices, Nokia mobile devices, Skype, MarsEdit, OmniGraffle, Things, Pages, Keynote, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Dropbox, Confluence, PBWiki, Apache Roller, Zimbra, Google Mail, GoogleCal, MacMail, iCal

Education
University of Colorado at Boulder
Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies – May 2007
3.7 GPA
Phi Beta Kappa

View some of my recommendations on LinkedIn; additional references available upon request.