Rovani's Sandbox

Rovani's Sandbox

About Me
Projects
If you like what you see (view the About Me page for more) and you're interested in exploring opportunities for us to partner up, please reach out to me at david@rovani.net or message me on LinkedIn #OpenToWork

David Rovani, Résumé

Passions and Motivators

With a passion for innovation, team leadership, strategic planning, and mentorship, I have created a career that centers around communication, continuous learning, and organizational influence. I focus on improvements to the people, processes, and technology that deliver ever increasing value to businesses and customers.

I enjoy pushing the boundaries of technology and finding new ways to solve problems or improve existing processes. I have a deep love for technology and a desire to stay current with the latest trends and developments, balancing between providing high-level direction to team members and diving into the technical details of projects.

I am motivated by complex problem-solving, thriving on tackling challenging technical issues and finding creative solutions. It is particularly satisfying when it leads to improvements in the company's products or services, be they internal tools or externally facing projects.

Where I get most pride from is in team leadership. Building high-performing teams, mentoring and developing talent, creating a positive work environment, fostering effective communication, setting clear expectations, and empowering decision-making... these are all some of the most rewarding moments in my career and what I strive to inspire in others every day.

Experience & Responsibilities

Chief Technology Officer at National Business Institute | NBI, Inc.

September 2023 to February 2025

NBI is a continuous legal education provider covering programs on national and state-specific topics, offering a full gamut of training formats and materials including live in-person events, live online seminars, OnDemand streaming videos, and self-paced learning downloads.

The Chief Technology Officer was a core role within the National Business Institute, pairing with the President to make up the executive leadership team. As CTO, I oversaw the Technology Group and provided leadership and expertise for all facets of the technology ecosystem, including network infrastructure, security governance, IT service desk operations, application development, web development, Shopify storefront architecture, and Salesforce administration. I was empowered to utilize my business analysis expertise to ensure that NBI’s technology infrastructure, platforms, and processes were designed to support internal business operations, digital and print marketing, online commerce, product delivery, and finance. I worked closely with and collaborated with other members of NBI’s senior leadership team and provide regular updates and advice to the board of directors.

Solution Strategist at The Maze Group

June 2021 to August 2023

The Maze Group is a consulting agency focused on solutions for Salesforce and Shopify e-commerce, digital marketing, content strategies, and private equity acquisitions.

At Maze, I was frequently the second person at the company to speak to prospective clients, accompanying the Account Executive. I would meet and engage with C-Level stakeholders, directors charged with implementing strategy, and the individual contributors that would be deep in the proposed solutions.

Projects while at The Maze Group

  • Interim CTO with National Business Institute
    • Advisor to President for strategic technology planning, organizational strategy, and business analysis.
    • Collaborated with the senior management to provide improved communication and insight into the development cycle and right sizing expectations for deliverables and timelines.
    • Created detailed technology roadmap to modernize ecosystem of legacy, homegrown, unstable applications.
    • Implemented a Backlog Management Process to triage and prioritize tickets; a UAT & QA process to mitigate against deployment regression; and a launch, contingency, and remediation plan to minimize impact to customers and the business.
    • Led development team in implementation of Shopify storefront and migration from legacy homegrown website.
  • Solution Architect, Shopify storefront build with Coty, Inc.
    • Led pre-sales discovery, project estimation, and statement of work (SOW) creation in a sales engineering role.
    • Technical architect throughout functional requirements gathering, merchant usability and expectation setting, and project prioritization triaging.
    • Interfaced regularly with client project teams, including E-Commerce DTC team, global technology operations team, information security team, and Accenture Managed Services team.
    • Led Maze Shopify development team in implementation of a boutique, highly customized Shopify storefront theme build, including integrations with Global-E, Klaviyo, OneTrust, Appointedd, Adobe Web Analytics, Widgetic, and ZenDesk.
  • Interim CTO with BodyBuilding.com
    • Advisor to both CEO and CPO for strategic technology planning, data stewardship, and risk mitigation.
    • Assisted the executive team during acquisition planning and solicitation.
    • Created detailed technology roadmap to solve immediate revenue requirements while providing a path for future innovation and growth.
    • Created strategy for modernization of content toolset to increase efficiency in labor, enabling personalization for customers, and unlocked cross-channel publishing.
    • Led ecommerce development team in stabilizing newly implemented Shopify ecommerce platform and fix issues impacting traffic and funnel conversion.
    • Implemented a Backlog Management Process to triage and prioritize tickets; a UAT & QA process to mitigate against deployment regression; and a launch, contingency, and remediation plan to minimize impact to customers and the business.
    • Led development team in implementation of Amplience headless CMS hosted by Netlify.
  • Solutions Architect, Shopify POC Project with Zwift
    • Provided Shopify platform expertise to the Zwift team of developers in creating a proof-of-concept Shopify storefront that would allow customers to purchase physical goods and digital subscriptions.
    • Architected integration of the Recharge subscription service between Zwift's home-grown entitlement service and Shopify storefront.
    • Architected Multipass integration between Zwift's authentication service and Shopify storefront.

Director of Solution Consulting at BlueBolt Solutions

October 2019 to June 2021

BlueBolt Solutions, Inc is a digital consulting agency focused on solutions for e-commerce, search, and content solutions with expertise in Shopify, Episerver, and DNN.

Brought on as a Senior Solutions Architect general technologist to provide solutions support for projects large and small, I assisted and mentored for work on the UX front-end of projects, back-end architecture, and integrations with other systems.

  • Provided UX support and created integrations between a new Shopify store and custom fulfillment workflows for a leading publisher of religious books and resources serving 12,000+ products with multiple fulfillment services and product types.
  • Researched and provided detailed instructions for integrating Auth0 with Shopify and TalentLMS, including authoring several blog posts.

Promoted to the role of Director of Solution Consulting, leading all sales engineering efforts. Worked in conjunction with the VP of Development throughout the sales process, including introductions to the agency, preliminary scoping, project solutioning, detailed work estimates, proposal creation, closing of the sale, and hand-off to the delivery team. I was instrumental in rethinking the approach to sales engineering and creating tools to support and streamline the process. I excelled at communication across all levels of prospective customer organizations from C-level executives to line-level employees; at capturing their workflows, understanding their painpoints, and empathizing with what they viewed as keys to success.

Director of Information Services at IFCJ

November 2012 to October 2019

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) is a global non-profit with offices in Chicago, Toronto, Brazil, South Korea, and Jerusalem providing humanitarian work in the eastern Mediterranean and former Soviet Union regions of the world. With annual revenue of $120m, IFCJ exists in an operational space with needs that reach into enterprise-level solutions, but within a budget designed to maximize stewardship of donors' contributions.

My time at The Fellowship was highlighted by moments of teaching and mentoring my team; growing and adapting the Information Services department to meet the ever changing needs of the company; and the ongoing work of maintaining and enhancing the custom built donor management system (KesherNet).

Overseeing a team of 3 application developers, 2 database administrators, and a data hygienist, my role was both manager/mentor for the team and the senior technical resource. The department was responsible for ensuring that the organization has timely access to accurate data that is securely stored yet easily accessible. Information was retrieved from dozens of vendors through file imports, API calls, webhooks, and manual keying. The data was accessed by internal users through KesherNet, through custom reports, and shared with vendors through file exports.

KesherNet is a web application written in C# on the ASP.NET and EF frameworks connecting to Microsoft SQL Server databases. It includes modules that handle payment processing (CC, ACH, and PayPal), fully templated receipt printing, weekly/monthly/quarterly (and other odd cadence) scheduled gifts, highly adaptable list segmentations, and many other custom tools that support business processes. I was the lead developer on the initial project to build the application, replacing a vendor’s legacy system that had reached its end-of-life. I continued to be the architect and lead developer while teaching and directing junior staff to take on more responsibilities as they learn and grow.

Several later projects used an assortment of technologies and platforms, including Azure Functions, CosmosDb, App Services, and API Management to build a donation API for the publicly facing website; implemented code review and check-in policies and governance; and began creating the architecture of a fully cloud-native, open-source donor management solution to replace the current system.

Initial position at IFCJ was as a Senior .NET Developer, then after a year was promoted to .NET Developer Team Lead. Two years later, promoted to Manager of Application Development. Received promotion to Director of Information Services in November 2017.

Additional Work Experience

Falkor Group: Application Development Practice Manager

May 2006 - November 2012

  • Lead Developer on a three year project to convert a large website from classic ASP to ASP.NET Web Forms to support retail franchises for an international tire corporation with product ordering, event scheduling, and to act as an informational hub between the franchises and corporate.
  • Developer on a project to analyze and document the business processes for a large humanitarian non-profit, and recommend application solutions to transition their donor management software away from a closed-source Windows forms application.
  • Lead Developer on the project to implement the replacement solution for the same large humanitarian non-profit, which included migrating to a new open source platform, and recreating customized business logic in the new system.
  • Lead Developer during ongoing maintenance and enhancement projects, also for the same non-profit.
  • Sole developer creating a small internal website to aid a rental property management company with data storage, replacing a ten-year-old Access database.
  • Created a fully customized internal application for a small community advocacy non-profit on the Chicago south side to manage their client caseload. This replaced an entirely paper-driven workflow with a managed electronic process.

Best Buy: Geek Squad "Double Agent"

May 2004 - May 2006

  • On-premise technical support for home and small businesses.
  • Diagnose and solve problems with home networking, Windows computers, and printers; and provide user training.
  • Required a significant amount of in-person customer support and working with both the central dispatch and local Best Buy employees to ensure that customer needs and expectations were always met.

Proficiencies & Technical Knowledge

  • Cloud-First Development - API Manager, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, App Services, Storage and Queues, AD B2C Tenants, Key Vault, Application Insights
  • Shopify storefront & theme architecture - React, Hydrogen, Remix, Liquid, CSS, HTML, Node, NPM, NVM, Tailwind, shadcn
  • SCRUM, Agile, Waterfall project management methodologies
  • Azure DevOps – Boards, Project Planning, Backlog item tracking, Repos, Pipelines, CI/CD
  • Microsoft development environment – C#, MSSQL, .NET Framework, .NET core, Visual Studio
  • Avid user of Capacities, Teams, VS Code, PowerPoint; also work extensively with Slack, Jira, Confluence, Project, Outlook, Word, Excel

University of Evansville, class of 2004

  • Received both a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Engineering.
  • Resident Assistant (RA), 2 years
  • Leadership Academy, President
  • Resident Student Association, National Ambassador
  • Student Government Association, Resident Hall Senator
  • Resident Gamers Society, President

Additional Interests and Activities

  • Avid cook, handyman, reader, and runner
  • Chicago Area Runners Association volunteer as site coordinator and pace leader
  • #drovani on the Peloton leaderboards
  • Occasional motorcyclist
  • Over 2 years of stumbling through Spanish lessons in Duolingo