Austin Francini

Platform-focused Product Owner with 10+ years driving enterprise-scale shared data capabilities at the American Red Cross. I have a track record of owning platforms utilized by engineering and BI teams alike. I love guiding folks towards technical solutions and excel at communicating in a way that end users understand. I have a track record of meeting delivery expectations even in high change and ambiguous environments.

Product Owner, Enterprise Data & Analytics at American Red Cross (2023-01 to Present)

Owned and evolved a shared data platform serving 11 Power BI and data engineering teams as primary internal customers.

• Defined platform product strategy and roadmap for enterprise analytics infrastructure, balancing near-term team enablement with long-range extensibility across the organization.
• Established a BI Governance and Quality Management Doctrine — a shared framework of standards, definitions, and change protocols — adopted across all data-consuming teams to ensure consistency and trust.
• Led onboarding of a data quality automation vendor, introducing shared metadata and data quality services that reduced duplicated effort across downstream teams.
• Co-architected an Enterprise Data Model providing a canonical source of truth for cross-team reporting, accelerating feature delivery by reducing per-team data discovery overhead.
• Managed product backlog, authored user stories with clear acceptance criteria, and led sprint planning; coordinated dependencies across engineering, BI, and DevOps workstreams.
• Partnered with engineering teams on platform decisions across AWS Redshift, PostgreSQL, and Teradata environments, contributing meaningfully to architectural discussions and data pipeline design.
• Leveraged AI-assisted workflows and tooling to improve backlog clarity, documentation quality, and team throughput.

Continuous Improvement Senior Analyst at American Red Cross – NHQ DCS (2018-06 to 2022-12)

Built and maintained shared data capabilities that unified reporting across 8 national departments.

• Co-developed a centralized, cross-departmental data model that standardized reporting definitions and eliminated duplicated analytical work across business units.
• Automated data cleaning, transformation, and visualization pipelines using SQL and Python, reducing manual effort and improving data reliability for downstream consumers.
• Designed and delivered dashboards and reporting solutions used by national leadership to drive strategic decisions — serving internal stakeholders as primary platform customers.

Fundraising Support Analyst at American Red Cross – AZ/NM Region (2017-01 to 2018-06)

• Built Salesforce-integrated Power BI dashboards supporting fundraising operations and donor engagement tracking across the region.
• Partnered with IT to connect Salesforce data to internal analytics infrastructure, improving cross-system data flow and measurement consistency.
• Supported the Salesforce Client Assistance Platform rollout by gathering requirements and shaping reporting logic — an early example of enabling downstream teams through platform contributions.

Bachelor of Science in Public Service & Administration – Iowa State University