Alex Tiktinsky

As a consultant at Strategy&, I spent more than one year embedded in this client's cross-functional governance team. Our work focused on improving transparency and accountability in content moderation appeals and the policy development process, in order to make our platforms safer and build trust with users and external stakeholders. I led the development and implementation of a new operating model for the highest level of content appeals escalation, working closely with senior client staff to align internal governance, policy, operations, legal, and communications teams on standard procedures and accountability structures. I also produced interactive data dashboards and a 60-page manual for the primary responsible client team and a comprehensive onboarding guide for internal and external stakeholders. Working closely with client managers, I helped expand a new process for democratizing content policy development from a pilot into a successful pitch for full-scale implementation. I provided strategic guidance and project management support, helping plan and execute a workshop for 40+ internal staff that featured academic and industry experts, and drafting concise white papers for a VP-level audience. When our client's VP in charge of trust and safety needed to make the case to C-Suite for a $150 million investment in content governance, I led qualitative and quantitative research and benchmarking analysis that played a key role in demonstrating the value of the program. Our advocacy succeeded in securing the investment.

I was hired as an independent consultant by a company in the electrical utility and logistics field with $1 billion annual revenue to improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of its environmental impact reporting. I worked hand-in-hand with the client Sustainability Director on a wide and cross-functional range of projects, producing both concrete program outputs and insights to inform future sustainability priorities and best practices. In order to retain a key external certification, I designed and conducted the first Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon accounting in my client’s 100-year history, requiring extensive quantitative modeling, project management, stakeholder mapping and interviews, and methodological research. I also worked closely with senior client leadership to develop a roadmap for the final Scope 3 phase of carbon accounting necessary to pursue other key certifications. I provided program management support for further environmental, social, and governance reporting. In close partnership with senior client leadership, I developed business cases for future sustainability efforts by evaluating regulatory, political, and economic pressures. I collaborated directly with the client CEO to conduct a feasibility study for expanding women-owned business certification, and built an external partnership path to enhance public contracting viability.

I joined the 2019 Bridgeport City Council campaign of Kyle Langan and Cynthia Torres just three weeks before their primary election. The candidates were passionate and hard-working, motivated by the desire to serve their community with integrity, and up against a powerful and deeply corrupt local party. I developed a new strategic plan for the final weeks of the campaign, multiplying spending efficiency through financial modeling, methodological research, and vendor negotiation. I implemented a digital transformation of our voter contact program, closing gaps in field management, improving voter targeting precision, and generating workforce accountability metrics that enabled me to quickly identify and eliminate contractor fraud. Bulk informational mail is often the greatest area of spending waste for state and municipal campaigns. So with our limited funds, we eschewed traditional bulk mail entirely in favor of an empirically supported social pressure strategy. First, we asked supporters to fill out commitment-to-vote postcards during canvassing interactions, and then mailed the cards back to those voters the week before the election. Second, within 24 hours of every voter interaction, the campaign representative who spoke with each voter sent that voter a handwritten thank-you card on campaign stationery. We were able to invest the money saved from a leaner mail program in a robust canvassing blitz, the most effective method of getting out the vote. Our strategy allowed Kyle and Cynthia to win a significant majority of in-person votes, although absentee ballots cast before Primary Day swung the final outcome narrowly in favor of our opponents.

In December 2018, I co-founded Voter Choice CT, a statewide advocacy organization to advance ranked-choice voting and other political reforms. I spearheaded strategic planning, operations, and policy initiatives, helping grow our supporter network to more than 2000 members. I directed meetings, conducted legal and policy research, and lobbied state legislative and executive branch officials. In 2019, I led Voter Choice CT’s public testimony on Connecticut House Bill 5820 (2019), An Act Establishing a Task Force to Study Ranked-Choice Voting, worked closely with key sponsors to advance amendments, and lobbied House members to earn their support. Our efforts culminated in the House passage of the bill.

While I was at Strategy&, a major beauty retailer contracted us to identify opportunities to improve the quality and efficiency of its supply chain. We informed our recommendations by interviewing senior client leadership to understand key processes, organizational structures, and pain points; conducting data analysis, and researching best practices. In our interviews, client leadership identified high turnover as a critical challenge. I conducted a quantitative workforce analysis, using Excel and Tableau, to determine factors driving high rates of turnover, and conducted industry benchmarking research to compare our client's outcomes to data from similar businesses. We observed that our client could mitigate some notable process pain points by simply optimizing its existing organizational structure. Using our interview data and client documentation, I built a comprehensive process map for the entire supply chain and identified opportunities for structural and process improvement, which we presented to client leadership. It became clear that integrating more robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and data sharing practices throughout supply chain and merchandising teams could significantly reduce operational thrash for corporate management, distribution center workers, transportation providers, and vendors. In line with our technology recommendations, the client committed to invest at least $160 million in a three-year digital transformation.

While working at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey, I served as the primary paralegal for prosecution of the Cape Town “Black Axe” mafia, a prominent organized crime cell that had defrauded Americans out of more than $6 million through romance scams (United States vs. Perry Osagiede et.al., and United States vs. Toritseju Gabriel Otubu). My role on the case team included drafting hundreds of subpoenas and other legal orders to major financial services providers and communications platforms, and working with those entities to secure their compliance. Our existing document automation tools, databases of suspect and victim identifiers, and file management tools were ill-equipped to cope with the volume of data involved in the case, so I built out new systems and legacy system enhancements in Excel and PowerQuery to slash typical subpoena drafting times by more than 75%, automate compliance tracking, and provide automated identifier-tracking dashboards to the attorneys on our team. Our work culminated in the indictment and arrest of seven ringleaders and an additional co-conspirator. It was a vast international investigation, requiring close coordination with the U.S. FBI and Secret Service, South African law enforcement, and Interpol.

At Strategy&, I conducted research and analysis on the operational implications of the European Digital Services Act (DSA) for social media companies, which informed both strategic and operational recommendations for clients and new business development. I also examined the risk posed to the US semiconductor industry by US-China trade tensions and synthesized my research into talking points for managing-partner-level business development.

In February 2018, at 23 years old, I made the decision to run for Connecticut State Senate. I had been hired the previous summer to manage Susan Bysiewicz's fledgling campaign to win back the 13th State Senate District, the state's most tightly contested. The legislative body was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans; the race for Governor was going to be a nail-biter; and a Republican had flipped the seat in the previous cycle due to his hard work and an anemic effort by the Democratic incumbent. In December 2017, Bysiewicz shifted focus to run for Governor, eventually winning the Lieutenant Governorship but leaving the 13th District without a Democratic candidate. I offered my resignation to Susan's campaign, hoping to continue my work on the pivotal State Senate race. Starting in December, I urged district Democratic leaders to put forth a new contender, offering my support. They waffled for months. In early February, with less than nine months until the general election, I told the party leaders that if they didn’t find somebody to run for the seat by the third week of the month, I would start knocking on doors to explore my own candidacy. They came up empty, so I got to work. In my first week, I knocked on more than five hundred doors across all four cities and towns in the district. That got the party’s attention. The bosses raced to identify a candidate, tapping a retired school administrator — who happened to be married to a former state representative — in early March, and asked me to drop out of the race. But at that point, I didn’t trust them or their candidate to do the work it would take to win in November. I told them that I would continue testing the waters over the next month, and that I would drop out and support their candidate if she had demonstrated a commitment to connecting with voters in the district at that point. By early April, I had visited countless households, but my opponent had not knocked on a single door. I resolved to force a primary election. I would need to qualify for ballot access by collecting more than 900 valid signatures from registered Democrats in the 13th District in a narrow 12-day period established by state law. I would need to fundraise, bringing in more than $15,000 in small-dollar contributions that included donations from at least 300 district voters, in order to secure a public financing grant. I would need to canvass thousands of households in the district to identify supporters and get out the vote for the August primary, whether to secure my own victory or simply to force the party to lay the groundwork for a Democratic win in November. It would take a capable team to pull this off. I recruited and hired ten college students from across the state and a handful of local supporters, took each of them along with me on neighborhood canvasses to get them familiar with my platform and values, and held team dinners at a favorite local taco joint to build camaraderie. With a trained and enthusiastic workforce, I set about the initial task of qualifying for ballot access. [End of Part I. Part II to follow soon!]