Certs I've earned and how I keep my skills sharp
I only get certs that help me do my job. Each one ties to something I use at Citrix.
Top-level SAFe cert. I was already doing most of this at Citrix — PI planning for 100+ engineers, program Kanban, coaching scrum masters. The cert made the knowledge more structured.
I got this to have better conversations with my eng teams about our hybrid cloud deployments. Helps me review architecture decisions and push back on capacity plans when the numbers don't add up.
Goes beyond the basics — applying Scrum when things get messy. Tricky team dynamics, org blockers. I use it to mentor scrum teams and run retrospectives that actually surface real problems.
I'm a TPM inside Citrix's DaaS org, so I needed to understand the product at an architectural level. Lets me talk to engineers in their language and catch issues in design reviews.
IT service management — incident workflows, SLOs, change management. I use it when coordinating dev and ops during production deploys. Not glamorous, but keeps releases from becoming fire drills.
Got this early as a foundation. I still use PMP principles for program charters, budgets, vendor negotiations, and risk registers. The quantitative side pairs well with my agile certs.
Certs are checkpoints, not finish lines. What I need to know changes every couple years.
I read eng blogs from Netflix, Google, and Amazon, plus distributed systems papers. Active in TPM, SRE, and platform engineering communities online.
Lately focused on Kubernetes, observability, and ML infrastructure — areas that keep showing up in my programs.
Conferences I attend regularly:
If you're breaking into TPM or leveling up, here's how I'd sequence it:
PMP or CAPM for basics. PSM I for Scrum. Learn JIRA, Confluence, basic CI/CD. Read The Phoenix Project and The Manager's Path.
PSM II and a cloud cert (AWS SA Associate or Azure Fundamentals). ITIL 4 for service management. Start attending conferences. Read Accelerate and Team Topologies.
SAFe SPC if you do scaled agile. Domain-specific certs for your industry. Work on exec communication. Read An Elegant Puzzle and SAFe 5.0 Distilled. Consider speaking.
More books and tools on the Resources page. See my skills breakdown for how this maps to actual work.