Laura Richardson

Experience

• 

  Sage Software, Inc.

  Apr 2001 - Aug 2006

  Senior Customer Support Representative

  Assisted customers and consultants with specific problems, general inquiries and training regarding Sage products in the areas of estimating, accounting, service management, purchasing and inventory. Educated customers and consultants on features of the software application and documented enhancement and new feature requests along with reports of issues with the software.Maintained high customer satisfaction scores by providing excellent customer service.Frequent top contributor of knowledgebase articles.Assisted development by participating in product feature reviews and QA testing. Show less

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  Sage Software

  Aug 2006 - Nov 2009

  Product Manager

  Developed successful products for construction accounting software suites using both the Waterfall and Agile development methods.Persuaded senior management to engage in profitable projects by presenting a business case justification complete with revenue projections and the positive net present value of the project.Discovered current market trends and needs by conducting thorough market research through phone, e-mail and on-line surveys as well as on-site customer visits.Validated development of products through WebEx demos of product to customers, consultants and business partners, as well as through in person usability analysis using customer support personnel and other internal resources. Established and maintained relationships with key clients and market influencers to gain needs analysis information. Documented and transferred research and product knowledge to engineers, QA, TechComm (Information Design), Sales, Training Services and Customer Support through market requirement documents, user stories, personas, and other explanatory documents based upon research and interview findings. Developed and maintained product line roadmap for the next three years.Educated sales staff, business partners, consultants, customer support and Training Services through frequent presentations and training sessions, both in-person and through WebEx.Ensured updated marketing collateral for new and existing products by partnering with Product Marketing and reviewing documentation. Ensured tax compliance by studying various taxation methods for Canada, Australia and the UK as well Show less

• 

  Portland State University

  Jan 2008 - Jan 2011

  MBA Student

  Studied business with an emphasis on international business and sustainability

• 

  Sage

  Feb 2010 - Dec 2013

  General QA testing for a client/server project and then a web/mobile project• Create and maintain tests in HP Quality Center and Microsoft Test Manager and Team Foundation Server. Wrote almost all test cases for web part of released current project. • Test in IE9, IE10 (Metro and Desktop), Chrome, Firefox, as well as on iPad 2 for web product• Run manual tests against specifications in Team Foundation Server when there were specs, and working with other team members to understand features when there weren’t specs• Have run existing automated tests with Visual Studio, using Excel, C# and Selenium Web Driver as the framework.• Work on daily triage team to determine severity, priority and scheduling of bugs• Collaborate with teams that are in-house and off-shored in India• Work with Microsoft Azure and Cerebrata’s Azure tools for troubleshooting issues• Deploy database and website to Azure as necessary• Train new employees or other team members on the software and testing processes• Ran two in-house “bug hunts” where company employees from other departments such as support and sales can help test the software and learn about it at the same time Show less

  • QA Engineer

    Aug 2011 - Dec 2013

  • Migration Specialist

    Nov 2010 - Aug 2011

  • Quality Assurance

    Feb 2010 - Nov 2010
• 

  CrowdCompass

  Dec 2013 - Nov 2017

  Senior Quality Engineer

  In a very enjoyable Agile and co-located environment, I'm testing and writing test cases for mobile (iOS and Android) and web applications. Using JIRA for bug management and TestRail for running test cases.

• 

  Cvent

  Nov 2017 - now

  Managing multi-team, multi-country projects and regular scrum master duties. Assisting managing my scrum master team and helping build out the vision and direction and goals for it. Also managing a direct report and training him on Agile and project management best practices as well. Managed small, multi-team projects while also fulfilling scrum master duties on several teams. Working with cross-functional and cross-cultural teams to facilitate their success.

  • Agile Project Manager

    Mar 2023 - now

  • Senior Scrum Master

    Mar 2020 - Mar 2023

  • Scrum Master

    Nov 2017 - Mar 2020