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 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
Full-stack Next.js chatbot hosted on Vercel, integrating the Claude API, Google Text-to-Speech, and AI image generation to support interactive voice and visual conversations with public-domain characters. Built independently to develop hands-on fluency with modern AI APIs and cloud deployment.
This site. Built from scratch with Next.js 15, Tailwind CSS v4, and static export — no template, no CMS. Deployed to Vercel with a custom domain via Cloudflare.