Yale Senior Secondary

Senior Product Manager at Amazon

- Managed roadmap and strategy for AWS database migration service. Got approval for three year product vision.
- Managed timelines and project planning in Jira, collaborating with engineers and customers for prioritizing bugs and feature work.
- Participated in engineering standups, helping identify ways to quickly unblock engineers as they hit issues
- Built processes to quickly prioritize hundreds of incoming feature requests from customers. Reduced backlog of untriaged feature requests that hadn't been reviewed in well over a year to no more than two weeks from submission.
- Built and managed program to handle issue escalations with an ecosystem of consultants, support engineers, and others to pick up tasks as needed.
- Built a virtual ecosystem of internal and external partners to help with customer engagements and creating content. Succeeded in off-loading 90% of customer product team escalations to consulting teams.
- Wrote business requirement documents for new features and major releases.
- Worked with account managers and customers (large and small) to understand their needs and explain how our products will best be able to meet their needs. Built and gave presentations to account managers and customers.

Amazon

Senior Technical Product Manager

If you have a high value B2B product or service, I WILL find you customers. My company specializes in generated extremely qualifed, hot, leads for high value B2B products and services.

- Created highly effective B2B lead generation system that delivers hot customers to clients of high value B2B products or services.
- I build large social communities for clients, helping them find the customers they need for their B2B products and services. I take social media groups from zero to thousands of members in just months.

Ttinagi

President

Managed priorities and roadmap for Global Financial Planning & Technology team within Amazon Corporate FP&A.
- handled intake of customer requests, collected requirements and reached agreement on prioritization
- scheduled work on engineering teams and planned and managed sprints and standups for 20 engineers on different teams
- made sure no balls were dropped on development activities and that engineering efforts were kept on track and stakeholders kept up to date with progress.
- managed the execution of a complete re-engineering process of the financial systems, moving off of third party software to big data processing in the AWS cloud using Spark EMR, pipelines and an S3 data lake.

Senior Product Manager

I manage both the engineering and business responsibilities for defining and building financial reporting services for the Amazon Consumer business.

- Prepare and manage business reviews and prioritization discussions to get consensus with stakeholders and executives.
- Plan sprints and manage scrums of software engineering team.
- Manage AWS fleet resources to minimize costs and maximize performance.
- Handle recruiting and career development of software engineering team.
- Set technical direction of architecture and services used.
- Manage relationships with other teams across the consumer business to get alignment on dependencies and conflicts.

Software Development Manager

I manage the roadmap and day to day priorities for a software engineering team that builds financial analytics tools for Amazon's global retail business. I am involved with everything from gathering customer requirements to helping design and plan our roadmap.

Some of my work includes:
- Planning sprints and running scrum sessions.
- Building business justifications and getting buy-in for priorities and plans.
- Creating training videos.
- Communicating with thousands of users, telling them about new features and collecting feedback for improvements.
- Organizing off-site training sessions for engineering team, helping them understand customers.

Senior Program Manager

I am dedicated to bringing Windows software development to the Cloud. It's my job to find out what Windows app developers need to make life in the Cloud easier, and then build solutions to make that happen. How much more fun can a job be? Check out our Uhuru Cloud Computing group on LinkedIn: https://bitly.com/uhrgmain

Just some of my responsibilities:
- Got 15,000 registered users on a beta Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Build a LinkedIn group of over 10,000 cloud enthusiasts.
- Built and managed company web site and blog.
- Create numerous YouTube product demonstrations and how-to guides.
- Interviewed dozens of cloud experts for podcasts to build relationships in the industry.
- Define product requirements and roadmap.
- Deploy and manage Cloud Foundry and OpenShift trial environments.
- Setup and manage datacenter servers, including virtualization stack (VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V).

Uhuru Software, Inc.

Director of Marketing

I drove agreement around the feature set and road map of our search technology software product, interfacing between marketing and sales. I worked with engineering to define release plans and priorities.

My responsibilities included:
- Creating agreed lists of feature priorities across company.
- Writing functional specifications for new product releases, ensuring there is agreement on what the expectations are on both engineering and sales/marketing.
- Running bug triage meetings, ensuring that business priorities are taken into account.

Atigeo

Program & Product Manager

Helping companies (and individuals) create innovative strategies to promote themselves on-line. I run a virtual agency of professionals who specialize in finding ways to utilize blogs, podcasts, and a combination of social media communities to target the right audience for our clients, without spending an arm and a leg on advertising.

Connecting with your customers, and building relationships, will get you further than any amount of advertising.

Effective Communications Services

Indentify markets, and vertical industries, for on-line business project and process management software.

IntranetSites

Marketing Director

I conducted customer industry and competitive research to help make decisions for future versions of the Windows operating system. I utilized surveys, focus groups, and customer interviews as part of research strategies. I then synthesized all the data into conclusions and recommendations for senior managers.

Some of the areas I researched include:
- 64-bit computing, and the use of 64-bit operating systems and applications
- application installation/deployment and patching
- developer needs and concerns (i.e. what drives decisions to pick a platform)
- developer needs and concerns with web applications platforms (e.g. Silverlight, AIR/Flash, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox)
- understanding the engineering processes used to manage the Windows APIs and identifying areas for improvement
- researching the needs, and problems, around code deprecation (i.e. removing old software) from the Windows product

Microsoft

Senior Product Planner

I put together product requirements, and managed the development process (with test and coding) for a variety of technologies in the Windows networking stack. I worked with IPv6, Windows Firewall, Teredo, packet filtering, VPNs, IPSec, and RADIUS.

- researched customer, and market needs, through customer surveys, interviews, and competitive analyses (interacted closely with marketing and sales force)
- extensive partnering with networking related firms to ensure we met their needs, and they were ready/prepared for upcoming changes in the operating system (e.g. CISCO, Symantec, McAffee)
- setup, and ran, beta programs for 40 key firewall/security related partners
- presented/explained Microsoft's network security technologies and vision to IT executives
- created and executed massive effort to ensure every Microsoft product, and operating system component, worked well with IPv6 and the Windows Firewall
- worked with developers and test teams to create specifications, and schedules
- made decisions regarding features/trade-offs to ensure successful products were delivered on schedule

Senior Program Manager, Windows Networking

Focussed on outbound marketing of Microsoft's management software products (e.g. Microsoft Operations Manager, Systems Management Server).

- educated sales force on how to sell effectively against individual competing products (e.g. did competitive research to help identify key strengths)
- wrote reviewers guides of new product releases to help customers and press do quick evaluations
- worked with members of the press who wanted to write product evaluations
- presented to IT executives in sales engagements
- built partner program for third parties wanting to build on top of Microsoft's management software, and setup first partner conference

Product Manager

Contact Networks

Product Marketing

Wrote numerous product reviews and columns, and ran staff of analysts who covered intrastructure technologies like servers, routers, VPNs, and firewalls.

- planned schedule of articles for delivery each week, ensuring the pipeline was full
- made sure committed articles were delivered by staff (and free-lancers) on time every week
- mentoring and training new staff to be analysts/free-lance writers

Michael Surkan