Meet Lauren “Elle” Neatherlin

Her Goal: Understand and Deliver Value to Clients

Win-win could be in Elle Neatherlin’s job description. As Stratosphere’s Director of Delivery, she is ultimately responsible for both her team members’ well-being and productivity, and the satisfaction their products and services give to Stratosphere’s clients.

“A lot of my role is empathizing with the client and our team to deliver the best solution,” she says. “Being a good steward of my clients’ resources, I want to put myself in their shoes, appreciate the investment they are making, and help them make the most of it. That requires me to understand their process and their people, and to provide honest, knowledgeable guidance.”

In more than a year at Stratosphere, Elle has consistently rallied her team to define and overcome the obstacles in their clients’ path. But for one state agency, the greatest challenge proved to be an unexpected budget shift.

“At the project kickoff the project sponsor informed me that, due to changing legislation, we’d have about half the resources we’d planned for,” Elle recalls. “We had to completely restructure how we were going to handle our delivery.”

The client and team decided to build out a minimum viable product or MVP, which is tech talk for a solution that addresses the agency’s most pressing needs without the extra bells and whistles. The strategy fit the project’s smaller budget and leaves open the door to expand and refine the product in Year Two, when more funding will be available. Delivery became an incremental, highly collaborative effort that enabled the client to provide feedback and suggest adjustments on features during development.

“The coolest part of this challenge is that the final product is going to be better because of this funding hiccup,” Elle says. “Now the client has more experience with our solution and the team has real user feedback to influence how we prioritize our remaining work.”

Elle applauds Stratosphere’s empowering culture for giving its teams the flexibility to quickly adapt and respond effectively to challenges.

“I spent 10 years working at a tech giant learning the policies, rules and potential contracting issues a project may encounter,” she says. “I couple that knowledge with the freedom Stratosphere has given me to do the best for our clients and team members. It’s not policy driven; it is people driven and solution driven.”

Stratosphere employs exceptional people, and that gives Elle the confidence that her team will come through for its clients. She devotes time each week to strengthening relationships with her team members and is learning more about the organization’s strengths every day. “I am enjoying working with each of Stratosphere’s customer success managers to learn about the unique successes, struggles, and personalities within each team,” she says. “Seeing the project through their eyes is helping me broaden my definition of what it means to lead and collaborate with others.”

That culture of collaboration is a key to how Stratosphere delivers solutions. “I won’t have all the answers, but I know we’ll be successful delivering solutions because I’m not doing this on my own,” Elle says. “We are going to solve these problems together. That’s what I like about working with the weird and brilliant folks at Stratosphere. Whatever the challenge is, we’ve got this.”

Creative thinking is second nature to Elle, who spends the hours outside her highly analytical job in decidedly non-analytical pursuits with her three daughters, husband and dog. “We crave activities that get us moving, like beach volleyball and pickleball, or let us be creative, like baking, painting, singing or designing,” she says. “I love the process of learning new things.”

The family shares her love of learning and is currently studying French. Elle recently broadened her baking skills by learning to make macarons. (Did we mention she owned and operated a custom cake-making business? Check out some of her creations here.)

At Stratosphere, Elle is continually learning from, and about, her team members and clients. The empathy she develops in the process informs her decisions and helps her provide guidance to improve experiences and outcomes for everyone on a project.

“To make that positive for everyone, I work very transparently and set clear expectations of what each of us can expect from the other,” she says. “I want both my client and my team to end a project proud of the work we’ve done and the decision they made to be a part of it.”