Senior Technical Program Manager and Product Leader
Resume:
KIRK TARRACH
Redmond, WA
****@**********.*** www.linkedin.com/com/in/kirk-tarrach
Senior Program Manager Senior Technical Product Manager Accessibility Manager Consultant Prompt Engineer
SUMMARY
Results-driven Technical Program Manager with 15+ years at Microsoft and Fortune 500 environments, combining deep engineering expertise, test automation, and quality management to deliver high-impact software in complex, matrixed settings. Excel at bridging engineering execution with stakeholder alignment, defining quality metrics, building actionable dashboards, configuring test environments, and driving automated testing strategies to ensure reliable releases. Proven in coordinating cross-functional teams, troubleshooting issues, and maintaining customer-focused outcomes under tight timelines. Strong communicator with hands-on technical depth in automation, metrics visualization, and process optimization.
Innovative Leadership: 10+ years of proven Fortune 500 tech leadership experience. Personally led approx. ten directs and hundreds of indirects over the years. Capable of leading individuals, teams, and orgs directly (and via influence). Essentially a “Provider” leader (action oriented, confident own path or methodology, loyal to colleagues, driven to provide for others). Proven ability to lead for results in fast-paced environments. Known for being proactive. Unafraid to be an agent of change.
Program Management: 7+ years of proven, progressively expansive PM expertise at MSFT and Meta. Highly capable of managing multiple/concurrent projects. Independently program managed 3x major programs with multiple areas of scope (affecting 400+ staff at MSFT). Focuses on bringing clarity to devs, insulating team members from chaos, and setting accurate glide paths towards release.
Service and Application Engineering: 15+ years of engineering expertise. Collaborate with engineers and technical leaders to create flexible cloud experiences.
Customer Obsessed Customer Service: 15+ Leveraging usability studies, design thinking and inclusive practices to make all products accessible and with experiences to delight all users. Builds compelling stories that demonstrate genuine caring for customers.
Compliance: 12+ years of compliance-oriented experience. Worked to reduce risk across security, privacy, responsible AI and geopol throughout career. Believes compliance is essential to designing robust products for all users. Process and detail oriented.
KNOWLEDGE SKILLS ABILITIES
Agile
Building Relationships
Creative Problem Solving
Critical Thinking
Customer Empathy Storyteller
Detail Oriented
Enterprise Strategy
Test Automation
Mitigation Strategies
Process-Oriented
Project Leadership
Security Privacy
Strong Verbal/Written Communication
System Architecture
User Experience (UX)
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER 01/2024 to 01/2026
Meta (Reality Labs Display Glasses with Neural Band) via INSPYR Solutions Redmond, WA
• Enhanced Sprint Planning and Release Methodologies: Modernized sprint planning, roadmapping, and release processes for 30+ workstream teams, boosting development velocity and product quality.
• Schedule Management: Integrated embedded/software team schedules into unified product timelines to meet aggressive release targets.
• Unified Cross-Feature Team Coordination: Created single source-of-truth digital dashboard platform for cross-feature coordination across project lifecycle.
• Leadership in Software Process Enhancement: Led software process improvements, including risk escalation, analytics dashboards, and collaboration tools.
• Direct Stakeholder Collaboration: Partnered directly with executives, department heads, and leads to resolve blockers and enhance efficiency.
• Customer-Centric Requirement Analysis: Defined customer-driven functional requirements for embedded hardware, AI, wearables—emphasizing UX, security, reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Comprehensive Process and Product Evaluation: Conducted thorough evaluations of localization, telemetry, and accessibility standards, leading to substantial updates in backlog items and procedural enhancements.
SENIOR TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER AND ACCESSIBILITY MANAGER 05/2023 to 1/2024
EsoTarrach LLC Redmond, WA
AI and Prompt Engineering: Collaborated with developers and designers on AI-driven application to streamline workforce re-entry, incorporating prompt engineering and user-centric quality practices.
SENIOR TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER AND ACCESSIBILITY MANAGER 9/2021 TO 5/2023
MICROSOFT Customer Growth and Learning Redmond, WA
Project: School Data Sync
Relationship Building: Communicated with key stakeholders and partnered with technical managers via a “World Tour” for SDS.
Project Alignment: Spearheaded process and data analysis of current SDS data gathering and technology assessment for potential tech for what SDS Business Data Augury project. Using the data insights road mapped long term strategy, and detailed project schedule all based on leveraging Power BI. Power BI project reporting and data visualizations shared with management. Presented progress in QBR.
Focus Area: Accessibility
Process Management: Developed accessibility strategy for teams around the world that resulted in educating stakeholders on how to maintain compliance, share accessibility best practices and evangelizing accessibility across organizations.
Leadership: Built worldwide 20+ person accessibility champions team while managing and allocating resources across teams worldwide.
KPIs OKRs: Created ADO Queries (100+) to track bug states and bug totals for 11+ projects on an ADO Dashboard that was used by organizational, and team leads to monitor bug progress, external blocking bugs and out of SLA bugs.
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER AND ACCESSIBILITY MANAGER 9/2017 TO 9/2021
MICROSOFT World Wide learning Redmond, WA
Project: Career Coach
Project Leadership: Led Career Coach team from brainstorming to product release owning the detailed project plan, road mapped long term product scheduling and achievable sprint schedules in Azure Dev Ops. Wrote clear requirements detailing schedule, cost, and scope for all levels of the business and across multiple product groups. Shared progress of project in QBR’s.
Collaboration: Engaged with LinkedIn to leverage LinkedIn Economic Graph data inside of Career Coach LLM to create a true Microsoft product. First team in Microsoft to be granted access to this data. Partnership with LinkedIn provided customers with real-world skill taxonomy which increased sales and usage of Career Coach in institutions around the world.
Product Leadership: Career Coach had consecutively been in Office Accessibility A11y tier for longer than any other EDU team since joining the EDU org (only the top 3% of all projects are nominated). Resulted in greater visibility on project/development process.
Technology Strategy: Designed initial micro service architecture that career coach was based on this included authentication/ authorization. This critical thinking created technical diagrams allowing team to move from initial brainstorming through planning to implementation very quickly.
Risk Management Risk Mitigation: Worked with design and development teams to ensure all CELA compliance (security privacy, geopol, responsible AI (ORA), Identify management and accessibility) requirements were met. Met 100% of Microsoft’s strict compliance requirements (guaranteed customer safety and never missed a ship date).
Risk Analysis and Reporting: Analyzed schedule sensitivity and risk, reported on critical tasks and issues to management, and recommended solutions for high-risk areas. Maintain standard project delivery schedule templates with key milestones.
UI Strategy: Co-Designed the Career Coach UI with the Lead Designer (web based for desktop and mobile) to meet Microsoft brand requirements and Microsoft Accessibility Standards (MAS) and across work across all devices and platforms.
Project Guidance: Leveraged design thinking and single component Developer code deep dives to make sure each piece of UI was vetted with customers.
Process Management: Identified gaps and created team processes that allowed the team to work at a high velocity while still delivering stable code on schedule.
Customer Input: Using Usability studies and design thinking sought customer and community input and used their feedback to inform future versions.
Focus Area: Accessibility
Collaboration: Collaborated with Executive leadership, Team leaders and across 11x Project teams of various function to increase accessibility knowledge and standardized Design and Development processes.
Knowledge Distillation: Translated Microsoft Accessibility Standards (MAS) into well documented, understandable, and achievable Design and Developer processes. Educated stakeholders on accessibility best practices and evangelized accessibility across orgs. Ensured compliance with digital accessibility regulations and requirements.
Technical Presentation: Used one on one coaching, team single component Developer code deep dives and organizational training to educate, evangelize accessibility processes and grow talent.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER AND ACCESSIBILITY MANAGER 6/2013 to 9/2017
MICROSOFT Learning and Readiness Redmond, WA
Accessibility Leadership: Brought all Learning and Readiness organization digital products into compliance with Microsoft’s new accessibility requirements with a small team of 5x Dev vendors while staying within timelines and budget. Included all websites, exams, course content (video or documents), and marketing materials across Sales, Finance, Legal, Engineering, Supply Chain, and Operations.
Audit Scheduling: Created schedule to continuously audit 3rd party partners with existing digital products.
Stepping Up: Asked by a sister organization to explain our process, help educate their teams and support them on through their push to bring their products into compliance.
Third-Party Management: worked with 15+ Microsoft partners to drive integration of accessibility requirements with external third-party vendors' products and processes.
Contracts Bid Processes: Incorporated accessibility requirements into dozens of bids and contracts. Defined accessibility requirements and responsibilities in contracts. Monitored compliance with contractual requirements related to accessibility.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER IN TEST 10/2007 to 6/2013
MICROSOFT Worldwide Learning Redmond, WA
Software Design: Co-designed and co-developed the Learning Central Platform and shipped V1.
Automation: Solely wrote test automation platform. Designed automation that reduced manual test effort, accelerated defect detection, and improved release confidence. Wrote and maintained automated test frameworks covering unit, integration, and end-to-end scenarios. Set up and validated test environments, installed builds, and diagnosed failures across distributed systems
Remote Leadership Coaching: Led a team of six international vendors to expand the test cases to test all of Learning Central. Traveled to China to train team. Resulted in a vendor team that produced exactly what the Redmond team needed because I coached every aspect of their work and code reviewed every line of test code.
SELECT EXTENDED CHRONOLOGY
Software Development Engineer in Test Talyst 2006 to 2007
Software Development Engineer in Test Microsoft 2000 to 2006
SELECT CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation MIT Professional Education Online November 2023
Introduction to ChatGPT edX Auditing Online May 2023
Disability and Digital Media: Accessibility, Representation, and Inclusion Curtin University Online via edX May 2023
Design Thinking Fundamentals RIT Online via edX May 2023
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Accessibility Georgia Institute of Technology Online via edX April 2023
AI Programming with Python Online via Udacity 2020
CERTIFICATIONS CERTIFICATES PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS
Pursuing Project Management Professional (PMP) Project Management Institute Expected Q2 2026
Project Management Essentials Certified (PMEC) MSI 2023
Scripting Visual Test InterTest Labs
SOFTWARE EXPERIENCE
Microsoft Office Suite: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, OneNote, Visio.
Cloud: OneDrive, Google Drive.
Collaboration: Zoom, MSFT Teams, Skype, Join.me.
Design Prototyping PM: Figma, Jira.
Web Design: HTML 4 and 5, CSS, JavaScript.
Languages: C#, Python
SELECT VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Career and Tech Education Advisory Committee Member 2021 to Present Monroe School District Career Tech Education
Coding Mentor for Hour of Code 2016 to 2019 Highland's Middle School and Bellevue Big Picture School
Lunchmaking Guru Summers of 2020 to 2021 Monroe School District
Girls Soccer Coach 2019 to Present LWYSA Crossfire Select
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