Michael Gaskin

Principal technology operations leader with wide-ranging experience across product management, engineering, tooling and enterprise IT. Specialized in making sense of high-ambiguity, low-maturity environments and creating capabilities where none currently exist. A hands-on player-coach comfortable with both high-level strategy and low-level execution through direct access to code and consoles. Cool under pressure and no stranger to firefighting with major revenue losses on the line.

Lead Global eCommerce Operations at PUMA Group (2023-04 – Present)

Bedrock technology operations role providing the foundations on which PUMA's global product teams build PUMA.com and associated systems

• Managed a €3.5 million CAPEX portfolio including ~20 externals and 16 platform and tooling vendors
• Started up and led five functional teams for platform engineering, cloud administration, edge technology, continuous performance testing, and L2 support / incident management
• "Person of last resort" for mysteries, intractable bugs, compliance crises, litigation support, and black-hole issues where ownership was unclear or contested
• Sole author and driver of a multi-million-euro, multi-year RFP for Global Operations Center serving the direct-to-consumer technology estate for eCommerce, order management, and brick-and-mortar retail tech support
• Conceived, designed, developed and productionized Order Viewer, a secure internal application providing observability into PUMA.com order data at sub-second latency; independently delivered architecture, implementation, GCP deployment, SSO integration and organizational compliance

Senior DevOps Manager, Global eCommerce at PUMA Group (2021-07 – 2023-04)

Led the development of a new headless commerce solution for major PUMA.com markets and managed cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, observability, and deployment pipelines.

• Recruited from North America to join the Global team in Germany for a technological moonshot to develop a new headless commerce solution for major PUMA.com markets in North America, the EU, India, Japan and Oceania
• Founding project team member and name-giver of Cybercat, a solution comprising a custom-built React/NextJS storefront running in the public cloud, a React Native mobile app for iOS and Android, a modern content management system (Sanity), and a GraphQL backend-for-frontend API to interface with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and other data sources
• Responsible for cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, observability, and deployment pipelines (CI/CD)
• Identified and seized an opportunity to switch from x86 to Graviton-based Lambda functions to save a mid-six-figure amount on compute cost annually
• Selected and built out PUMA's observability stack from scratch with Coralogix for logs and APM, Anodot anomaly detection and Checkly synthetic monitoring

Manager – eCommerce Site Operations at PUMA Group (2020-01 – 2021-07)

Led the development team building out and operating the US and Canada PUMA.com sites with $170M annual revenue. First point of escalation for all incidents, outages, and bugs affecting the sites.

• Led the development team building out and operating the US and Canada PUMA.com sites ($170M annual revenue)
• First point of escalation for all incidents, outages, and bugs affecting the US and Canada sites
• Successfully balanced competing demands between regional and global roadmap items, bugs, pain points, and technical debt by creating a single-pane-of-glass view of all Work In Progress in Miro
• Led the organization in bi-annual roadmap planning and weekly tactical adjustments; encouraged horse-trading among stakeholders and enforced tradeoffs to protect development team capacity
• Delivered new capabilities including Apple Pay, Buy Now Pay Later options, outfit recommendations with Stylitics, post-purchase delivery assurance with Narvar, migration to global SAP Emarsys email platform, Ambassador Card support for athletes and celebrities, WCAG accessibility compliance, a wishlist, improved observability with Splunk, and more

IT Service Management Analyst at MathWorks (2018-03 – 2020-01)

• Designed incident, problem, and release management processes within an evolving Platform Engineering function
• Streamlined major incident collaboration by introducing a ChatOps-based system with xMatters and Microsoft Teams
• Created a contract management system using Jira and Riada Insight to replace fragmented spreadsheets

Principal Analyst – IT Service Management at Staples (2015-02 – 2018-03)

• Founding member and name-giver of the Continual Service Improvement team within Staples Digital Solutions
• Unearthed a decade-old enterprise process map of Staples and used it to change the way the organization thought about IT reliability and availability
• Completed a short-term assignment with the DotcomSupport team to improve L2 incident and bug handling for Staples.com, a top 5 online retailer. Helped the team to make better use of ServiceNow and Jira to prevent issues from stalling and falling out of view
• Stepped in as temporary Product Owner for an analytics team in crisis and used Weighted Shortest Job First prioritization to reduce the lead time for analytics requests from 5 months to 3 weeks

Program Specialist – Global eCommerce PMO at Staples (2015-02 – 2018-03)

• Project member for the buildout of design.staples.com, a major new copy & print platform replacing several vendor-operated white-label sites
• Played a variety of roles interfacing with inside sales and customer service staff, in-store Copy & Print associates, the PNI Media production team, and Staples Premedia Services to manage the transition and build out the collection of artwork templates for the new site

B.A. in Geography – Middlebury College (2008-01 – 2011-01)