Tim Lawrence’s Technical Program Management Portfolio

Technical Program Management Portfolio

Welcome to my portfolio! Here you'll find a few different things:

  1. An expanded overview of some of the large programs I have led end-to-end throughout my career.
  2. Case studies that I have completed on my own to keep my skills sharp.

A note on confidentiality: This portfolio presents either real work that is publicly known, or anonymized with composite names/data based on real programs.

Table of Contents

CDC for Accelerated Polling in Heroku Connect

Many customers rely on Heroku Connect to sync Salesforce data into Postgres, but traditional polling and Streaming API limitations can leave gaps: polling can be slow or miss high‑volume changes, and not all Salesforce objects support PushTopic‑based streaming. This combination creates a problem for teams that need near‑real‑time, comprehensive sync across a wide range of Salesforce objects without having to hand‑tune integrations or accept stale data.

Result

To address this, Heroku Connect now uses Salesforce Change Data Capture (CDC) as the signal for its Accelerated Polling capability, letting it respond to change events rather than just relying on periodic polls. As a result, customers can sync data faster and across more standard objects, improving freshness and coverage while still benefiting from Heroku Connect’s managed integration model.

Streamlined a 15-step manual process to integrate Salesforce with Heroku into a one-click integration, reducing customer onboarding time from 15 clicks to 1, and enabling scalable agent deployments for 100+ enterprise accounts, solving compute scaling blockers for agent deployments.

Result

Heroku AppLink unlocked the ability for developers to enable Heroku across Data360, Agentforce and Core Salesforce. It enables customers to accelerate Agentforce adoption by building custom actions that work seamlessly within Agentforce agents and allows Heroku apps to be consumed directly within Salesforce flows and Data Cloud while automatically enforcing the Salesforce security model.

Heroku - 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, enabling ~15% compute cost reduction for the private compute 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.

For a more detailed deep dive into the Fir program, check out this page: Replatforming Heroku’s Runtime to Kubernetes

Heroku - Next Generation Postgres on AWS Aurora

Orchestrated a 12-month long database fleet migration program from AWS EC2 to Aurora. In addition to more flexible compute and storage combinations, it delivered nearly 8x faster queries and 20% faster ingest for 150,000+ databases across 1,000+ customers with minimal customer-facing downtime and comprehensive rollback procedures.

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 in Spring 2026.

Heroku - Implementation of Stripe Payments & Radar

Goal: Take advantage of the broader Salesforce x Stripe partnership^ to replace a legacy billing system with Stripe.

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.

Heroku - Enabling Payment Support for 3D Secure and Reserve Bank of India E-Mandates

3D Secure (3DS)
Goal: 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.

Goal: Leverage 3DS as the additional factor of authentication to return India-issued credit cards to the Heroku platform.

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 enablement resulted in the return of many customers and a large amount of revenue from the India region to the Heroku Platform. It also led to a career milestone, with my first post on the Heroku Blog^.

Finastra - Migration from Legacy to Go-Forward Digital Banking Platform

Goal: Lead the migration of 160+ legacy customers to our go-forward digital banking platform. This had a lot of moving parts to manage:

Result
As a result of this migration, we were able to drastically reduce the number of customers on our legacy platform, reducing the overhead and support burden on our Engineering resources and freeing them up to expand the development of our go-forward platform. One specific feature that was directly realized due to the additional Engineering capacity was support to biometric authentication (i.e. TouchID & FaceID) in our mobile banking applications.

Protocol Labs - Implementation of New Payroll Provider

Goal: Protocol Labs would like to make the switch to a new payroll provider within 3 months. Needing a project plan, including timelines, stakeholders, considerations, contingencies, resource allocation, budget, etc.

Task: For this program, I first started by building out a the branding/design. Without access to the internal resources, I had to get crafty and pull images and color codes from the Protocol Labs website and create my own branding guide to apply across a set of Google Slide, Doc, and Sheet templates.

EPAM Contiuum - Establish a Technical Program Management Office

Goal: Establish a Technical Program Management Office based in Smartsheet, for the Learning Services team at EPAM Continuum, to provide templates and best practices to the team to track projects and key metrics for our client

Task: When I joined the Learning Services consulting team at EPAM Systems they had just started using Smartsheet as a project management tool.

As the sole Smartsheet Certified User on the team, I led the effort to establish a Program Management Office, using best practices from the Project Management Institute. The PMO was responsible for creating a common template to track the progress of all projects, along with reporting templates to track key metrics for our client (Google):

Result
With this in place, it became our go to tool and dashboard during our regular standup's for monitoring in progress work and triaging upcoming work for the design teams. The PMO evolved from when it was first established to when I left, making sure to keep up with the latest tools and trends to allow the team to be as efficient as possible.

CentralSquare - Software Engineer Knowledge Transfer

Goal: Execute a comprehensive training program for 200+ employees across 15 product lines, reducing impact of Engineering reorganization after the Superion, TriTech, and Zuercher to form CentralSquare.

Task: During the merger of Superion, TriTech along with Zuercher, and the public sector and healthcare business of Aptean that formed CentralSquare, I was the project manager and lead instructional designer of a comprehensive knowledge transfer process.

With the VP of Integration as my key stakeholder, I led a team of 10 functional managers and over 200 software engineers through the task of identifying important knowledge that would be lost in in the job elimination caused by the merger to create a work breakdown structure.

Result
Over the course of 7 months, I directed and managed the project work to ensure that all milestones were met and that the project was successfully completed and closed before the final exit dates of the affected employees.

Much of the knowledge captured during this knowledge transfer process was used to create the 5 week long developer boot camp to quickly on-board and up-skill 30 entry-level developers reducing time-to-first commit from 18 days to 12 days (33% faster).