Vikas Borwankar

Lead TPM for ‘AppDynamics’ Product, this role is all about managing the lifecycle of complex, cross- functional technology initiatives & drive delivery improvements quantified with metrics. Work closely with Engineers, Product Managers, UX & User Research and other stakeholders to provide hands-on support to multiple engineering teams to focus on delivery while leading the program aspects like scoping, discovery & definition, planning, execution & tracking, and release.

Key Responsibilities:

o Work closely with product managers to understand product vision, product priorities & roadmap, and help in estimating scope.

o Work closely with engineering managers, technical architects and various other stakeholders to set up delivery timelines

o Develop and manage project plans to successfully deliver results.
o Identify bottlenecks, and risks and coordinate discussions with cross-functional teams to review

project deliverables.
o Build partnerships with cross-functional product teams in AppDynamics
o Maintain project dashboards, the status of completion goals, backlog items and tracking project

metrics.

Achievements:

• Created model for Product Managers to identify Product Priorities and stack ranked initiatives which helped engineering teams focus on organization's highest priorities. This model included creating granular feature sets (Called initiatives in Jira) that could be delivered to production within 30-90 days. This also helped engineering teams to split efforts effectively between two different products.
• Created dynamic delivery projection mechanism, which took into account team’s last 6 Sprints performance in terms of Velocity and Predictability, which gave engineering managers the capability to set realistic start and end dates with very high confidence
• Effectively managed 9 feature teams (50+ Sprint Teams) to get top view of feature delivery and its cross-team dependency. Incorporated inter-team communication mechanism to ensure effective discussion happens with a limited number of people leading to conclusive results. This helped engineering teams to have a healthy backlog and very high confidence in delivery.
• Improved the backlog visibility from current to future. At any given point in time, the engineering teams now have a high-confidence backlog of a quarter and a tentative backlog of 2 quarters beyond. This helped the Marketing & Sales and Pricing & Licensing teams to get a very clear picture of the product roadmap which in turn helped them with their customer interactions. I received a ‘Visionary Award’ in June 2022 from the CMO for these efforts
• I worked closely with Scrum Masters of various teams and helped them streamline the Agile Scrum process and bring in consistency across the organization. Worked with Leaders/Managers from Product, Engineering, Design, Security, and User-Docs and helped them zero in on a consistent overall process structure or skeleton while giving individual teams flexibility on execution styles. The goal was to ensure the input and output of a process are consistent across teams which helped executive management to get a better picture and robust status updates. The process included Backlog refinement, Sprint Scoping and planning, trend analysis, metrics, reporting structure, delivery models and post-prod activities. I received a ‘Connect Everything’ award for this work jointly from the CTO/CPO office in Feb 2022
• Created dynamic project reports, as an output of the above point which helps engineering teams track progress in real-time and take necessary actions. I run Feature level & Product Level Scrum of Scrums to track progress, identify and resolve dependencies, and raise and mitigate project risks. The focus here is to enable systematic cross-team communication for tracking dependencies and action items and ensure they are created, owned and delivered appropriately
• I worked with Engineering, Product, Design and Research leaders to ensure the UX org is at least 4 Sprints ahead of engineering in terms of delivery. This aided in improving the quality engineering backlog and in turn, helped in clearly defining delivery goals
• Created a robust reporting structure at various levels with automated reports being tine triggered via Jira/Confluence. Reports at various levels like Sprint, Feature, Product and for different consumers like Engineering team, Product Org, Exec Management, Marketing & Sales. These reports track team metrics and give trends (upward or downward), track against Org level OKRs, give a view of committed Vs delivered, resource allocation and optimization, product bugs & SLAs and so on
• Facilitated and implemented process improvement initiatives among the site operations, product teams, engineering, and corporate system groups to solve complex problems related to increasing the capability and reliability of our delivery operations
  

• Managed Software delivery across 5 feature teams ensuring teams are aligned to organizational goals and are incrementally delivering value by tracking key metrics and enabling and sustaining continuous improvement of these metrics
• Engage with all stakeholders like Product Management, Project/Program Management, Operations and Engineering
  teams to ensure quality is followed as a practice
• Working with various 3rd party vendors providing services like UI/UX design, HTML & CSS Development, Security Testing
  Effectively people managed 38 employees from teams like Dev & QE, Application & Product support (L1,L2,L3,L4).

• Extensive working knowledge of End to End project management and Quality Assurance delivery for full lifecycle of development projects
• Tasks include screening of requirement analysis and evaluation done by leads and SME’s, Scoping & Estimation, signing off on the Design & Execution plan, Risk identification and Mitigation, Satisfying Exit Criteria, Management and Stakeholder Reporting
• Create automation strategy at release level and contribute towards building automation suite; Update automated regression suite using Selenium and Java
• Planning and delivering post-production warranty support of Enterprise Release; Delivery tasks include facilitating Analysis of Production issues/defects and Mitigation Plan, also working closely with dev leads to prioritize permanent fixes

• Worked on IBM-i systems; Both Server & Application support
• Maintained 200+ LPARS on 24x7 support model; Later moved to 'follow the sun' model