Bothell, Washington, United States
• 21 years in software/IT industry; 16 years as Program Manager/Technical Product Manager, 5 years as Software Developer. • 12+ years of experience in driving projects involving geographically distributed teams. • 12+ years’ experience in creating and operating highly scalable and low latency distributed online services at Microsoft and Expedia. • Led development of 10+ products through full SDLC in Microsoft and Expedia, including v1 releases. • Expert in agile software development, delivering enterprise applications through weekly/monthly release cycles. • Skilled collaborator – Scoped, managed and delivered large programs end to end involving external partners (Yahoo, British Telecom, Thomas Cook etc.), working with multiple product teams and disciplines/orgs like product management, user experience, analytics, business, legal, finance, support, etc. • Highly customer focused. Consistently demonstrated active customer and partner empathy by driving interactions for requirement gathering, onboarding, for gaining feedback, providing tier 3 customer support. • Excellent communication and presentation skills. Presented at various technical Public and Org level seminars like Microsoft TechReady, Expedia Product Review and Showcase; also, hosted customer/partner training sessions. • Rich Program Management experience includes requirements capturing & analysis, impact analysis, working through dependencies, writing functional specifications and stories, creating and maintaining prioritized backlog, project schedule management, product support, resolving conflicts, holding bug triage meetings, conducting retrospective, defining and publishing scorecards and KPI. • Varying levels of technical expertise wide spectrum of technologies: AWS cloud services, Java, C#, .NET, web services, SOAP, JSON, REST, WCF, IIS, SQL server, NoSQL (MongoDB), HTML, JavaScript, BizTalk, MSMQ, ESP8266 (NodeMCU), Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. Basic understanding of OBD2 and CAN bus protocols. • Home automation enthusiast and builder - Created Windows Phone app for home security, created Alexa skill for Vera home automation controller, implemented end to end garage door opener solution (hardware, firmware and integration with home automation hub).
Expedia Travel Agent Affiliate Program (TAAP) extends the Expedia’s product inventory to travel agents all around the globe via a customized portal. As a TPM in TAAP team, I: • Drove the implementation and rollout of important features like deferred payments, dynamic commission, and package rates which helped in doubling the revenue (to almost 2 billion) in last 2 years. • Streamlined the customer support process (daily triage, bug prioritization and dev allocation) improving time to resolve trouble tickets. • Improved the product robustness by initiating projects like – adding TAAP specific test cases in partner components, moving TAAP specific features in TAAP domain, architectural improvements within TAAP system. • Established relationships with partner product teams to get priority in bug fixes, feature asks, etc. • Drove strategically important projects for TAAP - separate MU tracking, GDPR, PSD2, AWS migration, etc. • Drove all scrum ceremonies and other project management activities like sprint planning, grooming, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective, weekly reporting, quarterly product planning, handling production issues (investigations, hotfixes, preparing COE, implementing corrective measures), etc.
The job of Scratchpad product is to increase the customer repeat via low cost channels. It helps customers in preplanning phase by allowing them to quickly resume their search across multiple sessions, devices and browsers, saving and sharing their searches, provide price and availability change notifications for their saved products/searches etc. As a TPM for Scratchpad product, I: • Drove a multi-team (7 product teams) project to build price alerts framework that increased email signup rate by 500% (I was also an architect/design lead for this multi-team project). • Managed the development of key features like: Favoriting, sharing, notes, price change notification, alternate date flight prices, etc. which boosted repeat rate up to 10% each and conversion up to 3.5% each. • Created a very low latency web service API (Java based web service running in AWS) to improve performance (latency reduced >10 times) of Scratchpad page and partner components. • Enabled Scratchpad in all 33 international Expedia points of sale and all Expedia Brands (like Orbitz, Travelocity, Cheaptickets, Wotif etc.) • Responsible for driving the cloud migration project to move Scratchpad page to AWS, which enabled daily releases and lowered operating cost. • Streamlined the planning and execution processes increasing the story points/dev/sprint to 13 (30% increase) and AB test velocity to 3 tests/month (from 5 tests/year). • Open-sourced various Scratchpad components, to allow partners to directly contribute to the product. • Worked with partner product teams to onboard Cars, Flights, Cruises, and Activities on Scratchpad.
Team: Bing Ads (search ads serving platform) Project: 1) Bing Ads International Rollout 2) Data transport services (Data Service, File publishing service) Responsibilities (Bing Ads International Rollout): • Compiling the requirements for each market launch. • Resolving dependencies, creating work items my team and teams on which we dependent, getting features green lit on time for each team. • Provide functional details for each market launch. • Creating detailed development, test, pre-launch and launch schedule for each market, considering the launch commitments, internal timelines, and partner (external company) dependencies. • Work with partner team (external company) to create schedule for milestones for interdependent work items/phases • Conduct scrum to track the engineering effort progress • Conduct sync up meetings with partner company. • Weekly Status reporting. • Drive Datacenter readiness for each market launch. • Drive various type of testing with bing ads v-team and partner company. • Conduct various ramps and pre-launch phases for partner readiness (like plumbing test, pre-shadow test, shadow test, launch, etc) • Gather and conduct system level KPI comparison with partner company. • Ramp partner company's ads traffic on to bing ads platform • Work with Bing team to migrate Bing’s ads traffic after the market launch. • Drive DRI issues in pre-launch phases. Responsibilities (Data transport services): • Create the roadmap for the component • Customer interaction to understand painpoints • Creating detailed functional specifications • Project Planning (Create features, costing, greenlighting, scheduling) • Project Execution (run scrum, status tracking, bug triage, evaluating risks/assumptions/open issues and taking corrective actions as needed, monthly retrospective, publish scorecard/KPI). • Cross core interaction with various bing ads cores and other products teams
Team: Bing Ads (search ads serving platform) Project: Data transport services (Data Service, File publishing service) Responsibilities: described above. Team: Solution Engineering Projects: SOA Advanced Application Blocks, Managed Services Engine (MSE), CSF Responsibilities: • Interact with customer (British Telecom) and DCA solution team to define requirements and features • Cost/Time Estimations • Coordinate with Development, Test and Partner teams to develop Project plan • Creating detailed functional specifications • Triage issues during the project implementation and monitoring phase • Ensure compliance to MS mandated polices like CPx • Drive all related project deliverables (like customer ready docs and reports) • Tracking work progress, risks, assumptions and open issues throughout the project and take corrective actions as needed