Consultant Spotlight: Susan Gentry
The “Fixer” Who Modernizes Enterprise Software
Susan Gentry
Consultant, Senior Product Manager
Meet Susan Gentry, a Senior Technical Product Manager and a true “expert fixer” for enterprise technology. Susan has a real instinct for finding overlooked opportunities and connecting technical solutions directly to your business’s bottom line. With deep experience as both a Product Manager and Senior Business Analyst, she excels at making sure technology actually aligns with business strategy and builds lasting partnerships along the way.
Susan’s unique background in both the business and technical sides of technology allows her to bridge communication gaps between users, C-level stakeholders, and engineers—a rare and valuable asset. Her career began in business technology across various industries before transitioning to leading teams that develop robust software solutions. This experience shaped her core philosophy, developed as a single mother of two: “I’m not going to bring a lot of fluff or embellishment. I am a super-technical person who embodies the ‘work smarter, not harder’ ethos.” This principle is evident in the teams she manages, which consistently produce high-quality software with maximum efficiency.
Susan has a real instinct for finding overlooked opportunities and connecting technical solutions directly to your business’s bottom line.
Strategy and Execution in Software Modernization
Susan has spent more than 20 years focused on modernizing complex enterprise software, leading Technical Product Management for more than six different applications. She is a master at organizing the entire development life cycle—from analysis to delivery—using the trusted As-Is/To-Be model. This rigorous approach, which documents the current workflow (“as-is”) before creating an improved future process (“to-be”), is key to securing confident stakeholder buy-in and driving massive process improvement. For instance, she built a brand-new trade allocation system that processed hundreds of billions of dollars in trades in its first year and is engineered to handle future growth. Susan applies this level of detail to every project, explaining, “I think of my coworkers as my customers. The work that I do makes their work lives better.... If we are working more efficiently (smarter, not harder) in a better environment, we know the business’s customers will feel those effects and have a better experience themselves.”
More Than Just Tech: Committing to Community
At Collabry, we believe in a balance of head and heart, and Susan’s commitment to her community is a powerful example. She’s active in her local grassroots organization, Red for Ed, where she advocates for securing better funding for public education. That means helping to increase teacher pay, lower class sizes, and improve school resources—a dedication that echoes our own commitment to making things better for people.
“I think of my coworkers as my customers. The work that I do makes their work lives better.... If we are working more efficiently (smarter, not harder) in a better environment, we know the business’s customers will feel those effects and have a better experience themselves.”
Connecting with Collabry
Collabry and our consultants provide the essential business expertise and human empathy that help our clients and communities truly flourish. If you are looking for consultants with that rare, exceptional blend of strategy, execution, and management—like Susan—for your most complex technical projects, let’s connect!