Ben Panning Email Address

Senior Vice President of Software Engineering

Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) is a national non-profit organization dedicated to helping all children learn. NWEA provides formative assessment, research-based educational growth measures, and professional training to improve teaching and learning. Partnering with school districts, states and other education organizations, NWEA delivers computer-adapted assessment services to more than 2,400 education agencies and two million students nationwide. In addition, its Growth Research Database (GRD), the most extensive collection of student growth data in the country, provides a rich opportunity for the study of academic achievement.

My mission: Lead software development teams into achieving more than they thought in order to solve other people’s problems. Ask anyone else about how to achieve this, and they will reply that it takes leadership, execution, and technical ability to make it all happen. True, but more than that, you have to put your customer and staff first. The rest will take care of itself, but not before putting in a lot of hard work. Personally, I believe that hard work does not constitute two four-letter words. Instead, hard work is a challenging marathon with lots of interesting twists and turns. And that’s exactly what I thrive on. I love seeing my teams grow and solve large problems, and the best part is helping them get there by providing coaching and the right business tools to make it happen. As a data-driven business growth leader who creates product roadmaps that deliver corporate vision through strong execution, I find it my role to translate plans into executable budgets while maintaining flexibility in responding to unanticipated or planned course corrections. This means acting as fiscal guardian meeting profitability and revenue goals, while maintaining a strategic focus (with special emphasis on Lean start-ups) that bolsters long- and short-term planning. I can scale projects to build company capacity and strengthen market positioning. I’ve gained a reputation as a builder of top-caliber staff through effective recruiting, retention and motivation by providing opportunities to solve compelling business problems, use of leading technologies, collaborative work environments, and proper incentives for achieving goals. Additionally, one of my leadership strengths is being able to clearly and accurately articulate company needs in RFPs when selecting vendors, and I monitor suppliers for regulatory compliance and adherence to SLAs.