Christian Gaardmark

+1 425-894-6066  |  Christian.Gaardmark@outlook.com  |  linkedin.com/in/Christian-Gaardmark 

Product Leader

Professional Highlights

6 years of partnering with awesome teams, setting product direction and multi-year roadmaps, defining metrics and targets, and delivering impact for 15,000+ internal people and 3B+ external monthly active users.

i18n Foundation and Developer Experience        2021 - 2023

1. Established the i18n DevEx Customer Connect program, where we engage with our developer community. We have just conducted our first comprehensive user study, including interviews and large-scale surveys, to gather crucial insights and identify key levers with which we developed a multi-year roadmap to reduce active effort (25 employee years saved) and enable 3,500+ engineers at Meta to ship impact faster (66 workflow years saved) across 8,000 monthly diffs.
2. Led the Global Experience efficiency program, establishing cross-functional collaborations and standardizing metrics across all of the 1,000+ people within the Global Experience organization. The program is projected to reduce costs by over $8M by the end of 2023 and have established common framing and metrics.
3. Supported the i18n foundation team and collectively enhanced the efficiency of content localization across all Meta products. The platform ensures that over 2 million English source product strings can be translated into all supported languages. The platform also collects valuable data on content impressions across languages. This approach has unlocked new product insights (e.g. 5% of content is viewed, with a long tail of content that has 0 < 1000 views), and enabled content experimentation which has resulted in incremental engagement lift up to 7%, and enabled localization prioritization.

Content Platform        2017 - 2021

1. Spearheaded the inception, secured engineering funding from VPs (GBM, i18n, CPP), and oversaw the design and implementation of a no-code view and other enhancements for Facebook's Content Management System. This required extensive cross-functional collaboration with teams comprising more than 40 members. Effectively reduced the average creation-to-publish time for help articles by 5 minutes and blogging time by an average of 60 minutes, significantly enhancing the productivity and confidence of thousands of internal creators. Employed metrics such as the percentage of active creators to track progress, facilitate follow-up interviews, and make necessary adjustments.
2. Pioneered the direct editing and publishing of strings within design tooling, while maintaining quality safeguards. Successfully influenced VPs of Product Design, i18n and CPP at Meta to fund engineering resources for implementation. This was achieved through a user-centric approach involving user interviews, collaboration with product design and content designers, and overseeing the engineering implementation including leveraging key metrics in active users and edited content.

14 years of leading, envisioning, and creating Microsoft 365 (Office) products and services.

Senior Program Manager and Senior Lead | Internationalization Platform        2014 - 2017

Pursuing the goal of expanding Microsoft's customer reach and content availability within a resource-constrained environment and independent localization businesses, I partnered with Windows, Azure, and Office teams to develop a unified Localization Platform. This platform enabled Microsoft to localize software and content in over 100 languages, ultimately contributing to the company's mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

1. Developed a platform with the capability to first machine-translate content, deploy the translated content, and then automatically upgrade the most viewed content based on budget signals. This innovative approach optimized resource allocation and content quality.
2. Constructed and populated a vast, multi-domain translation memory across Microsoft, enabling the recycling of 30% to 100% of all content created by Microsoft. This significantly increased efficiency and consistency in content production.

Senior Program Manager | Office Central Services and Developer Experience        2012 - 2014

Added features to Microsoft 365 that enabled users (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, SharePoint) to open and save files to both local and cloud services through a single endpoint. This endpoint allowed developers to add and discover various services, all of which are now integrated into the Microsoft Graph.

1. Enabled Office to discover required 1st, 2nd and 3rd party services, e.g. SharePoint, OneDrive, and DropBox.
2. Strong cross functional partnerships across Windows, Live, Office and select 3rd party companies.

Senior Lead Program Manager | Office.com and Content Management Platform        2010 - 2012

Led the expansion and redesign of Office.com by integrating clipart, image, template, most recently used, and assistance services. At the time, the platform served approximately 75M monthly active users in 37+ languages, offering 7M assets.

1. Developed the Office.com Content Management System (CMS) on Microsoft SharePoint, setting a new standard in content management within the company.
2. CMS roadmaps and features were informed by ongoing cross-functional interviews, design sprints, and a weekly near-zero-downtime shipping schedule, a practice that was unprecedented at Microsoft during that time.
3. My team also contributed to the development of Office Win32 client features such as 'New from Template', 'Most Recently Used', and 'Assistance Services'.

Program Manager and Lead Program Manager | Localization System        2003 - 2010

Led the Office Globalization Team, scaled our system and processes so that Microsoft Office could be released efficiently into 100+ markets.

1. Grew from peer mentor to people manager of 5 full time reports.
2. The team designed the xCube localization system and processes that enabled Microsoft Office to be released into 100+ markets.
3. Strong cross functional partnership across the Microsoft Office International organization.
4. Partnered with Microsoft Windows in adopting our xCube solution for their content localization.
5. Build all our initial prototypes to quickly validate our direction with our internal users.

3 years of enabling Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to reach millions of people around the globe through innovative tooling reduced all of Microsoft Office Internationalization's localization spend by 40%.

Software Engineer | Office Internationalization Tooling        2001 - 2003

Build tooling that enabled Microsoft Office to ship their product and help content in 100 languages.

1. Designed, implemented and supported internal localization tools which helped Office reduce external localization spend by 40% through best in class recycling, repeats, and terminology changes processes.
2. Created an internal design pattern study group and restructured our internal team shared code base.

Software Engineer | Internationalization Tooling        1998 - 1999

Scaled the Internationalization of 8 Microsoft Windows and Office products through custom automation and supported internal and external localization cross-functional teams.

1.5 years designing and implementing a user-friendly Windows client application, enabling elearning course creators to easily create web-based-training (WBT) courses.

Software Engineer | eCourse Creation Tooling        1999 - 2001

1. Spearheaded the design and C++ implementation of the public TopClass Publisher and third-party API interfaces, empowering elearning creators to create web-based training products on Windows.
2. Collaborated in designing and implementing a shared code repository across WBT Systems client and server codebases, streamlining development processes for a team of 30 developers.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Datamatics Computer Science Programme, Denmark.

1. Capstone project focused on User Interfaces and Prototyping within Object-Oriented System Development. Notably, all major projects were completed in a collaborative, group-based setting.

Patents

1. Representing complex document structure via simpler structure through isomorphism.

Just For Fun

1. OneGreatWorld.com, discover connections that you didn’t know you had (100 MAU).
2. My Templates!, a straightforward way of managing your templates from within the Windows Explorer Shell (0 MAU).
3. Volunteered at The Arc of King County where I migrated their proprietary CRM data into Salesforce.