Program Manager

Problem Solver

I love to get my hands dirty helping teams work together to solve complex problems with software and technology to deliver value to customers.

How I drive programs

• I have deep expertise running large programs and building products at places such as Expedia Group, JP Morgan Chase and Oracle.
• This is backed by a solid engineering background in software engineering and database design
• I have experience leading product management teams.
• This puts me right in the sweet spot to define and solve problems and understand how to measure results.
• The outcomes I have helped deliver have generally had C-suite visibility and required close collaboration and reporting to executive leadership stakeholders.

What I can bring!

Highlighted Programs I Managed

My Leadership Identity - How I show up

Keeping it real and doing the right thing. Focus on helping the team deliver the best outcome fast and incrementally. Ready to learn and to help others see the vision so we can get there together.

Integrity and honesty

Trust is key and integrity is one of my fundamental character elements. I believe in transparency even when the news is terrible but I also endeavor to bring potential solutions or mitigations along with highlighted risks or issues. Surfacing problems fast enables the widest range of decisions to be made.

Judgement and pragmatism

Decisions should be made using the best real data available and based on input from key team members from technical, product and leadership stakeholders. I work to help define practical and incremental solutions to problems as they surface. I am a Creative Observing Coordinator.

Caring about people and the product

Love of beauty and kindness are key elements of my nature. In my leadership style this translates into a deep commitment to the quality and function of what we deliver and authentic caring about the wellbeing and growth of the team members I work with.

Drive for results

I strive to identify the underlying problem(s) the team and organization are trying to solve and what real value we can create with solutions. I am very aware of politics but look to sidestep this through data based decision making and a laser focus on business results.

Bringing an Agile mindset!

I believe approaching problem solving, especially with software solutions, is most successfully achieved by using approaches and a mindset which embody Agile principles. Not just using a framework such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean or eXtreme Programming but constantly working to enable the current team and stakeholders to align with the underlying principles they were built on.

Some core elements of applying an Agile mindset:

• Working practices adhering to the core tenets of the Agile manifesto have in my experience yielded the most value and the happiest teams and stakeholders.
  
• Recognition that the complexity of problems and solutions can only be addressed by people (not process) and fostering ways that facilitate broadest visibility and engagement.
  
• Developing skills in thin slicing (stories and program milestones), focus on tackling high risk or uncertain solution elements early and fast feedback loops is the best way to limit risk and deliver value.
  
• The best way to deliver to a deadline is to really define the goals and prioritize the work needed and be ruthless as to what the team works on.
  
• Change is constant and inevitable. Build teams and program structure that can surface, recognize and adapt to it.
  
• Good and regular retrospectives are a key part in developing and improving how teams work and thrive.
  
• Listening is key - both to stakeholders needs and team concerns.
  

Overview

Expedia wanted to be the first OTA (Online Travel Agent) to enable easy shopping with loyalty points at checkout in a similar way to the Amazon shopping experience which customers were becoming increasingly familiar with. By allowing customers to seamlessly burn from internal and third party stored value programs to “lower” the price of their trip, the hypothesis was to provide a unique reason for customers to use Expedia to book their trip, and to return to Expedia for future bookings.

The first 9 months of the program involved delivering this new capability for hotel bookings using Expedia’s loyalty point system. Subsequently the capability was extended to also operate with our partner Citibank’s ThankYou point system.

My Role

Adding such a significant new capability to the mission critical checkout flow was a daunting task requiring significant and novel work from 16 different teams at Expedia impacting the end to end checkout and payment flow. I was the Expedia program manager driving this delivery and the main partner contact collaborating with the Citibank team.

Outcomes

• $10's MM Revenue Uplift (year 1)
• Reduction of loyalty point liability
• On time delivery per program plan
• Launch and roll out with no significant customer issues
  

Customers

• Expedia travelers with loyalty point accounts
• Citibank ThankYou point members
  

Stakeholders

• Expedia senior leadership including C Suite
• Citibank partner team
• Expedia Product team
• Expedia Engineering leadership (core teams)
• Expedia Accounting, Tax , Legal teams
  

Tools / Technology

• 16 Expedia Teams using many technologies (MostlyJava services, Legacy monolith plus some service architecture)
• External partner API (SSL / XML)
• Reconciliation System SFTP / AWS Elastic Search
  

Overview

By the close of 2017 Brand Expedia had developed significant momentum in migrating all customer and partner facing applications out of physical data centers and onto AWS Cloud services. Many applications were not yet optimized to run in the cloud and many engineering teams lacked experience operating production workloads with new DevOps responsibilities. Feb 2018 saw a steep ramp in cloud cost billing which was trending to overshoot the (large) budget by 80-100% for the year. Senior management pulled together a team to drive a rapid cost reduction as an urgent risk mitigation program.

Over 300 engineering teams were in scope for the cost reduction program which built and operated reporting to make daily spend visible to teams and leadership and set and track against team level spend targets. The program also provided guidance and a framework for engagement for engineering teams to improve cost optimization.

My Role

I was the program manager resposible for coordinating and leading this program. I had support from a ‘war room’ team of engineering leads and managers for the first 3 weeks (daily reporting to CTO/CFO). Subsequently support from 2 more junior program managers to drive the ongoing work with weekly reporting to senior management.

Highlights

• Visibility - Enabled teams to build dashboards for their own services showing detail cost breakdown by component daily.
• Targets - Targets were quickly established by groups of engineering teams and built into the dashboards and management reporting.
• Engineering engagement - Guidance content, shared process from more mature teams and facilitated cross-pollination of techniques.
• Reporting - Senior leadership were very engaged and had access to on demand summary reporting with daily / weekly review sessions.
• Target Adjustment - Process to enable request and approval for target adjustments supporting ongoing growth and budget controls.
  

Outcomes

• 38% reduction in AWS Costs over 4 months
• $10’s MM per year across > 300 engineering teams
• Ongoing targets and process for cost management established.
  

Customers

• Engineering teams operating cloud based services
• Expedia C suite - especially CFO/CTO
  

Stakeholders

• Engineering team managers
• Program managers (any cloud based development)
• Product managers (any products dependent on cloud based services
• Platform teams responsible for AWS tooling, asset management and cost reporting.
  

Tools / Technology

• Cloud Portfolio Analyzer ( AWS Costs Analysis tool built on Kibana, AWS ElasticSearch, AWS Redshift)
• PEAR (AWS Tag Compliance Tool built on AWS CloudTrail, Lambda, SNS & DynamoDB)
  

Mobile

Overview

Apple released the iPad 1 in April 2010. Chase had an iPhone native application with very limited functionality at this time and a simple mobile web experience. 2 small teams of 8-9 developers each were focused on building out banking applications on iPad, iPhone and Android to support the elite JP Morgan private wealth customers and over 10 million Chase mobile banking users.

These apps included the first large bank apps to support check deposit and won several industry awards making Chase a leader in banking tech. Both brand new technology and banking tech culture added to the challenges of delivery.

My Role

I was the Technical Program Manager responsible for the iPad development programs as well as having an oversight role for the iPhone and Android teams. I had the great fortune to work with small teams of excellent engineers with solid Agile bones as well as the assistance of embedded coaches from Thoughtworks (Agile specialists). This period was one of the most fulfilling of my career as we worked together to deliver outstanding products in the face of some daunting challenges and cemented my belief in applying Agile principles as a way to reduce risk and deliver to deadline.

Highlights

• Devices and SDKs for iPad were brand new and emergent as delivery was underway requiring fast adaption and feature prioritization.
• JP Morgan and Chase business teams were unfamiliar with modern software development practices and specifically the mobile space.
• iPad front facing camera announced Mar 2, 2011. We extended our release plan by 1 month but included the killer check deposit feature.
• These challenges were met by the team through the introduction and adherence to Agile practices including; story development, prioritization, feedback via demos and story validation with stakeholders, retrospectives & learning and strict change management.
  

Outcomes

• July 2010 - Optimized Mobile Banking experience for mobile web browsers
• September 2010 - Improved iPhone App with check deposit
• October 2010 - JP Morgan iPad application for banking, stock and position tracking
• January & April 2011 - Android Chase application supporting banking and check deposit.
• May 2011 - Chase iPad application including all iPhone capabilities and check deposit.
• Very high ratings from users and industry awards
  

Customers

• Chase banking customers (> 10 MM)
• JP Morgan Private Wealth Clients (~ 75K)
  

Stakeholders

• Senior Management for 7 Chase Lines of Business
• JP Morgan Private Bankers
• JP Morgan Senior management
• Chase Banking Services Technology Team
• Product, Marketing and Legal teams
  

Tools / Technology

• iOS (iPhone/iPad)
• iPad app adopted front facing camera within 2 months of availability on iPad devices
• Multi-tasking was also adopted within 2 months of availability for iPad
• Android OS for phones
  

Operations & Resilience

Overview

A key objective for Expedia for moving all customer facing applications to the Cloud was to improve service reliability. Failover capabilities (Multi-AZ and Multi-Region) were the main strategy to address non-change induced production failures with an objective to recover service fast and support high availability leading to improved customer experience, trust and loyalty.

The Cloud resilience program was a multiyear effort based on developing a detailed strategy and guidelines for application design and configuration, scoring of compliance to recommended configurations, building manual runbooks and drills for critical systems. It also incuded building platforms to embody standards, provide visibility of system state and automate fast and safe failover of customer traffic.

My Role

Initially I was the Program Manager driving this effort and a key participant in establishing the strategy and guidelines (with engineering leaders). After a consolidation of platform tooling I transitioned to a Product leadership role with a team building the tooling and providing support to the Program Manager who picked up responsibility for driving adoption.

Highlights

• Although the vision is not yet fully realized this approach had huge positive impacts on several big production outages (mostly due to cloud partner issues) returning service for customers hours earlier than otherwise would have been possible.
• Practise drills for key systems highlighted procedural and design changes needed to support faster recovery.
• Scoring application compliance with resilience guidelines highlighted areas of focus for investment and improved engineer engagement.
• Capabilities for automated failover of some components was available within the standard build platform. More general tooling is planned. This is a longer term capability requiring engagement from teams and learning to succeed.
  

Outcomes

• $17MM projected savings per year (reduced revenue loss)
• Current state has saved multiple millions of dollars during major outages through faster recovery
• Fast automated failover available for some components
• Configuration scoring allows focus for investment
  

Customers

• Expedia Engineering Teams
• Expedia Compliance Team
• Expedia Travelers (Indirectly)
• Site Reliability Operations team
  

Stakeholders

• Expedia senior executive management
• Platform teams responsible for AWS tooling, asset management and cost reporting.
  

Tools / Technology

• Akamai
• Cloud Gate Proxy (Custom Service built on AWS EC2)
• Platform Tooling (Kubernetes, Istio, AWS Elastic Search, AWS Dynamo DB, AWS CloudTrail)