Herb Payton

About Herb Payton

Senior Manager with more than 20 years in software industry leadership. Skilled in driving multimillion-dollar projects, and managing stakeholder, employee, and client relationships. Proven ability to manage complex projects in a fast-paced environment, negotiate contracts, streamline operations, direct sourcing engagements, and build lasting business partnerships. Led projects and teams at Microsoft, Amazon, Warner Bros, and Epic Games, achieving the delivery of business and technical solutions.

Experience

1. Project Manager

   Capgemini

   Jun 2025 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   As a Technical Product Manager/Project Manager my duties revolve around defining, tracking, and managing all in-progress cross-team work ensuring clear priorities, strategies, and ownership, and how technology can align on the same goals. If conflicting priorities arise, I communicate with engineering and other internal teams and leadership to negotiate trade-offs and plan next steps. As a TPM/PM I focus on communication and collaboration, clarity and work definition, risk assessment, strategizing with internal teams and stakeholders, building roadmaps and establishing and driving timelines for product development and test.Other duties of the TPM/PM are as follows but not limited to: Tracking and managing all in-progress work and backlog items, ensuring clear priorities and ownership and driving continuous communication on all issues. Monitoring project status and working with engineers to mitigate blockers. Working closely with engineering, design, test, as well as other internal teams to ensure that technical and business goals are met. Creating well-defined business stories, narratives, and work progression documentation to support engineering and test teams. Identifying dependencies across multiple engineering teams and proactively managing cross-functional coordination. Owning communication of project updates to leadership, ensuring transparency on delivery timelines, key milestones met, or missed opportunities. Persistence in our objectives while remaining open to feedback and collaboration. Fostering collaboration between technical and non-technical stakeholders to align business and engineering goals. Influencing best practices around project execution, ensuring the elimination of bottlenecks and unnecessary manual toil.

Education

• University of Washington

  BA, English