Zachary Stedt

U.S. Bank

Lead product vision, strategy, and roadmap for high-profile payment and business banking experiences on the digital platform. Managed multiple journey teams distributed across the US and India, overseeing end-to-end product delivery for payment setup, customer onboarding, and business banking engagement. Led two journeys: Access & Authentication and Onboarding & Activation.

• ·Multi-team leadership: Own product strategy and delivery for multiple journey groups, coordinating quarterly planning, sprint execution, and cross-team dependency management across US and India-based engineering, design, and QA resources.
• ·Payment Setup experience redesign: Led end-to-end strategy, requirements and cross-team coordination for a major Payment Setup flow overhaul driven by straight-through enablement changes, including screen removal, welcome experience redesign, and hardware ordering enhancement targeting ≥15% increase in hardware order conversion.
• ·Cross-functional coordination: Organized and facilitated multi-day intensive planning sessions with India-based teams covering process optimization, escalation frameworks, and detailed roadmap development for multiple journey teams in parallel.
• ·Business Payments engagement: Designed and drove implementation of nudge systems for enrollment and reactivation of business banking payment services, improving customer engagement through targeted product touchpoints.
• ·Business activation strategy: Owned the dashboard activation experience, defining entry points, suppression logic, and routing for customers at different stages of their onboarding journey.
• ·Process improvement: Established improved escalation protocols, communication SLAs, and bug triage processes between US and India teams, reducing cross-timezone friction and improving delivery velocity.
• ·Stakeholder & executive communication: Translate strategic business objectives into detailed product requirements, feature prioritization, and phased implementation plans for executive review and cross-functional alignment.
• ·Native mobile delivery: Led delivery of native mobile application that significantly improved performance and user experience over the previous mobile solution for investment services clients.

American Bar Association

Led digital content strategy and publishing across web, eBook, and tablet magazine channels for a major national professional association.

• ·Managed content strategy for high-traffic website and led a full site redesign that improved user experience and engagement metrics.
• ·Developed and published division's digital content across web, eBooks, and tablet magazines.
• ·Drove changes to social media strategy that measurably improved audience engagement and interaction rates.

Freelance & Medill News Service

Reported and produced stories for Chicago Public Radio's morning business program. Photojournalist for trade publications. Published across regional media outlets in video, audio, photo, and text formats.

Transportation Solutions Group

Planned, deployed, and supported business applications and infrastructure. Led virtualization and disaster recovery initiatives. Drove SharePoint rollout in a multi-server environment.

Electronic Learning Environment

Designed and implemented network modernization for a large school district. Built custom attendance system using MySQL and ASP.

Northwestern University

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign