Kimberly Waters

My journey began with 8 years of service in the United States Marine Corps from 1997 to 2005, where I was deployed for Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq. In the desert, I was highly influenced by the IT people who could come into the middle of the desert and create communication mediums out of nothing, and that experience planted the seed for my future career. After coming home from serving, I landed a job as the executive assistant for the director of an IT department at a concrete company, where I supported him and his team and just learned and ate up as much information as I could from all of them, including system administrators, developers, and IT support for end users. When my life came upon hard times, I reached out to a friend who I served with, and he mentioned there was a role at the Department of State as a content manager for the websites, so I quickly took him up on the offer. From there, I learned web design and web development and slowly crept up that ladder, and my final role was basically a program manager at the Department of State. I pivoted from development because I found the leadership skills that I had gotten out of the military, and I was able to leverage them in being a program manager and leading people and organizing people to accomplish a goal. That's what program management does. I've been in program management since around 2007, over 15 years now, and I've held positions as a manager, senior manager, and director throughout my career. Right before I left the Department of State, I was cited as a federal rising star as someone to watch based on my accomplishments there. Later, while managing a large team at Meta, I was given an award in 2018 for building social value from the Facebook security team. In my day-to-day work, I check on the status of things that are supposed to be delivered at a specific time, check in with the person responsible to make sure they're on track, and if not, I try to understand what hurdles they're encountering and help them find ways to overcome those hurdles. I make sure that anything being worked on is aligned with the strategic priorities of the organization and company, and I continuously look to build relationships with the people I need help with through stakeholder management, building that trusting connective tissue between their teams and what is being asked for from the team who's responsible to deliver.