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In my previous role, I led a team to launch a new kit. The team included individuals from product support, segment marketing, sales, and customer support, and we were tasked with launch the product to market within a specific time frame to address a rising demand.

We faced the challenge of managing tight deadlines and aligning cross-functional teams with diverse priorities. To address this, I ensured that everyone understood the key objectives and customer needs, fostering collaboration and creating a detailed project roadmap. I set clear milestones and facilitated regular check-ins to ensure we were on track.

One of the biggest hurdles was getting buy-in from the sales team on the new product's value proposition. I worked directly with sales leaders to develop tailored sales tools and training materials, ensuring the team could effectively communicate the product’s benefits to customers.

By maintaining a clear focus on customer needs and empowering the team to collaborate effectively, we launched the product on time, surpassing adoption targets by 15% in the first quarter. This experience reinforced the importance of strategic planning, transparent communication, and making customer satisfaction a central part of the team’s mission.

In my early days as Program Manager, I managed a project for one of our main customers. This project had a very tight schedule and I promised to deliver the first EVT samples in 3 months.

It was my responsibility to ensure everything would be completed on time, and achieve the quality standards defined by the program and inside the budget approved by leadership.

Unfortunately… when I started to deep dive into the project and analyze all the technical details, I realized that it was not possible to get the prototypes ready on time. I missed the deadline by 2 weeks. I felt bad at that time because I failed, so I immediately started to work on a new feasible schedule trying to mitigate the problem. In addition, I arranged a daily opening and closing meeting with the core team to monitor all activities. The root cause of the problem was a delay in some component's delivery and I also ignored one of the Reliability tests defined by Engineering.

So I highlighted the problem to my manager and I shared with him my new plan. I explained the situation to him and I shared the new timeline that I could meet. Then we worked together to commit to the new delivery date. So I learned a lot from that situation, now I’m always adding some buffer to my project schedules and I work more closely with core team members. But the most important learning was, how important is to be honest and raise your hand on time if something goes wrong.

So I'd say the time I took the risk was, I actually went against the recommendation of my manager. Not directly, but essentially I was put on a project at Niagara and I was looking at a lot of the contract amendments and I analyzed our contract negotiation with Uber. And so as I was looking at the whole data, trying to see the discrepancies and really seeing, okay, what lanes should we negotiate, seeing what are the terms of negotiation that we should use, and then finally, I wanted to also forecast on terms of a long-term growth. So not just necessarily for just this term, but see how that would last for the future quarters as well. So kind of taking those into consideration while I put them all out into a matrix and showed the team, the director, and a lot of my team was thinking that we should go with the option that saves us the most amount of money. I'll put the $700,000 to $800,000 for the quarter, implementing this new amendment that I actually disagreed. And I suggested we just take somewhere closer to about the $600,000 range because for two reasons, one, I noticed that the lanes that we included in the $600,000 would lead to better client relations with Uber as a long-term and one of our biggest carriers. And two, I also noticed that in the long run, we actually would save a little more just because in the future quarters with seasonality to keep into account, those lanes were not always going to save us the most amount of money. So maybe while the $700,000 to $800,000 option would save us that much in the first quarter, when it comes down to the winter, it would save us only about $300,000 versus the $600,000 option is a little more consistent throughout the seasons. And so we actually noticed that in terms of a long-term growth for the year, we would save a lot more. So that was a time where I kind of took a risk to go against and maybe recommend something slightly different than my manager. But I think the director, when he heard me say these things, he took those into consideration and saw my analysis and saw that I was able to back up kind of my decisions and this type of risk to making sure I'm minimizing it as much as possible. So I think that was something that he really appreciated and that the VP of supply chain ended up deciding to work towards.

At my current job one of our biggest customer raised the  issue they were facing in our notification service. The issue was they were not receiving any notifications from our system on their new infrastructure. Their production infra was working fine.

I reviewed their configuration and everything was looking fine at the same time we hadn't done any changes to on our end which could cause this issue. Since their contract was up for renewal the issue, we needed quick resolution. I setup a live debugging session with customer to understand the issue in detail and their new infrastructure. After the first call it was clear that the issue was happening during https handshake or at network layer. To keep the momentum going I setup recurring call with with them and assured them that we are treating this as a high priority. On the next call I involved our security expert and SRE team for further debugging. However the issue not futher progress was made, at this point I insisted SRE team that we contact Azure support to understand if there is any issue at the tcp layer. Azure team looked at the turned on debug logs and found that our network was default MTU (maximum transmission unit) was higher than customers network MTU and customer network was dropping packets.

Finally I worked with SRE team to lower our MTU to match the customer configuration and ran tests. After the config change issue was resolved, our customer confirmed that they could see the notifications. This was really difficult issue I had ran across but I worked with various teams to get to the bottom of it and delivered results to customers satisfaction.

Technical debt is inevitable part of devleopment process, At Auctane, I had a buffer of 10-15% of sprint cycle to address any technicl debt. I had maintained two buckets - tech debt and the other feature buckets - All low hanging tech debt was a valuable tool for new comers to team, during shipping season we would actively stop working on new features- these were dedeciated to tech debt for the team. For e.g. there were many stored proc with dead code - this caused lot of issues to debug - etc we identified these are candidates to refactor and improve - we took this in small increments and chip away at the tech debt.  By actively addressing the tech debt while working on new features - I could manage the tech debt.