Andrew Lacroce
Technical Program Manager / Engineering Manager
20+ years driving delivery across engineering, product, and business teams. 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. I work at the intersection of engineering execution and business outcomes, whether the priority is stabilizing a struggling team, standing up a planning framework across a large organization, or leading a cloud migration without slowing critical delivery.
My background spans both Engineering Manager and Technical Program Manager roles, so I bring technical credibility, delivery discipline, and the ability to align engineering, product, and leadership around clear priorities. 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 moving with focus and accountability.
I lead through clarity, not authority, and do my best work in high-expectation environments where the problems are hard and the stakes are real. My focus is consistent across roles: reduce technical debt, break down silos, strengthen collaboration, and create the conditions for engineers to do their best work while delivering outcomes the business can trust. I also use modern AI capabilities, including ChatGPT and Claude with API integrations, as practical tools to accelerate analysis, improve communication, and support better execution.
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 — 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.
Skills
Program & Delivery Management
- Technical Program Management
- PI Planning & Portfolio Management
- Agile / Scrum / SAFe
- Risk & dependency management
- Roadmap execution
Engineering Leadership
- Engineering management & team development
- Agile transformation
- Cross-functional alignment
- Remote & distributed teams
- Hiring & performance management
Cloud & Infrastructure
- AWS
- GCP
- Cloud migration strategy
- CI/CD & DevOps
- Platform modernization
Tools & Process
- Jira / Confluence
- GitHub
- Incident management
- Stakeholder communication
- Technical debt reduction
Applied AI
- ChatGPT and Claude
- LLM API integration
- AI-assisted delivery workflows
- Prompt and output quality management
- Outcome-focused AI adoption
Projects
Contact
Open to Technical Program Manager and Engineering Manager roles. Best ways to reach me: