Sr. Technical Program Manager
Jovan Werbes
7 years turning complex programs into clear outcomes. Currently leading AI transformation at Highspot — making AI stick, not just ship.
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Sr. Technical Program Manager
7 years turning complex programs into clear outcomes. Currently leading AI transformation at Highspot — making AI stick, not just ship.
Who I Am
7 years running technical programs across engineering, cloud infrastructure, and AI initiatives at companies like lululemon, Hitachi Energy, and Highspot. I close the gap between what AI can do and what organizations are actually ready to absorb.
My edge is being genuinely technical — a CS degree, time as a software engineer, hands-on experience with the tooling — without losing sight of the people and processes that determine whether any of it actually lands.
Cloud cost reduction driven at scale
Engineering & vendor teams led simultaneously
Critical vulnerabilities eliminated via CI/CD
Team throughput improvement while raising quality
What I Do
Building adoption strategies that create measurable change — north-star metrics, governance, change management, and mitigating vendor lock-in before it becomes a problem.
Complex multi-stakeholder programs from roadmap to release — Agile and Waterfall delivery, risk management, and the kind of stakeholder alignment that doesn't require constant escalation.
Global capacity planning, cloud cost forecasting, and remediation programs — including a 30% spend reduction across SaaS and infrastructure platforms at lululemon.
Incident response, unified triage workflows, SLO/SLA alignment, and release management — turning reactive on-call chaos into structured, measurable operations.
CI/CD vulnerability gating, infrastructure-as-code, SDLC enforcement — cutting critical vulnerabilities by over 50% and building the guardrails that keep delivery moving without cutting corners.
The hard part of any transformation isn't the technology — it's the people. Building the habits, processes, and incentives that make new ways of working actually stick.
AI Toolkit
Not surface-level familiarity. These are the tools I push hard, evaluate critically, and use to move faster and think deeper.
Deep research, strategy documents, and complex reasoning where nuance and accuracy matter more than speed.
AI-native editor for rapid prototyping, automation scripts, and hands-on technical evaluation of developer workflows.
Long-context analysis, multimodal tasks, and cross-referencing large document sets at speed.
Synthesizing research, internal documents, and meeting transcripts into structured, actionable intelligence.
Specialized AI workflows and automation for operational tasks and process improvement.
The stack evolves constantly.
These are the current daily drivers — the list grows as the field does.
Journey
Started in arts, found the pull of systems thinking too strong to ignore. Switched to CS and graduated with a degree that taught me how to decompose hard problems — a habit that's defined every job since.
Answered 911 calls while finishing school — translating high-stakes emergencies into clear, actionable reports for first responders. An unexpected foundation for calm, precise communication under pressure.
Designed Kubernetes-based microservices for satellite ground stations under government and ITAR compliance. Mission-critical software with real consequences — where I first understood what it means to ship with no margin for error.
First TPM role: led a monolith-to-microservices modernization across 3 engineering teams, reducing a 2-week database operation to 5 minutes. Doubled team throughput. Recovered a failing program by restructuring its dependencies from scratch.
Led engineering practice, cloud operations, and reliability programs across 8+ engineering and vendor teams globally. Reduced cloud spend by 30%, cut critical vulnerabilities by 50%+, and unified incident management across QA, Support, and Engineering.
AI/LLM product modernization across 4 product streams. Built the backlog from scratch, coached the team through refinement, and designed a 2-year horizon that brought coherence to a fragmented product strategy.
Leading Highspot's internal AI transformation program. Building the strategy, metrics, and adoption infrastructure that turns AI from a point of curiosity into an organizational capability — including hands-on evaluation of local LLM approaches to mitigate cost and vendor risk.
Contact
Whether it's AI strategy, a program management challenge, or a conversation about where this is all going — I'm always up for it.
jfwerbes@gmail.com