VIVEK SKANDAPPAN
Marysville,WA
Summary
Experienced Technical+Product/Program Manager with a proven track record of successfully leading cross-functional teams in delivering complex technical solutions at scale. Skilled in managing end-to-end program lifecycles from inception to delivery, spanning the retail and banking domains. With a total of 19 years in the technology industry, brings a strong background in technical leadership, process optimization, and standardization. Proficient in Agile methodologies, excels in technical dependency management, risk mitigation, and building frameworks that accelerate development and integration across teams.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
1
1
SAFe 5 Product Owner/Product Manager
1
1
Professional Scrum Master (PSM I)
Work History
Technical Product/Program Manager
Starbucks
04.2022 - Current
- Led technical program and product management for Starbucks' multi-tenant Rewards platform supporting North America (37M members) and Japan (5M members) markets, handling up to 6,000 transactions per second, while maintaining separate business rules and integration points with a unified API architecture
- Spearheaded technical implementation for major external retail partnerships (Delta Airlines, Marriott, Bank of America), leading cross-functional teams through the complete lifecycle from inception to delivery
- Developed comprehensive project plans with clear milestones and managed technical dependencies across 6+ internal teams, enabling seamless collaboration and risk mitigation
- Transformed Starbucks' API development methodology by implementing an API-first approach across engineering teams, defining and reviewing API contracts before development began instead of waiting for completed code
- Eliminated integration bottlenecks through the API-first initiative, reducing rework by 10%, enabling parallel development tracks, and significantly accelerating time-to-market for new features
- Created and aligned API definitions with OpenAPI 3.0 specifications, enabling well-defined interfaces for seamless integration across platforms, enhancing developer efficiency and improving collaboration
- Led the development of a member-to-member reward star sharing feature for Starbucks Japan, improving customer engagement by 5% while coordinating work across technical and business stakeholders
- Facilitated the transition of an end-of-life system and various third-party reward engagements to Starbucks-managed systems, achieving $20M in annual cost savings and enhancing maintainability
- Addressed a critical issue impacting ~70K members and hundreds of thousands of transactions over a 10-month period by developing a Python script to automate data corrections, reducing resolution time from over a month to 1 week
- Developed dashboards and reports based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) using AWS OpenSearch to measure system performance, enabling data-driven decisions for platform optimization
- Effectively guided the Scrum team through Sprint ceremonies, including Daily Stand-ups, Refinement, and Planning, ensuring alignment and fostering a productive and collaborative environment, resulting in a 10% improvement in team velocity
Product Owner
T-Mobile
01.2017 - 04.2022
- Responsible for defining an executable product delivery path based on product roadmap and planning delivery for retail store point-of-sale (POS) applications running more than a million transactions per day
- Worked closely with product management, business and development team to gather requirements, design and deliver over 30 product enhancements, small and large, involving cross-functional teams in the T-Mobile ecosystem including Migration of Sprint customers, Cross channel returns and EMV (Chip and pin) payment enablement
- As a Product Owner, helped deliver multiple integrated products to retire legacy applications with high availability microservice based APIs and experience APIs (xAPIs) there by extending checkout experience to mobile applications
- Conducted design sprints to develop prototypes and to identify Minimum Viable Product (MVP) scope for a Program Increment (PI) Planning
- Experienced in defining detailed pilot strategy for applications to seek feedback and iteratively release product components to the field there by reducing impacts to the daily business process
- Collaborated with the development team to implement Code as a Config (CaC) within a fully automated CI/CD pipeline
- Defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to directly measure the value of product delivered and proactively incorporated the feedback into the next product increment
- Reduced number of user interactions (clicks) to complete transactions by 20% there by reducing the overall transaction time
- Worked with the architect and product team to define and maintain a healthy, ranked product backlog, achieving an average team utilization of over 95%
- Used stack ranking and MoSCoW methods for backlog prioritization
- Participated in a concept assessment process to provide inputs on potential solution, design, and documenting the output to define a High-Level solution design including non-functional requirements
- Experienced in successfully leading cross functional teams between engineering and design teams to scope, plan, prioritize, execute, and plan incremental delivery with an on-time delivery achievement of over 90% following Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodologies
Project Manager/Scrum Master
Recreational Equipment Inc. REI
05.2015 - 12.2016
- Part of the design and planning team for tokenization of payment data storage for all channels in REI
- Managed the project end-to-end and ensured a successful launch with minimal issues being reported from the field
- Co-ordinated with REI Retail, Online, care teams and external payment vendor, JPMorgan Chase, to ensure successful transformation to tokenize and externalize payment data by bulk conversion
- Managed Point-of-Sale (POS) application enhancement to onboard new payment device and gateway by Tender Retail, for EMV-Chip and pin transaction enablement in payment terminals for in-store payments
- Planned end-to-end delivery and chartered a plan for A/B deployment and pilot strategy for rolling out device upgrades without impacting store business
- Developed PowerShell scripts to identify successful and failed deployments which helped in identifying issues during deployment phase itself reducing issues being reported from the field
- Managed a team of 12 across offshore and onshore ensuring good coordination between teams
Technology Lead
Sears
01.2013 - 04.2015
- Lead the team in design and development, to modernize legacy thick client Point-of-Sale (POS) application to a client-server architecture model
- Analyzed new features and came up with estimation, detailed design and timelines
- Technical review of development work and managing internal testing before the product is delivered
- Managed resolution of QA and production tickets and ensured timely resolution and status reporting to leadership team on the risks, blockers and mitigation steps
- Lead a team of 8 at offshore coordinating work with onshore business and management teams
Developer/Technology Lead
Infosys (Finacle – Infosys banking product)
09.2005 - 12.2012
- As a technology lead for Finacle product, worked with multiple client teams onshore and offshore implementing Finacle core banking and e-banking solutions
- Part of the onshore requirements elicitation team for implementing core banking for City Savings bank, Philippines
- Documented customizations and specifications for development team
- Managed and lead the team providing production support and issue resolution at onshore, for Finacle core banking solution, for Development Bank of Singapore (DBS)
- Single handedly managed rollout of e-Banking solution at onshore for Nation bank of Egypt, the largest bank in Egypt
- Application development and support for Finacle core banking product for various other clients such as URALSIB bank in Russia, Punjab National Bank of India, City Savings Bank Philippines
- Developed customization and product enhancements as a lead and developer for Finacle major release versions working with team capacities varying from 5-15 members
- Lead a core training team, organized regular training sessions to ramp up new members of the team and mentored them until they are ready to take up development on Finacle product
- Started a knowledge management initiative to share important details about the product in a fun and collaborating way which elicited maximum participation
Education
Bachelor of Technology - Mechanical Engineering
Government Engineering College Barton Hill Thiruvananthapuram
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala01.2005
Skills
- C
- Java
- JavaScript
- Unix
- Oracle
- AWS OpenSearch
- Design tools: Open API 30 (Swagger), PlantUML, Postman, Figma
- JIRA
- Jira Align
- Rally
- Microsoft Visio
- Microsoft Project
- Splunk
- Datadog
- Anthropic API / Claud AI
- Attention to detail
- Problem-solving skills
- Strategic planning
- Analytical skills
- Risk management
- Scope management
- Complex Problem-solving
- Agile methodology
- Requirements gathering
- Best practices implementation
- Technical leadership
- Cross-functional team leadership
- Problem-solving abilities
- Verbal and written communication
- Schedule management
- Project leadership
- Issue resolution
Certification
- Certified SAFe 5 Product Owner/Product Manager
- Certified Professional Scrum Master (PSM I)
Timeline
Technical Product/Program Manager
Starbucks
04.2022 - Current
Product Owner
T-Mobile
01.2017 - 04.2022
Project Manager/Scrum Master
Recreational Equipment Inc. REI
05.2015 - 12.2016
Technology Lead
Sears
01.2013 - 04.2015
Developer/Technology Lead
Infosys (Finacle – Infosys banking product)
09.2005 - 12.2012
Bachelor of Technology - Mechanical Engineering
Government Engineering College Barton Hill Thiruvananthapuram
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