Bio

From 2017 to 2025, Zach Nicoson served as Vice President in product strategy, customer & market intelligence, and data analysis roles at Project Lead The Way. He revamped the product portfolio during the COVID-19 pandemic to sustain financial viability and ensure business continuity. By creating segmentation tools to categorize markets and customer groups, he enabled the sales and marketing organizations to deploy highly targeted campaigns. He also developed and maintained “what happened”, “why did it happen”, “what will happen”, and “what should we do” analytics to guide decision-making across every function.

Between 2014 and 2017, Zach was Senior Director in corporate strategy, corporate planning and finance roles at Anthem (now Elevance Health). There, he established a Transformation Office charged with evaluating and realigning $13 billion in operating expenses and optimized $1 billion in annual spending by implementing a capital allocation process to assess more than 200 initiatives requesting $4 billion. He also advised senior leadership on market trends, competitive dynamics, and external factors for strategic decisions.

Zach began his career at Suros Surgical Systems (acquired by Hologic), progressing through roles of increasing scope in engineering, business development, product management and corporate strategy from 2002 to 2014. He helped grow Suros from 10 to 200 employees and $2 million to $32 million in annual revenue, culminating in a $240 million acquisition, before scaling Hologic from 1,000 to 6,000 employees and $100 million to $2 billion in revenue. He is a named inventor on 67 U.S. issued and pending patents currently protecting a product portfolio that has seen an 80-fold increase in annual revenue. During his tenure, he also led initiatives that delivered a 16-point market share gain, overtaking a 15-year incumbent to claim the #1 position.

Alongside his professional achievements, Zach built a strong academic foundation with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and further honed his strategic and analytical expertise through executive programs in Using Data to Improve Pricing Performance and Advanced Business Analytics (MIT), Finance Essentials for Management (Bentley University) and Corporate Strategy (University of Chicago).