Hands-on various product types:
B2B and B2C, Start-up and well established services, Apps and Web, Local and Multi-regional, developed for regulated markets and just for fun.
I have a business mindset and experience.
I have a technical background.
My decision-making process is data-driven.
Currently, I am focused on continuous growth as the Product Manager. I work and feel confident on the Business Representative level according to the Product Owner maturity scale.
One day I have gotten very inspired with an idea so much, that decided to incorporate a small company. The app got its name – “22 Skills”. I have built a Scrum Team of 4 people from scratch and about a year passed till the MVP was born.
We have shared our vision with people and 22 Skills was even chosen as a model for innovation and entrepreneurship case study of Ulster University, London, UK. During the whole semester, MBA students and their professor looked deeply into our application, business strategy, and recruitment services market.
At the end of the semester, the professor sent us her best students reports with a lot of recommendations on marketing, business model improvements, and business development in general.
We have reached 10 000 users within 3 months. Unfortunately, the marketing expenses grow much faster, and when the pandemic hit the decision was made to close the project.
Nevertheless, working in my own startup helped me to develop a business mindset. Also, it showed me directions for professional improvements.
I have incorporated analytics in my decision-making process, which became much more data-driven.
I worked as Technical Project Manager since 2012. At that time, PMBOK Guide had not mentioned Agile approach. After 2 years I have noticed that the productivity of the developers was proportional to my activity. It was good enough for clients, but from my point of view for software development this classical approach was inefficient and I have seen it as a bottleneck. I turned my view towards Scrum and Agile practices, became a Scrum Master. Those were proven to be viable and in several years that knowledge gave me the possibility to build a 100% remote scrum team for my start-up.
Recently, already being a Product Owner, I was invited to guide an Agile transformation of the development department. There was no Scrum Master, and one of QA’s was chosen for this role but had no experience with Agile. 25 developers heavily relied on the project manager, who left the company just before I came. This was the biggest challenge. The hardest thing was to make developers' minds shift from being managed individuals into being developers inside a self-managed team.
The process took me 6 months. I have mentored Scrum Master and we build 3 independent teams. 1 reached a complete self-managed state, 2 others are close. Customer cycle time due to transformation reduced from 3-4 months to 2-3 weeks. Technical Debt stopped its growth. Release Stabilization Period was down from the whole working day to just 2 hours.
I Have very strong software development experience, deep understanding of each step of the software development life cycle.
I speak the same language as Developers. I know their possibilities and limitations. This understanding helps me to build trust with them. It helps me to keep them focused on customer outcomes instead of just usual software development outputs.
During years of software development I have worked as Java Developer (Spring Framework), Web developer, System and Network administrator (CCNA), and finally as a Software Architect. I have accumulated a wide specter of knowledge: from creating websites in the early 2000s to architecting the enterprise medical software for international clinical trials and developing high-performance SaaS recruiting applications from scratch.
My CV and availability is shared on request.