John A. Reitzer-Smith
Senior IT Leader · Aspiring Product Owner
I deliver integrated, secure technical solutions in complex enterprise environments — partnering with business and engineering teams to define strategy, prioritize roadmaps, and launch high-impact products. Deep fluency in AWS and on-prem infrastructure, with a track record of mentoring cross-functional teams.
Professional Summary
Bridging business strategy and technical delivery
Senior IT leader and aspiring Product Owner with more than 15 years of experience delivering integrated technical solutions in complex enterprise environments. Proven ability to partner with business stakeholders and technical teams to define strategy, prioritize roadmaps, and launch secure, high-impact solutions. Known for mentoring and leading cross-functional teams, translating customer and data insights into actionable requirements, and driving efforts to enhance safety, reliability and efficiency in technical operations. Committed to fostering healthy team cultures.
Core Competencies
What I bring to a team
Product Vision & Roadmap
Defining strategy and translating it into prioritized, deliverable roadmaps.
Backlog Management
Prioritizing by urgency, value and dependency; turning insight into stories.
Stakeholder Collaboration
Aligning business leadership, engineering, security and service teams.
Coaching & Mentoring
Developing Product Owners and engineers; building a culture of improvement.
Risk & Decision-Making
Anticipating issues, running risk assessments, and leading incident response.
Data-Driven Analysis
Using support and usage metrics to influence features and measure impact.
AWS & Cloud
EC2, Lambda, SSM, CloudFormation; secure Windows workloads at scale.
Automation & Infra
VMware, XenServer, scripting, patch programs (BigFix, SCCM, JAMF).
ITIL & Service Mgmt
ITIL practices across endpoint management, releases and operations.
Professional Experience
Where I've made an impact
- Served as customer proxy for enterprise and government clients, translating support issues into requirements with AWS engineering to improve product reliability and experience.
- Co-managed team backlogs of cases and enhancement requests, prioritizing by urgency and business impact, and facilitating daily stand-ups.
- Advocated for customer needs in product roadmap discussions on secure Windows EC2 workloads, using support-metric insights to influence feature development.
- Led incident response for security events across cross-functional teams; mentored new engineers on customer-centric problem solving.
- Acted as Product Owner for the End-User Computing portfolio, building a roadmap for endpoint management, patching and UX, and coordinating delivery across agile teams.
- Designed a global patch management program (BigFix, SCCM) achieving >95% compliance aligned to security and business objectives.
- Facilitated cross-functional planning across desktop engineering, security and service desk; mentored associate engineers and product owners.
- Owned the macOS platform roadmap, delivering JAMF Pro deployment and secure OS upgrades enterprise-wide; translated requirements into user stories.
- Introduced automation and self-service capabilities, turning usage-metric insights into backlog items that improved satisfaction and reduced support load.
- Led modernization of a build-automation lab with a multi-year roadmap for virtualization, monitoring and disaster recovery.
- Translated complex requirements into stories and acceptance criteria; delivered virtualized environments on VMware and XenServer.
- Directed the Windows XP → Windows 7 migration as product owner, defining vision and coordinating imaging, compatibility testing and user training.
- Built automation scripts to streamline endpoint provisioning and compliance; facilitated stand-ups, retrospectives and change management.
Education & Certifications
Foundations
Selected Project
Building, not just managing
GTD Manager
A personal Getting-Things-Done task manager with an AI coach. A React single-page app backed by Supabase, integrated with Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive), with a hardened AWS edge and a FastAPI proxy that keeps API keys server-side.
Get in touch
Let's talk
Open to senior IT leadership and Product Owner conversations. The fastest way to reach me is email — I'll get back to you promptly.
Dallas, Texas