NEWS
Meet Your Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Dan Berger
- Company update
- 4 MIN READ
- Jul 31, 2024
Summary
Some of the most effective leaders are those who have a breadth of experience, who can understand problems from multiple perspectives, and who can empathize with people, no matter their role.
Dan Berger, Apply Digital’s VP of Enterprise Solutions, is one of those leaders. With over 15 years of experience in leadership roles across product management, data analysis, and tech implementation, Dan brings a uniquely broad perspective to his role on the Apply Digital leadership team.
We connected with Dan to find out more about his unique experience and skill set, what drew him to management, and how he taught himself to code at a young age.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Apply Digital:
You have over 15 years of experience in leadership roles. How has working across data, implementation, and product management informed your perspective on leadership?
Dan Berger:
I’ve been fortunate to be able to work across this triangle of roles and to lead teams in all these different areas, which gives me a unique perspective into multiple sides of a story. A lot of what we do at Apply Digital requires us to bring different disciplines together, and because I’ve been in these disciplines, I can relate with their goals, motivations, and hesitations.
This is really helpful when we’re deciding how to approach a project and asking ourselves: Which stakeholders and teams are key to achieving success? Which teams should lead and which teams should support? Having been in these situations from different vantage points, I can look at the situation and say okay, if we lead with this team, this is what we’re going to get. This makes it easier to sequence a project and optimize which teams are needed at each phase, to maximize results for the client.
Apply Digital:
What drew you to management? Did your personal interests inform your career path?
Dan Berger:
My interest in tech goes all the way back to when I was 7 years old. I remember my dad bringing home a Commodore PC and some floppy disks, and that kicked off an interest in learning how that thing worked and learning to write code. For the first chapter of my professional career I spent much of my time on learning new technologies and coding languages, but over time my interest shifted to the bigger puzzles that we were trying to solve — to go deeper into the people and process side of things, beyond just the technology.
I’m still very passionate about the latest and greatest in technology, but it’s at the broader intersection of people, process, and technology that these days I find myself contributing more and more.
A lot of what we do at Apply Digital requires us to bring different disciplines together, and because I’ve been in these disciplines, I can relate with their goals, motivations, and hesitations.
Apply Digital:
On a tactical level, how do you leverage your experience to drive value for Apply Digital clients?
Dan Berger:
Building on what we talked about before, my experience helps guide clients on how to maximize value for money and ensure successful delivery. This means knowing which skills are needed at specific points in a project, how to best sequence the work, and how to de-risk and reduce complexity. In addition to identifying potential gaps or roadblocks that could arise.
At Apply Digital we work with many Enterprise clients, and likewise my own background spans a number of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. Large companies tend to operate in similar ways when it comes to process, governance, and risk — there’s a high standard when it comes to security and compliance at the Enterprise level. So the issues we might run into with clients, I’ve spent the majority of my career in their shoes, and can anticipate where we might run into delays or blockers that we can alleviate early and without issue.
Apply Digital:
What do you wish more people understood about leadership at the executive level?
Dan Berger:
That’s a good question. I think that often, senior leaders at client companies can get bogged down with a lot of escalations and weigh-in into tactical decisions, for topics that could have been resolved through empowering and delegating to others.
The ways we work at Apply Digital alleviates senior leaders at client companies from having to make each and every decision along the way. I think we’ve put together a good leadership stack on our end, along with strong ways of working to really utilize time efficiently and maximize value for our clients.
Interview conducted by Nathan Munn.
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