Alex Covic

In early 2020, Alex was asked to analyze and improve a digital publishing workflow centered around communications (email, content creation, and localization) that included a top 5 global tech company and several of their vendors.

The highly-complex process wasn’t very well documented and included a number of legacy tools and procedures.

Alex conducted 20+ hours of interviews to map out the workflow, recognize pain points in the process, and gather requirements. Based on those findings, he identified and prioritized the areas of improvement and translated those into:

- BPMN diagrams showing the current and future workflow states
- Backlog and roadmap for the future improvements to the workflow
- Time and cost estimations for the above
- Corresponding playbook and executive summary documentation illustrating the current and future workflows

Scratchy is the scratch card game that lets you play for real prizes from the brands you love.

At the same time, Scratchy is a powerful business intelligence tool that translates in-game interactions into customer insights for brands and retailers.

Brought in as a product consultant for an existing product - which at the time had 2.1 and 2.4 stars on App and Play Stores respectively.

Conducted ethnographic user research and to understand the users' needs, pain points and expectations. Translated the findings into a new value proposition and product strategy, and defined user stories, development goals, and a product roadmap.

Led the multidisciplinary product development team through several product increments, resulting in an increase of usage metric KPIs (sessions and interactions per user, time in-app, etc.) by over 200%.

Tabooz is a safe digital space designed to foster mental health, identity, well-being, and confidence in youth by addressing cultural, social, and systemic taboos.

It's also a content platform that offers entertainment, storytelling, resources, information, and access to local support and helplines.

As a product consultant, I've formed and led an agile, distributed product development team through several product iterations, conducted customer discovery interviews to gain insights used to shape the product, and served as a touchpoint between the customer, the product team and various stakeholders.

The product had a limited launch at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

The learnings gained from the MVP launch and customer discovery resulted in a pivot and product being rebranded as Evoality - the personal evolution tool for businesses to provide employees with the knowledge, information, and resources to support diversity, inclusion, equality, and wellbeing.

Alex was a product and digital transformation consultant for The International Water Association, a 10,000+ member strong traditional organization in the water sector.

During this time, he helped create and executed much of the strategy that completely overhauled many processes inside the organization, revamped and modernized their core offering, and created 10+ web and mobile products in the process. He also helped the organization diversify and open new revenue streams based on those products.

Highlights include:

— Helping The IWA transform their main offering and revenue source (yearly membership packages) to a SaaS product (https://iwa-connect.org/).

— IWA Learn, a professional development marketplace for the water sector that enables the organization to publish premium and free, online and offline educational programs.

— IWA Events, a web portal that lists and showcases best events in the sector,

— The Source Water Magazine, a web and mobile mag for the water sector.

Every two years, The International Water Association
collects data on water consumption from 200 cities and
prepares a comprehensive report on the water industry.

This took a lot of work using spreadsheets and email.

Alex was brought to solve this problem and come up with a solution that would make this process easier, faster, and less effort and resource-intensive.

He started by analyzing the data to and interviewing dozens of water industry researchers to understand their process and the issues that we're facing.

The effort resulted in waterstatistics.org - a data visualization platform that streamlines gathering, processing and publishing data on water from 39 countries and 198 cities.

WaterStatistic.org makes information on the global water consumption public and easily accessible. This helps the industry and government make better decisions while keeping the public informed.

Best part? Instead of waiting two years for the data to be gathered and processed and the report to get published, new data now becomes live almost in real-time.

The International Water Association is a global non-profit organization and knowledge hub for the water sector. As the product and innovation consultant for The IWA, Alex was asked to help the organization's learning and capacity development department plan and execute the design and development of IWA Learn, a leading professional development platform for the water sector.

His responsibilities included user research and discovery to define the feature set, MVP backlog, and roadmap planning, as well as sourcing, hiring, and leading the design and development team that executed the project.

Today IWA Learn hosts over a hundred free and premium online and onsite professional development and learning opportunities and serves over 40,000 users every month.

The Source Water Magazine was a leading publication for water professionals that is distributed to the members of The International Water Association as one of the membership benefits.

As part of the organization’s digital transformation efforts I’ve consulted on, I’ve formed and led the team that developed the iOS, Android, and web versions of the magazine and integrated it with other IWA’s digital assets (membership community portal, the main website, etc).

Further, I’ve led the launch of the magazine and created and executed the growth strategy that resulted in 12,000 signups in 3 months and created a stable readership base that’s highly valuable for advertisers in the water sector.