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If the feature requested aligns with our long term goal and is not taking resources away from critical projects then I would build the capability, else I would offer professional services that may develop for the specific customer.

As Program Manager my biggest achievement was leading the development of a complex electromechanical module for HP. The project consisted of developing and producing a huge electromechanical module for a high-speed large format printer.

I was in charge of overseeing the entire Product Development Process, from requirements gathering and solution design to development, testing, deployment, and mass production release.

The Key aspects of this project included

1.Strategic planning: I developed a plan including the project Objectives, scope, and deliverables, as well as timelines, milestones, and resource requirements.

2.Stakeholders management: I engaged with key stakeholders such as business leaders, external vendors, and customers to keep them all on the same page, ensure alignment, and address concerns.

3.Risk Management: Identifying potential risks and challenges associated with product performance, compatibility with external modules, material availability, etc.

4.Collaboration and Communication: I facilitated collaboration and communication among cross-functional teams involved in the project, including engineering, operations staff, and materials, to ensure alignment.

5.Quality Assurance: Implementing robust testing processes and quality assurance measures to ensure reliability and performance.

6.Mass production release: Worked with all operational teams to ensure material and factory readiness to launch the program to mass production

Finally, the project was released on time and satisfied all stakeholders, internal and customer. This reinforced the importance of clear and transparent communication between stakeholders to drive successful technical outcomes and foster a collaborative team environment.

Pushed for single tenancy of application because of monolith and legacy architecture but had to move to multi tenancy later on because of scalability issues.

I'd like to share a personal anecdote about a time when I failed to reach a metric as a Manager in a Data Engineering project.

Metric: Reduce data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes within 3 months to improve real-time analytics capabilities.

Context: Our team was responsible for building a data pipeline that ingested large volumes of data from various sources into a cloud-based data warehouse. The data was then used to power real-time analytics and reporting for our business stakeholders.

Goal: Our goal was to reduce the data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes to ensure that our analytics capabilities were as close to real-time as possible. This would enable our stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly and respond to changing market conditions.

Plan: Our plan was to optimize the data ingestion process by:

Improving the efficiency of our data processing algorithms

Increasing the scalability of our cloud infrastructure

Implementing a more efficient data storage solution

What went wrong: Despite our best efforts, we were unable to meet the metric. We encountered several issues that slowed us down, including:

Underestimating the complexity of the data processing algorithms, which required more development time than anticipated

Difficulty in scaling our cloud infrastructure due to vendor limitations and cost constraints

Unexpected issues with our data storage solution, which required additional debugging and testing

Impact: Missing this metric had a significant impact on our project. Our stakeholders were not able to get the real-time analytics they needed, which delayed their decision-making and affected our business outcomes.

Lessons learned: This experience taught me several valuable lessons, including:

The importance of robust planning and contingency planning to account for unexpected setbacks

The need for more accurate estimation of development time and resources required for complex tasks

The value of prioritizing and focusing on the most critical components of the project to ensure success

Actions taken: To address these issues, we:

Revised our estimates and created a more realistic project plan

Broke down the task into smaller, more manageable components to improve development efficiency

Implemented additional monitoring and testing to ensure that our data ingestion process was stable and performant

By learning from our mistakes and taking corrective actions, we were able to eventually meet the metric and improve our data ingestion latency to under 10 minutes.

In 2022 one of the representatives I worked with was planning a one month long Power and Video evaluation. Before the evaluation was going to begin I was informed that he would not be able to cover because he was going out on medical leave to have heart surgery.

At first I was very concerned because there a lot of moving parts to an evaluation of this nature and magnitude. You have to know the surgeons preferences and technique, competitors instruments, various surgical procedures, and what instruments are compatible with other competitive instruments. I was going to be taking the lead on this with very short notice and not much time to plan before he was departing for medical leave. We sat down and meet everyday for a week and went over all the inventory ordered, surgeons, and procedures. I had every surgery day planned for.

When the eval started I got there an hour before the cases started to setup the room and make sure all the capital and disposable equipment was ready. I introduced myself to the surgeons before each case and stood in all the cases where our equipment was being used. After each case I would address any questions, comments, or concerns the surgeon had and ask for their support to move forward with purchasing the equipment.  After the day was completed, I ensured all the equipment was properly put away, sterilized, and ready for the next day.  I’d go back to the hotel, make notes on the day, and review my notes for the next day. I did this Sunday through Thursday night for 4 weeks.

When the 4 week evaluation concluded I gathered all the feedback from surgeons, addressed any concerns, and reinforced the positive feedback and once again politely asked for the business.

I was responsible for sending back all of the equipment so I spent a few extra days gathering equipment and ensuring nothing was left behind.

A few months later we found out that the surgeons really liked our equipment and we were awarded the power contract. That contract was the largest for that year and I was personally thanked in our monthly newsfeed by our CEO for my efforts.