Brad Long

I started in 2010 managing Active Directory accounts and imaging laptops for a course production team. Unglamorous work, but it taught me the thing I have relied on since: most broken processes are not broken because someone made a bad decision. They are broken because nobody owns them.

Testing came next. Two years on Payment Operations releases, where a subscription-status bug is not a support ticket but customers billed incorrectly at scale. That is where I learned to check the edge case before the happy path.

Seven years as a business systems analyst at Optum put me in the middle of healthcare data: EHR migrations, payer-provider interfaces, and a mailing process nobody owned until someone sat down and mapped it. I moved into project management in 2024 and now lead three Agile teams. The job changed; the instinct did not.