Andrew Lacroce
Technical Program Manager ✦ Engineering Manager
I build the planning frameworks, team structures, and delivery cultures that let engineers do their best work, and I apply AI tools pragmatically to improve speed, decision quality, and delivery outcomes.
About
I'm a software engineering and delivery leader with 20+ years of experience building high-performing teams, driving Agile transformation, and delivering complex technical programs at scale. My background spans both Engineering Manager and Technical Program Manager roles, giving me technical credibility, delivery discipline, and the ability to align engineering, product, and leadership around clear priorities.
I lead through clarity, not authority. I specialize in translating business goals into executable roadmaps, managing multi-team programs in remote and distributed environments, and creating the operating rhythms that keep teams focused and accountable. I do my best work in high-expectation environments where the problems are hard and the stakes are real.
After a stretch of progressively demanding roles, I took an intentional break: I built personal software projects in modern stacks, developed hands-on fluency with AI tools including ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Claude, made music a serious pursuit, and spent meaningful time with family.
Experience
- ✦Formalized PI planning across 12 teams by standardizing cross-team estimation and building shared capacity visibility; used Jira as the execution backbone and a purpose-built Google Sheets workbook as a flexible planning layer to prototype the process before migrating to permanent tooling.
- ✦Established cut-line communication protocols and trade-off frameworks that gave executives meaningful visibility into capacity and dependencies, enabling informed prioritization and reducing unstructured top-down pressure on teams.
- ✦Restructured the planning timeline by shifting preparation further left, enabling teams to enter each quarter with committed, well-defined work and improving delivery cadence predictability across the program.
- ✦Directly managed two teams (Order Management and Item Master DevOps, ~6 engineers each) within a ~100-person engineering org; drove a replatforming effort from Ruby/Scala to Kotlin, reducing tech debt and improving platform scalability.
- ✦Reduced tech debt-driven support burden from 80% to 20% of team capacity, enabling sustained focus on feature development.
- ✦Inherited a team in chronic firefighting mode; stabilized operations within 3–6 months by providing air cover, enforcing severity-based SLAs, and transferring prioritization ownership back to the team.
- ✦Led a Scrum team within a 100+ microservice ecosystem and reduced customer-impacting errors by 50% in 3 months by tightening ownership, on-call practices, and incident review discipline.
- ✦Expanded scope to lead 3 Scrum teams (~15–20 engineers) supporting Comcast's customer service messaging platform, reduced custom workflow implementation time from 3 months to 1 month, and mentored and hired talent across remote teams.
- ✦Served as Scrum Master and program manager for the Comcast Messaging Platform (~10 DevOps engineers, 3–4 QA), responsible for all customer-facing SMS and email interactions across non-marketing channels.
- ✦Led the phased AWS migration of the messaging platform; completed bulk traffic cutover in 6 months and full migration in 10–12 months, beating the original 12–18 month target.
- ✦Integrated Comcast's AI assistant with the SMS platform, enabling customers to interact with automated troubleshooting workflows via interactive SMS dialog.
- ✦Led implementation and ongoing management of large-scale e-commerce platforms for Toys R Us (primary account), Sports Authority, and Dick's Sporting Goods, with sites handling millions of users with strict uptime SLAs during peak retail seasons.
- ✦Managed cross-functional teams across engineering, operations, and business to deliver complex platform implementations and integrations on schedule and within scope.
Technical Project Manager supporting e-learning SaaS platform delivery for Fortune 500 clients.
Business Systems Engineer supporting internal tooling and workflow automation in a global insurance environment.
Skills
Program & Delivery Leadership
Large-scale program management·PI planning & SAFe delivery·Portfolio & roadmap management·Risk & dependency management·Operating cadence design
Engineering Management
Engineering team leadership·Hiring & performance management·Technical debt strategy·Incident management & SLA ownership·Team health & operating model
Technical Strategy & Platform
Cloud migration strategy·CI/CD & DevOps·Platform modernization·Distributed systems & microservices·Technical risk management
Stakeholder & Executive Alignment
Executive communication·Cross-org prioritization·Capacity planning & cut-line framing·Engineering-to-business translation·Global distributed team leadership
Applied AI & Automation
LLM integration & API workflows·AI-augmented delivery & analysis·Prompt engineering & output quality·AI adoption strategy·LLM feasibility evaluation
Projects
Built to develop hands-on fluency with modern AI APIs, full-stack deployment, and agentic conversation design. Integrates the Claude API, Google Text-to-Speech, and AI image generation to support interactive voice and visual conversations with public-domain characters.
Built from scratch to practice modern frontend development and own the full deployment pipeline. No template, no CMS. Next.js 16, Tailwind CSS v4, TypeScript, deployed to Vercel with a custom domain via Cloudflare.
Built for personal use to automate and enhance playing a text-based multiplayer RPG (nukefire.org) on Windows. TinTin++ scripts handle character session management, GMCP-driven automapping, class-specific combat hooks, and a multi-window Windows Terminal launcher for coordinating multi-character group play.
Contact
Prefer to connect live? Book time directly on my calendar. I'm happy to discuss new opportunities, technical projects, or potential collaborations.
Book a 30-minute intro call →