A Program Management Lens on
Architectural Transformation
ADVISORY ARTICLE
By Sejal Harishchandra Shah
Sunnyvale, California, USA
Modern organizations increasingly struggle with fragmented event pipelines with each team building isolated systems for logging, telemetry, analytics, and transactions. This fragmentation creates duplicated engineering effort, inconsistent governance, and significant integration complexity. Unified Eventing (Event Streams) initiative demonstrates how a well-managed program can overcome these issues, delivering a single, abstracted platform that improves reliability, governance, and developer experience.This article explores the program management approach that enabled this transformation, highlighting how stakeholder alignment, technical governance, phased change management, and value measurement came together.
1. Setting the Stage: What are Events and Why Unification Was Needed
What Are Events?
In technology systems, an event simply marks that something happened at a specific time. Think of a shopper clicking the “buy” button on an e-commerce site, a user logging into their account, a temperature sensor capturing a reading, or an error message being written to a system log.
Events are the building blocks of how modern digital platforms capture behavior, diagnose issues, and make decisions. They carry information like who did what, when, and under what conditions, and they are stored or streamed so that other systems analytics dashboards, fraud detection engines, personalization models, or monitoring tools can react appropriately.
Why Do Events Matter?
Events matter because they create the data fabric for an organization.
Events form the connective tissue of modern organizations. They show how people interact with products and services, which helps teams measure adoption, engagement, and satisfaction. They also provide the training data that powers machine learning models whether predicting customer churn, tailoring recommendations, or detecting unusual activity. Without events, both analytics and intelligence systems would have little to act upon, decisions are slower, personalization is clumsy, and system reliability is harder to maintain.
More…
To read entire article, click here
How to cite this article: Shah, S. H. (2025). Unified Event Streams: A Program Management Lens on Architectural Transformation, PM World Journal, Vol. XIV, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/pmwj156-Sep2025-Shah-unified-event-streams-advisor-article.pdf
About the Author
Sejal Harishchandra Shah
Sunnyvale, California, USA
Sejal Harishchandra Shah is a Senior Technical Program Manager and a seasoned expert in data platform architecture, big data systems, and marketing technology (MarTech) execution at scale. With over 20 years of leadership in technical program management, he has delivered enterprise-grade solutions in customer data platforms, experimentation infrastructure, and AI-powered engagement systems. Sejal has driven critical initiatives at Apple and Block Inc., including schema-governed eventing, OpenAI-integrated marketing tools, and self-serve experimentation frameworks. His deep understanding of data reliability, large-scale analytics pipelines, and MarTech orchestration uniquely positions him at the intersection of engineering, product strategy, and scalable system delivery in modern digital ecosystems. He can be contacted at sejal.s.tpm@gmail.com
