Greg is available for hire
Hire GregGreg Sarcona
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Location
Sunnyvale, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
October 21, 2020
Greg is a senior agile coach who has led teams in startup, mid-size, and enterprise-sized organizations for developing internal, B2B, and user-facing applications. He has led cross-functional and geographically distributed groups at the product and portfolio, program, and team levels. Bringing into unison the processes, practices, teams, and tools for increasing productivity and value delivery is fun for him. He is conversational, approachable, and always available for assistance.
Project Highlights
Customer Community Portal
Set up and integrated product management, support, and services tools to support a new portal for customer-input feedback and ideas.
Create Lean Prioritization Process
Created a new process for strategy, product management, and engineering to use for defining and prioritizing solution-level features.
Expertise
Work Experience
Project Manager, PMO
2021 - PRESENT
Roche
- Led the Lean portfolio management of digital pathology research epics.
- Project-managed teams developing UI, machine learning, and image analysis for pathologists in cancer detection.
- Oversaw the Agile transformation of team planning and execution in research and early-stage development.
Product Operations and Agile Program Manager
2017 - 2020
Flexera
- Defined Lean portfolio management processes for strategic initiatives, product management, and engineering, and held trainings and workshops for evangelizing adoption.
- Generated monthly roadmaps for customers and internal teams (support, services, sales, engineering, and product).
- Released the customer portal for community-based feedback and ideation. Integrated the portal with support, product, and engineering tools (Jira, Salesforce, and ProductBoard).
- Standardized prioritization and scheduling methods for product and engineering.
- Maintained alignment among strategy, engineering, product management, marketing, and support through regular leads meetings with executives and team members.
- Administered Jira, ProductBoard, and Aha! tools, creating flows for maintaining alignment among executive strategy, product management, and engineering.
Agile Project Manager
2016 - 2017
BDNA
- Joined the team as an Agile coach and project management leader, then led teams through multiple releases of flagship products and new products for on-premise and SaaS platforms.
- Set up processes and workflows for engineering and support to prioritize and schedule updates, and communicate those plans to customers.
- Trained Scrum masters, product owners, program managers, support, and upper management in multiple locations (US, EMEA, China, and India) on Agile methods for definition, iteration, prioritization, scheduling, execution/implementation, and release.
- Administered Jira tools and made enhancements for reporting, scheduling, prioritization, and ease of use by engineering.
- Assisted in merger and acquisition of projects, tools, and processes when BDNA was acquired by Flexera in 2017.
Agile Program Manager
2015 - 2016
SAP
- Led the agile transformation for server deployment teams in the US, EMEA, India, and APAC by developing and refining best practices.
- Trained PMO, management, and team leaders on Agile methods and JIRA tooling.
- Identified obstacles to productivity and worked with engineering, IT, and executive management to remove them.
Agile Transformation Leader and Scrum Master
2014 - 2015
Western Digital (WD)
- Led Agile transformation and execution for teams in iOS, Android, firmware, and API.
- Developed best practices with pilot teams, then trained other scrum masters and teams with creating Communities of Practice.
- Set up the Atlassian tools suite and administration. Created dashboards for team members, scrum masters, product owners and managers, upper management, release planning, and beta testing.
- Hired a team of scrum masters and agile program management.
Scrum Master and Agile Coach
2012 - 2014
eBay
- Led agile transformations for the transition from Waterfall to Scrum in paid search, photos, data warehouse, and server deployment teams.
- Transitioned the paid search engine marketing team from legacy system to new scalable system with worldwide bring-up in less than one year.
- Trained eBay teams on PayPal Agile methods in preparation for the merger.
Scrum Master and Business Analyst
2011 - 2011
GoingOn Technologies
- Led Agile transformation, developing the Scrumban process, practices, and tooling suited to team delivery methods.
- Managed scheduling and road mapping for development teams, UI/UX, and back-end architecture teams.
- Conducted quality audits for root-causing quality problems, cost, and schedule overruns. Determined COPQ and suggested remedies to executive management for selecting courses of action.
- Defined processes for including customer-reported bugs into the roadmap, and how to communicate their fixes to customers.
Project History
Customer Community Portal
Set up and integrated product management, support, and services tools to support a new portal for customer-input feedback and ideas.
Coordinated support leads, product management leaders, services, and solution strategy for defining the use of the customer portal to acquire voice-of-customer for feedback and new/enhancement ideas.
Showed product management on how to use the portal and its input in determining customer value of new features and enhancements.
Trained product management, support, services, and success teams on the use of the portal for interacting with customers for ideas, issues, and roadmaps.
Integrated Jira, ProductBoard, and Salesforce tooling and migrated issues among their databases.
Showed product management on how to use the portal and its input in determining customer value of new features and enhancements.
Trained product management, support, services, and success teams on the use of the portal for interacting with customers for ideas, issues, and roadmaps.
Integrated Jira, ProductBoard, and Salesforce tooling and migrated issues among their databases.
Create Lean Prioritization Process
Created a new process for strategy, product management, and engineering to use for defining and prioritizing solution-level features.
Defined, implemented, evangelized, and refined scaled-agile processes for lean portfolio management for the purposes of feature definition and prioritization.
Tied features to strategic themes for capacity management and vectors for determining customer value.
Trained product management and engineering on how to roadmap: the difference between start, end, and delivery to customers.
Implemented integrated solutions in Jira, ProductBoard, and Aha!
Tied features to strategic themes for capacity management and vectors for determining customer value.
Trained product management and engineering on how to roadmap: the difference between start, end, and delivery to customers.
Implemented integrated solutions in Jira, ProductBoard, and Aha!
New Product Introduction for Cloud Spend Management
Served as the scrum master for a team developing a new AWS cloud instance and licensing spend management tool for a single customer.
Worked with the product owner, cloud partner, and project customer to define POC and MVP for the product.
Worked with the product owner and executive management to determine MMP for follow-up features for MVP project customers, plus new customers.
Led the team using Scrum and Scrumban methods for development.
Assisted the product owner in backlog management, tracking, and demo readiness in addition to the standard scrum master responsibilities.
Worked with the product owner and executive management to determine MMP for follow-up features for MVP project customers, plus new customers.
Led the team using Scrum and Scrumban methods for development.
Assisted the product owner in backlog management, tracking, and demo readiness in addition to the standard scrum master responsibilities.
Paid Search Engine Marketing Platform Upgrade
Served as the scrum master and agile coach for a team developing a paid search engine marketing analysis platform for a global etailer.
Scrum master for a team of developers, database architects, data analysts, search engine marketing experts, and a localization expert.
Trained and led the team on its first Agile, Scrum, project to define and develop a system.
Migrated global online etailer marketing group's system to provide 100x capacity improvement, 80% reduction in data analysis turnaround time, and support for extended-character sets for Eastern Europe and Asia.
Phase 1: New tool development.
Phase 2: Crossover and bring-up.
Worked with the marketing and systems teams to define and test "playbook" for data drain, bring-down, data ETL, and bring-up. Iterative refinements reduced cycle time by more than 50%, allowing for the end date of the project to be pulled in by over three months.
Trained and led the team on its first Agile, Scrum, project to define and develop a system.
Migrated global online etailer marketing group's system to provide 100x capacity improvement, 80% reduction in data analysis turnaround time, and support for extended-character sets for Eastern Europe and Asia.
Phase 1: New tool development.
Phase 2: Crossover and bring-up.
Worked with the marketing and systems teams to define and test "playbook" for data drain, bring-down, data ETL, and bring-up. Iterative refinements reduced cycle time by more than 50%, allowing for the end date of the project to be pulled in by over three months.
Education
1991 - 1996
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
Lehigh University - Bethlehem, PA
1988 - 1991
Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering
Lehigh University - Bethlehem, PA
1984 - 1988
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
Certifications
MARCH 2021 - MARCH 2022
Lean Portfolio Management 5.1
Scaled Agile Academy
APRIL 2020 - APRIL 2022
SPC5 (SAFe SPC 5.0)
Scaled Agile Academy
JULY 2014 - JULY 2022
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Scrum Alliance
JULY 2014 - JULY 2022
Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)
Scrum Alliance
FEBRUARY 2012 - JULY 2022
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Scrum Alliance
SEPTEMBER 2005 - SEPTEMBER 2021
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute
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