Aaron Wallace

A niche coupon platform for media publishers and consumers; disrupted in 2025 by Google algorithm changes after 10+ years in market.

• Conducted a comprehensive root cause analysis targeting the high number of bugs (often up to 50% of sprint work), uncovering gaps in testing strategy, unclear Acceptance Criteria, and framework/library compatibility—ultimately reducing bugs per sprint to 15%.
• Met biweekly with the CEO to exchange insights on organizational and technical challenges—providing an additional perspective on engineering limitations, modern delivery standards, and coaching the CEO on how to shift to the company to the Product Operating Model
• Helped the Engineering Manager make the case for AWS migration by mapping out how legacy systems were draining time through rework and instability—resulting in leadership approval, and ultimately improved reliability and lowered infrastructure costs.
• Facilitated a critical architectural decision to sunset the newly built Coupon Admin Next and merge the outdated, high-maintenance Coupon Frontend into a single platform. Led an impact mapping session that helped leadership weigh resourcing risks and maintenance tradeoffs, enabling engineers to switch to higher impact areas.
• Designed and facilitated Tech Debt Mapping & Prioritization workshops, producing a focused roadmap that eliminated 60% of critical debt over 5 months, reducing rollbacks and increasing throughput.
• Led a company-wide Product Discovery workshop and created lean inspired templates (e.g., Business Model Canvas, Journey Maps, Assumption Testing) to support customer-centric innovation
• Mentored a first-time Engineering Manager on effective decision-making, building team accountability, and running impactful 1:1s.

Volkswagen's used car eCommerce platform operating across Europe with 20+ Engineering Teams

• Identified root causes of organizational planning issues, including transparency and cycle time of dependencies, Cost of Delay, unexpected work requests, and changing business requirements, by interviewing and surveying all PMs
• Responded to high occurrence of features being released, which violated compliance laws; Formed cross departmental working group and refactored steps in software development lifecycle after systemic root cause analysis, saving company from potential fines
• Analyzed github cross team code-review dependency data to reveal bottlenecks in key teams; affected teams used the information to negotiate with each other; VP Engineering used info to negotiate scope and capacity of platform teams
• Launched Engineering Metrics Transparency Initiative with VP Engineering to encourage metric based decision making in Engineering Managers, knowledge sharing between teams, and continuous improvement, and delivery flow
• Organized the OKR setting cycle for Product & Engineering

The Deutsche Kreditbank's innovation lab, building digital banking apps and platforms for 5M+ users, 20+ Engineering Teams

• Created system for pulling Agile Coaches into the teams with the greatest need; balancing needs of teams, organization, and product goals, getting great reviews from management and product
• Led investigation into making work units T-shaped in domain knowledge and using globally prioritized backlog in order to reduce lead time of top priorities and reduce bottlenecks in backend API development
• Coached management on how to reduce Time to Market for highest priorities; management translated knowledge to board of DKB, resulting in descoping of several low value projects, allowing us to focus all engineering resources to achieving largest business case, reducing bottlenecks to important APIs
• Responded to very negative eNPS score and several POs quitting at once, by crafting exploratory workshops to reveal hidden product ownership barriers from management and bank stakeholders, culminating in 2 day offsite
• Created popular feedback rituals in teams that allowed them to feel safe and also be honest; adapted feedback process during probationary period for new employees company-wide
• Helped team confidently reject half of work requests, after refocusing team on it's purpose in relation to company's biggest goal; primarily using the Goal Tree and expectations clarification with management as tools

A boutique NLP training company in Shanghai delivering certifications in coaching, communication, and performance psychology.

• Designed and delivered certification programs in NLP for coaches and managers, focused on leadership, performance, and communication.