Dan Charlson Career Summary/Cover Letter

Last Updated: 2008-09-11

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My philosophy is: Work hard. Work smart. Have fun. Treat others openly, respectfully. Exceed the business goals of the company. Delight customers!

My objective is to lead a dynamic, fast-paced team and use my software industry experience to champion customer requirements, own important projects end-to-end, and ship great products on schedule with the right features. —I am, or become, the expert.—

I am an experienced mid-to-senior level program, project, and account manager of B2B and B2C software and web products, with diverse experience in different technology/business areas, on both V1 products and more mature development efforts, and a strong international background. I have worked in small, medium, large and enterprise-scale organizations—including seven years at Microsoft—on both sides of the client/vendor dynamic, having personally managed multiple projects with values each up to US$2M and durations ranging as long as two years. In addition I have about two years of team management, having led as many as two teams of 10: software and web developers and testers; and desktop publishing and print specialists. At this time I am preparing for the PMP Certification Exam, since I easily have the experience and training hours required.

My specialties include: deep knowledge of the software development process; XML technologies particularly XSLT and XSD; content and knowledge authoring, management, and publishing; external and internal cross-group coordination, collaboration, and negotiation; and internationalization and localization; encodings and fonts. I have studied over 10 languages, including Japanese, Korean, and Arabic—my obsession around writing systems comes out here. With my strong analytical skills and eye for design, I home in on underlying issues, troubleshoot workarounds, and/or devise effective if not elegant solutions.

I thrive on and deeply enjoy investigating and solving challenging problems.

I am keenly interested in both strategic and tactical activities, on one hand focusing on the customer or client goals and problems, while on the other maintaining a careful balance against company goals and team resources, creatively optimizing the time-to-market by constantly evaluating status and communicating with stakeholders to ensure the right thing gets done, right.

The ways I add value include:

Strong people interaction and relationship skills
Business Process Improvement: creation and refinement, often leading to 90% time savings
Documentation and Training Design and Delivery
Subject Matter Expertise in multiple domains, as well as knowing what I do not know, and who and where to turn for assistance

Summary of Experience
13 years in software and web industries, including:
  10 years program (7 years) and project (3 years) management
  7 years at Microsoft (6 as employee, 1 as contractor)
  7 years in localization
  5 years in account management / business analysis and strategy
  3 years in software test engineering
  2.5 years natural language processing (NLP)
  2 years as team lead or manager
  2 years in digital media & DRM