Web Team Lead

Where communications strategy meets engineering delivery#

I'm a program manager and web team lead in the Technical Information Department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I lead a portfolio of web projects for directorates across the Lab: about 15 active at a time, plus about 40 in maintenance mode, with budgets from $5K to $300K. I turn audience research into information architecture and content strategy, and co-manage a cost-recovery web services team. My own team is full stack: five people across UX, content strategy, front-end development, and full-stack development, and six at its largest. I stay hands-on in the code and infrastructure, so engineering teams treat my scope and priority calls as decisions, not requests.

Much of this work is internal to the Lab, and some of it is controlled or classified and can't be disclosed, so I describe it here by approach and outcome rather than by project.

Program and portfolio leadership#

I'm the program manager for several internal modernization efforts that have consolidated about 13 fragmented sites into one primary site and three purpose-built ones. For their executive sponsor and compliance lead, I built the governance: a RACI covering every domain, a leadership kickoff, and live tracking dashboards, built with AI assistance, that let everyone collaborate on a complex program in real time.

I also replaced Microsoft Project with a custom project platform — Kanban, Gantt, budget forecasting, and utilization tracked against an 80% target — that the team works in every day. After several overruns in prior years, we had zero projects over budget in 2026 across 15 concurrent projects. I've since extended the utilization views, with four-week projections, to other team leads in the department.

Audience research and communications#

1. I lead the audience research behind IA decisions — card sorts, tree tests, surveys, site audits, and competitive analysis — for Lab directorates and organizations, as well as learning-and-development sites.
2. I write the communications that keep programs moving: branded estimates, project charters, and decision-focused meeting summaries that name owners, deadlines, and go/no-go calls.
3. I train partner teams to own their content. One conference team now maintains its own Drupal site.

Technical leadership#

I build production tools alongside our developers, including the portfolio, utilization, and content-review dashboards (React, with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB), and we've shipped apps for Lab-wide users in under five weeks.

When our servers' operating system reached end of support, I led the team's move to AWS GovCloud. I ruled out paid extended support, at about $699 per node, as an insufficient stopgap and migrated directly to meet the June deadline. I now manage the resulting Docker-based hosting environment.

Most recently, I've started building static sites internally and leading AI-enablement projects. Colleagues can build apps with AI coding tools, but those apps usually keep their data in one person's browser; we connect them to a real database so results are shared and teams can collaborate. You can read more in its own case study.

I build the static sites with Hugo, chosen for security, and a single configuration produces both high-side and low-side versions of a site.

CMS process improvements#

On Liferay, the Lab's internal CMS of choice, I built AI development guidelines, design templates, and best practices for my team, and aligned with the institutional CMS team so ours is recognized as a value-add development team. The guidelines include our rules of engagement for AI: standing instructions we give the AI at the start of every session, so every collaboration begins from the same ground rules. On WordPress, I moved the team away from dependence on third-party plugins toward custom development.

I've also streamlined how our sites are published, maintained, and tested, and automated mailing list management, cutting its annual cost by about 80%.

Service-center operations#

I built a custom billing dashboard and the financial controls behind it: ledger reconciliation against Oracle, charge-code validation, and weekly time-entry checks. It replaced a manual VBA and Excel process for about 30 customers per billing cycle and cut weekly QA from 4–8 hours to about one. The work earned a customer-nominated Director's Office Recognition Award.

Recognition#

1. Director's Office Recognition Award, 2026
2. Business Directorate recognition awards, 2025 and 2026