Kristina Stephens

Product and operations leader with 8+ years advancing from founding employee to director-level product strategist for a two-sided agronomy technology platform. Built the supply side of the marketplace from zero, owns the quality rules that govern what reaches a customer, and partners daily with engineering and AI development teams. Following a 2026 organizational restructuring at BW Fusion, remains the active quality authority for Next Level Ag while pursuing a full-time product role.

Available immediately.

Director of Product Strategy & Customer Insight - Agronomy 365 / BW Fusion / Next Level Ag

(2025-01 - 2026-12)

• Own product strategy and a prioritized backlog for a two-sided agronomy platform, making value-based trade-off decisions across growers, dealers, service providers, and laboratory workflows.
• Conceived and drove development of trial workflows, sampling protocols, field mapping logic, and customer-facing reporting views, authoring 30+ requirements and design artifacts engineering built to; specifications drove mobile V1 release.
• Designed a four-level AI capability framework spanning information retrieval, context-aware assistance, decision support, and workflow automation, with governance defining where AI acts autonomously versus requiring human review; built and deployed a working product prototype independently.
• Codifying eight years of manual quality-control judgment into documented, machine-enforceable rules — analyte thresholds, plausibility checks, escalation criteria, and release controls — implemented by engineering as automated batch QC.
• Ran customer discovery through a tiered beta program, usability sessions, and an 84-response NPS study; fed findings into product gaps, positioning, and pricing recommendations for leadership.

General Manager - Agronomy 365 / Next Level Ag

(2020-01 - 2025-12)

• Co-founded the Ag365 platform and built the early operating model as its first employee: sales support, customer service, pricing, invoicing, onboarding, and escalation management before dedicated support functions existed.
• Built the supply side of a two-sided marketplace from zero: recruited and trained a certified Service Provider network of 59 organizations serving 709 farm operations, which became the company's primary sales channel; led a cross-functional team of 9+ spanning customer service, dealer relations, marketing, finance, and engineering.
• Owned the vendor relationship with FieldAlytics for scripting and sampling work orders, then led the build-versus-buy decision and transition to build that capability natively into the company's own app.
• Developed pricing tiers balancing customer retention, trust, and company ROI; contributed pricing, attribution, and P&L sensitivity analysis to parent-company five-year digital strategy planning; supported 2.2x year-over-year growth and $4.6M in digital revenue.

Microbiologist & Quality Control Manager - Next Level Ag

(2018-01)

• Hold final review and approval authority for soil and plant tissue analytical results before customer release — the human quality gate on every result a customer sees.
• Led investigations and corrective action for laboratory and reporting defects, including analyte units, package logic, report visibility, and approval workflow errors; identified a regression affecting 60+ batches and directed the hold, correction, validation, and controlled re-release.
• Delivered technical presentations on microbiology and agronomy to dealer, agronomist, and customer audiences, translating laboratory science into decisions non-specialists could act on.
• Designed scalable quality controls including automated QC flags, regression testing, package validation, audit history, and versioning.

Clinical Support Roles - Horizon Health Care / Avera McKennan / Sanford Home Health & Hospice / Children's Care Hospital

(2006-01 - 2018-12)

• Provided patient care and clinical support across hospice, pediatric, skilled nursing, and hospital settings, working daily within HIPAA requirements for protected health information, accurate documentation, and multidisciplinary communication.

Bachelor of Science - Microbiology & Biochemistry - Dakota Wesleyan University