Michael Lutton Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

I've expanded my leadership domain from just owning teams building and operating product features to now including our application infrastructure teams. This increases my ownership headcount to 35 individuals.

Chicago, Il, Us

◾ Global Leadership: Cultivated strategic relationships with Business, Product, Legal, Sales, and Compliance stakeholders worldwide, aligning engineering initiatives and operational tasks with market needs and compliance standards.◾ Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partnered with Reporting teams to elevate data quality standards, solidifying the integrity and reliability of their processes and improving merchant service quality by aligning with reporting SLAs.◾ Innovation & Strategy: Orchestrated the technical and operational strategy for the merchant funding platform, managing systems responsible for over 200 billion USD in annual disbursements.

Chicago, Il, Us

◾ Strategic Expansion: Spearheaded product feature launches and regional expansion efforts with a concentrated focus on the Brazilian market, aligning product capabilities with local business needs and compliance requirements.◾ Leadership Recruitment and Development: Handpicked and nurtured a team of Engineering Managers, fostering leadership skills and domain expertise to support the department's growth and scalability.◾ Team Structure and Efficiency: Organized engineering teams into loosely coupled, autonomous groups with clear charters and empowerment areas, which enhanced agility and innovation within their respective domains.◾ Process Improvement and Agile Coaching: Coached teams towards adopting more efficient story definition processes, breaking down multi-sprint stories into smaller, vertically sliced use cases for quicker feedback loops and consistent delivery cadence.◾ Agile Practices Leadership: Contributed to the PayPal Agile Leadership Council, advocating for and implementing improved agile practices that elevated engineering processes across the company.◾ Delivery Standards Working Group: Actively participated in the cross-functional PayPal Agile Delivery Standards Working Group, helping to define and disseminate 'good practices' for engineering delivery.◾ Leadership Program Participation: Engaged in the PayPal Emerging Leadership Program, gaining insights and coaching on personal leadership and strategic goal development, further honing my skills for leading in a dynamic, matrixed organization.

Chicago, Il, Us

◾Team Leadership: Led a 6-person engineering team in automating the merchant onboarding process for the Braintree platform, including the development of data collection forms, underwriting tools for risk assessment, and systems for integrating approved merchants into the Braintree/PayPal ecosystem.◾Team Expansion and Talent Acquisition: Actively recruited and onboarded three new engineers, significantly strengthening the team's diversity and operational capacity.◾ Inclusive Leadership: Advocated for and implemented inclusive workplace practices, ensuring accessibility and compliance with legal and ADA standards, and nurturing a culture that supported the success of all team members.◾ Recruitment Process Improvement: Contributed to revising the organization's engineering recruiting practices, focusing on creating a consistent and unbiased evaluation process that assessed soft skills, technical capabilities, and alignment with company values.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

◾Dual Team Leadership: Acted as manager and technical lead for two teams: UI Tools and Profile, ensuring incremental progress towards engineering goals and balancing hands-on contribution with collaboration across Product, QA, and engineering teams. These teams supported our customer identity product, developed with node.js, Redux, and React.Process Optimization: ◆ Story Duration Reduction: Decreased average story completion time from 8 to 2 business days by reducing story size and complexity, enabling faster feedback and alignment with the product vision. ◆ Throughput and Collaboration: Boosted team throughput and reduced rework through brief, effective design discussions prior to story commencement, fostering peer collaboration and early identification of blockers. ◆ Quality Assurance: Diminished the average number of customer-impacting bugs per week from 2.5 to 0.5 by meticulously defining edge cases and implementing automated checks to ensure system functionality.

New York, Ny, Us

Outside of my day job @ Groupon, I taught a two hour workshop that introduces Agile development practices at General Assembly - Chicago. This workshop occurred once every couple of months and talks about: - Agile Principles and Values - Introduces the Scrum Framework - Introduces Kanban - Compares both approaches and provides recommendations around when when is more appropriate for your organization

Chicago, Il, Us

Optimize provided Groupon with a single unified global platform for experimentation, user behavior tracking, and experiment analytics. We strove to provide our users with world-class tools to instrument their applications, collect data, and interpret the results.My Engineering Manager responsibilities included: - Acting as the ScrumMaster for the team - Overseeing the technical implementation of all new features inside our platform - Triaging support questions and issues in order to allow the team to focus in on feature work - Providing clear communication to external stakeholders (and dependent teams) on the status of our work - Leading team stand-ups and retrospectives - Mentoring and growing the seven engineers on my teamIn addition to my role on Optimize, I also was involved in growing our organization's culture. This included helping to lead a manager and agile community of practice. I also actively mentored other employees, assisted our campus recruiting team with on-campus interviews, and represented Groupon through various volunteer opportunities.

Chicago, Il, Us

Managed a number of full-stack teams responsible for building, running, and supporting Groupon's web systems. These teams ranged from 5 to 15 people in size. Responsibilities included: * Owning the overall technical platform for the team which includes diagnosing technical problems and architecting solutions to solve business needs * Defining the implementation road map for our product goals * Developing 1-2 stories each iteration that created value for our customers * Triaging reported issues and drove any problems towards resolution * Mentoring team members on how to grow their career and provide value to the team * Running iteration planning meetings where we discussed new work and design discussions around that work

Cleveland, Oh, Us

Michael provided on-site process/engineering coaching for software delivery teams that wanted to improve their overall quality and return on investment by adopting Agile/Lean principles. As a thought leader inside his customer's organization, his primary focus was on teaching his teams TDD/ATDD techniques so that they could create high-quality web applications using Groovy and Grails. As a coach, he has also: - Mentored Project Managers on how to support and empower their teams - Assisted Business Analysts with creating acceptance criteria for user stories - Migrated Cucumber step definitions from Groovy to Ruby using the PageObject Gem and Watir - Provided technical recommendations on object-oriented architecture approaches, the use of the Spring framework for dependency resolution, dependency mocking techniques, and SOLID principles - Facilitated retrospectives for a number of teams inside the organization - Assisted IT Leadership in defining a long-term testing vision for the company as a wholeHe has also taught a number of onsite classes and delivered internal presentations on Test-Driven-Development (TDD), Writing User Stories, Release Planning, and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). Michael has also collaborated with his fellow coaches on creating materials for training Business Analysts on Agile/Lean techniques.Skills / Technologies Used: ATDD, TDD, Emergent Design, Agile Software Development, Lean Software Development, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Responsive Design, Ruby, Groovy, Grails, CSS, JQuery, JavaScript, REST, XML, AJAX, Spring, Hibernate

Paris, Paris - Issy-Les-Moulineaux, Fr

Michael served in a leadership position with the local Sogeti office that consisted of over 350 people as a solution lead in their application development practice. In this role he assisted with developing market strategies, writing proposals, teaching seminars, presenting on the advanced programming concepts, and leading an internal architecture-related group that discussed best practices across customer teams for both Microsoft and Java-based technologies. Michael was responsible for analyzing financial data for Sogeti’s Microsoft Practice in our to help the national practice leader determine the how each office was performing. He also mentored 4-6 people every year. This mentoring relationship included performing semi-annual performance reviews, providing professional career guidance, and being the mentees advocate if they were being considered for a promotion.Skills / Technologies: Coaching, Mentoring, Application Architecture, Service-Oriented Architecture, ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net WebForms, Java, SQL Server, Oracle, UML

Michael was a senior technical lead of a 8-person team responsible for monitoring all production-related activities for a platform that supported a high deductible health plan product for American Express.This system was the central hub for all data exchanges associated with the product and was responsible for synchronizing monetary and claims-related data to all outside systems such as card processors (First Data), health insurance companies (Empire Blue Cross / Blue Shield), and banking platforms (Metavente).Daily activities include being a subject matter expert on the technical implementation of all 40+ data exchanges, overseeing the verification and integrity of all data being sent into and out of the system, developing new added functionality, mentoring junior members of the team, and establishing validation routines to ensure system integrity.Skills / Technologies: Mentoring, C#, T-SQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services, Test Automation, Large Data Analysis

Worked as a contractor for various mid-cap and global 500 companies in the greater Columbus area. Roles included:- Lead developer responsible for creating a calculation system for generating rebate checks based upon customer performance. This system dramatically reduced the time it took to process and calculate rebate checks from an average of 10 weeks per year per customer down to an average of 2 weeks per year per customer. The system consumed over 55 million records of sales data and generated over $5,000,000 of rebate checks per year. - Lead developer of a Business Intelligence application for a Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical company that provided real-time access to customer sales information. This BI application replaced legacy mainframe reports with dynamic reports that could be customized to fit each sales person's needs by allowing extensive customization via filtering, drill-down, and drill-through capabilities.Skills / Technologies: TDD, Extreme Programming, Services-Oriented Architecture, Application Architecture, C#, T-SQL, Crystal Reports, Reporting Services, Microsoft ASP.Net, AJAX, REST, XML, Custom Workflow Solutions

Columbus, Ohio, Us

Specialized in the design, development, and support of their business intelligence and reporting systems. Primary team member responsible for supporting division-wide compensation systems for sales associates. This system paid out over three million dollars annually based upon bonus criteria.Technologies /

Carmel, Indiana, Us

Worked at Sallie Mae as a contractor specializing in Microsoft-based technologies for their Internet Applications Group. Performed full life-cycle development for customer support system, including gathering requirements, writing functional and design specifications, developing and testing code, and assisting with product releases. • Interviewed end-users to gather and prioritize requirements for system• Created requirements document stating the projects desired goals based upon interviews• Designed mockups and prototypes of Visual Basic application in order to verify that requirements matched user expectations• Developed Visual Basic application utilizing SQL Server stored procedures, XML, and Visual Basic FormsTechnologies /

Dublin 2, Ie

Primarily worked as a Technical Architect / Developer / Team Lead while at Accenture focusing on eCommerce and eCRM projects. Projects included being one of four development team leaders for a 50+ person project that implemented leading edge Microsoft.Net technologies including ASP.NET, SQL Server 2000, JAVA, SOAP/XML and Web Services. While in this position, he was responsible for supervising all project-wide development of SQL Server statements, leading the implementation of ASP.NET pages for the project, assisting with the creating of project standards, and helping the database and operations team(s) with mission-critical support issues. Other projects while at Accenture included auditing an existing eCRM application for HotJobs and recommending optimizations for improving the application's stability and performance. He also was involved in the creation of a firm-wide course that taught analysts and consultants how to design Microsoft-based solutions based upon Accenture's methodology. Technologies /

Us

Designed web applications for startups and large companies utilizing both Microsoft and Java-based technologies. Roles included Application Architect for a JAVA project, SQL Server Developer, Team Lead for a B2C startup, XML Developer, and ASP / VB / COM Programmer. Technologies /

Indianapolis, In, Us

Designed, Created, and Supported Microsoft based applications associated with the Networking and Document Management Practice. Primary support engineer for clients with questions associated with Microsoft SQL Server. Assisted with the troubleshooting of Microsoft Exchange issues. Responsible for programming and the integration of custom application development solutions utilizing Optika File Power and PcDocs for the Document Management Practice.Technologies /