Andrei Bujor-Blanaru

I joined the company—one of the world's largest services marketplace—as a senior product manager for the collaboration suite comprising several products that facilitated better interactions between both sides of the marketplace during the project delivery. One such product was Groups, a shared workspace product designed to manage users' projects better.

When I joined, the product had little traction and was primarily used as an internal tool. Upon conducting user research and analyzing the usage data, I identified a few critical quick wins and created the strategy for the product to be released for the general population. This included releasing new features to create value for our users and ensure a healthy marketplace adoption. Among these was the ability to communicate at scale with thousands of users, real-time notifications, and threaded conversation.

The features and product delivery to the general population were supported by experiments and A/B tests that I designed, which informed and validated our initial assumptions about the product. The product grew to 300,000 weekly active users (WAU) within the first month after release.

Aviation Job Search is the market leader in recruitment for job-seekers and employers in the aviation niche.

I joined the team as a consultant for one part of the e-learning division. Still, I ended up leading the redesign initiative as a senior product manager to speed up the delivery of this critical business project during a unique time in history—the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the pandemic disrupting the recruitment and aviation niches, it was a strategic goal to make this delivery as lean as possible and provide value fast to the massively affected industry by the global lockdowns.

Therefore, I led 80+ customer discovery sessions with both sides of the marketplace to understand the core value proposition we had to deliver upon. I also created a framework for experimentation that allowed us to dual-track our design and delivery to move at pace while validating our implicit assumptions. Finally, I released the product to overhaul the back-end architecture, data structure, UI/UX, and rebranding.

Viscuri was Romania's biggest vinyl records marketplace. I co-founded the company with one of my best friends, a music producer, and led the product development side.

Vinyl records are one of the hardest products to transition from offline to online selling because of the particularities of the target audience. It required a lot of hands-on user research and lean experimentation to identify the most valuable parts of the physical experience we should bring online.

By taking a lean approach to delivery, we were able to release multiple MVPs and test them at vinyl fairs with real users to validate some of our key assumptions. I created the go-to-market strategy around the core value proposition derived from the user research and successfully sold out most of our digitized stock offered to our beta testers in a week.

The product achieved profitability within the first year of launching and became the market leader shortly after. Following multiple rapid iterations, which added upon the core value proposition, the product grew to become the niche market leader in Romania.