Career Commentary
Last Updated: August 15th, 2025
Don't you already have a resume and LinkedIn? Why bother with a career commentary?
A Resume and LinkedIn are both formal, concise, and high level - there are constraints to the story you can tell. They tell a story, but not the whole story. Think of this as a more like a director’s commentary, that you used to get on your DVDs and Blu-rays.
Tim Lawrence
LinkedIn | PMI Project Management Professional Certification
Table of Contents
Experience
Senior Technical Program Manager
Heroku (A Salesforce Company) - Remote
February, 2022 to Present
At Heroku, I've had the great opportunity to work with a ton of really smart, passionate people on cutting edge technology.
I've also been able to work on and deliver some really cool features and functionality thus far in my time here.
Current Program: Deeply integrating Heroku with Agentforce, Salesforce, and Data Cloud
This one is currently in progress and we have a lot of exciting stuff in the works as Salesforce embraces Heroku to deploy Agentforce at scale. I'll be able to share more after this year's Dreamforce event, but we did recently deliver Heroku AppLink to GA!
Heroku AppLink: Enables customers to do more with their Salesforce investment by streamlining a manual and cumbersome 15 step process into one click that seamlessly and securely brings custom apps and elastic compute to Salesforce Flows and Agentforce, as well as helps solve blockers in scaling agent deployments.
Next Generation of Heroku on Kubernetes (Fir)
Delivered the cloud native next generation of the Heroku platform, bringing AWS EKS, ECR, OpenTelemetry, AWS Global Accelerator, CloudNative Buildpacks, Open Container Initiative (OCI), and AWS Graviton into the platform.
Result At AWS re:Invent 2024, Heroku announced the Pilot of the next generation of the Heroku platform, and General Availability was announced in May 2025.
Heroku Postgres on AWS Aurora
Delivered a new Heroku Postgres performance tier backed by AWS Aurora and the migration of our legacy Heroku Postgres fleet from EC2 to Aurora.
Result
We released our Essential Tier of our Heroku Postgres backed by AWS Aurora in May 2024, and successfully migrated our existing multi-tenant fleet.
Our single tenant tier is on track for GA and we will migrate our remaining fleet shortly after.
Implementation of Stripe Payments & Radar
The first program I was assigned to at Heroku was the implementation of Stripe^. Heroku wanted to take advantage of the broader Salesforce x Stripe partnership^, so we were able to work closely with our partners in Slack and Core Salesforce already leveraging Stripe to gather requirements and best practices to implement Stipe in a phase approach.
Phase 1
Implemented Stripe alongside our legacy billing system so that all new and updated payment methods were processed by Stripe. We had to make sure that we not only had parity with our existing billing system, but implemented the Stripe Radar fraud tool as well.
Phase 2
Once we launched Stripe, our next phase was the migration of our customers from our legacy platform to Stripe. This involved Stripe processing an import and us matching users with a unique identifier.
Result
After several payment cycles of utilizing two vendors, we were able to successfully migrate all users and decommission our legacy system, resulting in lower fees, reduced fraud, and increased tax compliance.
Enabling Payment Support for 3D Secure and RBI E-Mandates in India
3D Secure (3DS)
One of the benefits of moving to Stripe, was the ability to enable 3D Secure 2.0^ to meet the EU's Strong Customer Authentication requirements, and provide an additional layer of protection via dynamic authentication methods such as biometrics and token-based authentication to our customers.
Reserve Bank of India E-Mandates
On October 1, 2021, new Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations went into effect that stopped the processing of automatic recurring payments without an additional factor of authentication and Heroku had to stop accepting payments from India-issued credit cards.
This was one of the most active issues on Heroku’s public roadmap^ and with the implementation of 3DS were were able to leverage it as our additional factor of authentication and re-enable India-issued credit cards payments for our customers.
Result
This resulted in the return of many customers and a large amount of revenue from this region to the Heroku Platform. It also led to a career milestone, with my first post on the Heroku Blog^.
Senior Engineering Project Manager, Universal Banking
Finastra - Austin, Texas (Remote)
September, 2022 to February, 2022
Finastra is a FinTech company where I was able to leverage my experience from EPAM working on Google Pay 3.0. I worked on Finastra's Digital Banking product, Malauzai, a white label online and mobile apps for small banks and credit unions that lack the resources to develop their own online banking applications.
It was my first time working with a globally distributed, cross-functional organization, and running more than just two or three projects concurrently. It was also here where I learned about managing up and managing down, and effectively communicating status transparently, and at the appropriate level based on an audience that ranged from external customers and partners to executive level stakeholders.
Migration from Legacy to Go-Forward Digital Banking Platform
Once of my largest projects was expediting the migration of 160+ legacy customers to our go-forward digital banking platform. This had a lot of moving parts to manage:
- Bookings: Working with the Sales team to track the progress of the sales cycle for each legacy customer.
- Attrition: Engaging with our Risk team to monitor and track customer attrition and escalate as needed.
- Implementations: Collaborating with the Professional Services organization to track the progress and completion of customer migrations.
- Process Improvement: Successfully led a program of external contractors to drive improvements to current implementation processes, resulting in a decrease in our average time to revenue.
Engineer Release Planning
Maintained alignment with the Product Management and Engineering teams to complete Artifact Workbooks for upcoming quarterly product release planning (sprints) to ensure all capital, expense, and non-functional effort was estimated and that time tracking is enabled across three international regions.
Monthly and Quarterly Business Reviews
Coordinated and prepared for various leadership meetings and business reviews, where I regularly produced and presented high-quality deliverables of various mediums on progress, while maintaining accountability for problems and identifying solutions.
Why did I leave?
The recession that followed the Covid-19 pandemic is pretty well documented, and the FinTech industry wasn't immune. Belt-tightening around the company led to restructuring, and after a few re-organizations, I landed on a new team, with no work coming in, and saw the writing on the wall. I started interviewing and was fortunate enough to land in my current role at Salesforce as a part of Heroku.
Lead Project Manager (Contracted to Google)
EPAM Continuum - Austin, Texas (Remote)
September, 2019 to September, 2021
EPAM Continuum is probably best known for designing Target's beloved shopping cart (pdf)^, but I joined them as one of the first member's of their Learning Services team.
As a Lead Project Manager, I led a team of Instructional Designers, Experience Designers, and Technical Writers who were contracted to Google, where I worked on launching Google Pay 3.0^ and Google Chrome localization.
The biggest impacts that I made in my time at EPAM Continuum were:
Establishing a Project Management Office
I utilized Smartsheet to establish a formal PMO for our team that provided transparency on the following key performance indicators: quality, on-time delivery, and resource utilization.
Developed Instructional Design Frameworks and Process Improvements
Leveraged my background in education and instructional design to develop instructional design frameworks and performed complex needs analysis to guide our Learning Services strategy.
I also led a successful process improvement initiative to update the standard operating procedures for copy editing that reduced our Quality Assurance error rate by 34%.
Why did I leave?
Unfortunately, after a year or so the work started to dry up and I saw the the cost cutting Google was enacting across their entire organization at the time. I had a gut feeling that our contract was not going to be renewed, so I started looking for a new opportunity, which landed me at Finastra.
Project Manager II
CentralSquare Technologies - Lake Mary, Florida
August, 2018 to August, 2019
When I started the company was called Superion, but shortly after joining we merged with two other companies in the Public Sector software space, TriTech and Zuercher to become CentralSquare Technologies.
Comprehensive Knowledge Transfer for Software Engineers
Unfortunately, one of the first orders of business was to consolidate the Engineering teams and over 200 Engineers were put on retention agreements with the understanding that they would be laid off with a generous severance in six months. In return, they had to participate in a comprehensive knowledge transfer process and I was assigned to as the project manager.
There were 15 different product lines affected, and my responsibilities were:
- Establishing a comprehensive project plan that would be used to capture all existing documentation and plan the recording of training sessions walking through the software architecture.
- Track the production and completion of training based on the above documentation and recordings by a team of Instructional Designers.
- Ensure that we hit our timeframe of completing all knowledge transfer sessions within the six month retention time frame.
It was a massive, but successful undertaking, and after the project's completion it led directly into my next project.
Developer Boot Camp
Planning and facilitating a 5 week long Development Boot Camp to quickly on-board and up-skill 30 entry-level software developers using the training from the knowledge transfer, PluralSight, and in-person facilitation (by yours truly).
Our product's codebase was primarily written in C#, something not really being taught in school to our new grads, so we needed a way to get them up to speed on not just our products, but a new programming language. The goal was to shorten the Engineer's time to productivity, which was measured in two ways:
- Training Completion Time: Tracking how long it takes for new employees to complete training programs and start applying their skills effectively.
- Time to First Contribution: Measure the time taken from the start date until the new hire makes their first meaningful contribution, typically their first code commit.
- Output: Measure the volume of code written and reviewed over their first 30 days post-boot camp.
My success in this project led to recognition from our executive leadership team, and their sponsorship of my final project at CentralSquare Technologies.
Public Administration Academy
Launching a two-day new hire orientation for all new hires in the Public Administration organization, that successfully on-boarded 350+ employees over a 6-month period.
Why did I leave?
Simply put, I moved. My then-girlfriend received a job opportunity in Austin, Texas that was too great to pass up. I had hoped to stay on as a remote employee, but in a pre-pandemic world, it wasn't an option for me. It all worked out though, because while in the process of moving, I landed an interview with EPAM Continuum and offered a job on their new Learning Services team.
High School Classroom Teacher
Orange County Public Schools - Orlando, Florida
October, 2010 to August, 2018
I often think about where I would be in my career if I had gone into business right out of college, rather than becoming a teacher. In reality though, if I hadn't spent 8 years in the classroom, I wouldn't be nearly as good at my job as I am now.
As a teacher I learned priceless, transferrable skills that I use every day:
- How to be organized, results-oriented, and manage my time down to the minute.
- How to execute fast and always have a bias for moving things forward, and always have plan in place to those who were absent back up to speed.
- How to decomposing course standards (requirements) into lesson plans and simplify complex topics into something my students can understand.
- How to get buy-in from students who sometimes do not care at all about what you're trying to teach them.
- How to have difficult conversations in an empathetic way.
Why did I leave?
I've actually written about this in a bit more detail on my personal blog^, but it really came down to the fact that teaching is a profession where passion is a necessity and mine was dwindling. I had quite a few colleagues who left teaching and gotten into Instructional Design, so I did a lot of research and realized how transferrable a lot of the skills I developed in my teaching career were.
It took a lot of applications, resume re-writes, and interviews before I finally was hired at CentralSquare Technologies (Superion, at the time) by a former teacher who knew the value an educator could bring to a business.