
Paul Flakne
Experienced Sr. Director of Development
Champlin, MN
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Summary
Held the position of Senior Director of Development for Naviga, providing leadership and oversight for the R&D department at their Bloomington MN Center of Excellence, and managing the Rochester office for all items related to the mobile product line.
In last role was managing the mobile development team handling customer and vendor request, financials, and overall development and support matters. With another group, oversaw the integration between a newly acquired company and the existing software packages. And with yet a different group, brought to market an integration with a new partner that was revenue generating for both the company and the clients.
Directed and managed multiple teams both small and large, including a team that took a new idea from proof of concept to production for web presentation of news content.
Successfully worked with a wide variety of team members. Managing team members with many years of experience, to developing engineers with minimal work experience, as well as building offshore teams.
A strong believer in working on growing employees by helping identify their strengths for them to harness as well as areas to improve upon. Proven through his leadership that this produces not only better products but also stronger employees that are able to advance their careers.
Worked with multiple facets of the company internally such as sales, operations, and hosting to drive where the product needed to grow and evolve. Has also traveled around the world to work with customers and prospects to understand their business needs and help drive product change when necessary and secure contracts.
Early in his career, was one of the lead of developers on a small team that wrote and developed a software package for his company that is still in use today by the majority of the newspapers in the US, Australia and Canada.
Experience
2018
Jun
-
2020
Mar
Senior Director of Development
Naviga / Bloomington, MN
- Provided leadership of day to day operations in Bloomington office for all of R&D
- Managed mobile development team out of Rochester MN handling customer and vendor requests, financials, and overall development and support matters
- Assisted and helped with decision making for development matters and escalations across the company from both internal and external sources
- Headed development with new partner on key revenue generating integration
- Led integration of newly acquired company with existing legacy applications
- Drove new development for a large international customer with a challenging timeline and successfully assisted getting customer live on schedule
- Directed development including budgets, roadmaps, and capacity planning
2017
May
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2018
Jun
Director Software Development
Naviga / Bloomington, MN
- Key player in opening new development center of excellence (COE) in Noida India
- Built up multiple development and quality assurance teams in Noida COE
- Directed development including budgets, roadmaps, and capacity planning
- Directed total team size of 49 between US and Noida COEs
2016
Jan
-
2017
May
Development Manager:
Naviga / Bloomington, MN
- Directed development of all products in the Media Pillar with Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of ~ $30 million
- Partnered closely with product director on roadmaps, budgets and development priorities
- Oversaw development team on new strategic digital Open Source based (Drupal) offering hosted in AWS; took product from proof of concept to production
- Transitioned dev team of one product from Aalborg Denmark to Bloomington Minnesota
- Supervised 28 employees on three teams
1991
Jan
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2016
Jan
Senior Development Advisor
Naviga / Bloomington, MN
- Gathered initial requirements, designed, and coded circulation system
- Worked with support, implementation, and sales on evaluating business needs and requirements of customers, providing solutions; making site visits as needed
- Major player in migrating product from on-premise to support cloud hosting and eventually into AWS
- Designed and coded initial new graphical user interface (Java) for application
- Interacted with outsourced development team for augmented development
- Managed various teams from 4 - 6 developers including interviewing and staffing
Education
1985
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1990