Mary Ellen Cavanagh

About Mary Ellen Cavanagh

STRATEGIC GTM LEADER | CHANNEL AND ALLIANCE ECOSYSTEMS | AI ENABLEMENT I\'ve spent my career in the partner ecosystem, and here\'s what I\'ve figured out: the difference between a partner program that looks good on paper and one that actually drives revenue usually comes down to infrastructure. Not strategy decks. Infrastructure. I build channel programs from scratch. At Backblaze, I built the entire channel marketing function as a team of one. At Veritas/Symantec, I was the sole SE supporting all seven major U.S. distributors across the full Backup, Archive, & Recovery and Security product lines. The constraint was always the same. The approach was always the same too: build systems that scale past you, train partners to be the smartest person in the room, and make sure everything you create is repeatable when you\'re not there. The work spans the full partner ecosystem: distributors, resellers, MSPs, and strategic alliances. I\'ve owned portal strategy, MDF programs, co-marketing campaigns, and the full toolkit partners need to actually sell. At Commvault, I was the named owner of the Microsoft Alliance messaging and GTM plan for what the company described as their most critical partnership. That work touched field-level co-sell enablement all the way up to executive QBRs with C-suite on both sides. And then AI showed up. Not as a talking point. As another system problem to solve. At Backblaze and Catalyst I was already building governance frameworks, training teams, and deploying AI tools into real workflows. Since then I\'ve been pushing further. Designing AI workflows. Testing models against each other. Building prompt systems and guardrails so the output is actually reliable. The same operating principle still applies: figure out what the tool is good at, build the system around it, and teach other people how to use it. Whether it\'s a SaaS startup standing up their first channel or an established program that\'s hit a ceiling, the goal is the same: turn complex ecosystems into systems that produce results you can actually plan around. Lately that has included independent work designing applied AI workflows and testing how tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini actually perform in real professional use cases.

Experience

1. Independent Applied Ai Systems Strategy & Development

   The Kaizen Alliance

   Oct 2025 — Present · AZ, US

   Independent applied research focused on turning generative AI tools into practical workflows for marketing, research, and professional productivity.> Designed and iteratively refined an AI career strategy agent that researches companies, evaluates role fit, selects the strongest resume archetype, and generates ATS-ready resumes and cover letters grounded in verified experience.> Conducted structured testing across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to compare output quality, identify gaps, and reduce hallucination risk through cross-validation.> Built reusable prompt libraries and workflow frameworks to support repeatable outputs for research, analysis, and thought leadership.> Prototyped applied AI use cases including a virtual AI office manager concept for a small business and AI-assisted creative publishing projects.> Applied AI tools to analyze complex document sets and generate structured question frameworks supporting decision-making in high-stakes personal scenarios involving medical diagnostics and care planning.> Designed structured self-directed learning systems to deepen capability in generative AI, automation workflows, and advanced iPhone computational photography.

Education

• St. John's University

  Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science

  1987 — 1991