About Ada Sanchez-Uribe
I work with business owners and professionals to decide what needs to change, and make it happen.
For more than twenty years I’ve led change where new technology meets the people who have to make it work: in a Wall Street firm, in City government, in a national real estate company and in my own businesses.
MBA · PMP · CSM · PNCC · Coach since 2008
My story
I’ve spent my career at the point where things change.
I started at Citigroup in 2000, and my first technology role was on a Citibank web development team building a portal for high-net-worth clients. That’s where I found my work: testing, business analysis and project management. As a business analyst at Merrill Lynch, working with the teams that built trading applications, I learned that understanding the technology was only half the job, so I earned my MBA to understand the business just as deeply.
At New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, I led the move of Section 8 recertification, one of the program’s most critical processes, from paper to an automated workflow. Around the same time, I designed and facilitated NYC Small Business Services’ Child Care Business Pathways program, in English and Spanish, teaching home-based child care providers to run profitable businesses, and was called back to brief the Commissioner on its results.
Most recently, at Anywhere Real Estate, I led Agile transformations for about twenty technology teams brought in through mergers and acquisitions, then guided them through a company-wide AI mandate: I built AI workflows and agents that served as project management companions for our Scrum Masters, including an AI tool that identified and measured each project’s risks sprint by sprint to support their decisions, and I coached the teams and my fellow Scrum Masters through the change. Across my career I’ve worked with more than 100 teams and business units: at Citigroup, Salomon Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, E*TRADE and UBS; in New York City government at FISA, the Department of Education, HPD and the Department of Correction; and at AutoNation, Realogy and Anywhere Real Estate.
I also co-own and operate Morningside Café, so I understand the life of an owner-operator.
My approach
Every change has two sides. I work on both.
The business side
I diagnose where value is being lost, design the change, test it on a small scale, and help you decide with evidence: the same discipline the largest companies use, sized for a small business. My MBA and twenty years of leading projects as a PMP and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) mean the plan has owners, dates and a clear way to tell whether it’s working.
The people side
A plan only pays off if people change how they work. I’ve coached since 2008, and I’m a Certified Performance Neuroscience Coach (PNCC) through the Flow Research Collective, trained in how people respond to pressure, change and new habits. I also trained with Tony Robbins in Date with Destiny and Leadership Academy. So the changes we plan are ones you and your team stick with.
Why Erestar
You are a star.
In 2013, while building this company, I went to a planetarium star show and saw something I’ve never forgotten: a human life follows a cycle much like a star’s, and how it ends depends on how we live it.
I named the company Erestar, from the Spanish eres, “you are,” and star. It’s still what I believe about the people and businesses I work with: no one is finished. The future isn’t simply something that happens to you. You can take part in creating it.
Results
A track record of change that holds
years leading business and technology change
technology teams guided through mergers, acquisitions and a company-wide AI mandate
first-time pass rate for my PMP exam prep students
NYC programs that taught child care providers and cooks to run profitable businesses