April Lea
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Toptal member since May 30, 2019
With over a decade of experience working with PaaS and SaaS technologies, April has successfully launched products across both starts ups and big corporates within the travel, online retail and cybersecurity industries to name a few. April is highly adept at all stages of the product development cycle and has developed a strong and influential leadership style is well versed at communicating with all layers of an organization.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Lean Product Development
- PCI DSS
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Product Management
- Roadmaps
- SaaS
Work Experience
Head of Product
Family Insights Group
- Served as the area leader of the technology arm of Family Insights Group including development teams and developer operations.
- Reviewed and analyzed updated product analytics within Amplitude, Appsflyer, and Firebase.
- Partook in scrum ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, retros) with the development team for the next period of priorities.
- Worked with tech lead on formulating user stories with well-thought acceptance criteria.
- Performed quantitative and qualitative research to develop delightful customer experiences.
- Developed wireframes using Balsamiq for mobile application and web application UI guidance.
Product Owner
FCM Travel Solutions
- Implemented and executed stakeholder engagement and communication plans.
- Led and facilitated workshops around the assessment, planning, and design of sprints and iterations; ensuring stakeholder goals are always at the forefront of all product strategy and development.
- Formulated and maintained quarterly strategic roadmaps for the mid-office platform using ad-hoc product management tools.
- Frequently interviewed end users to obtain consistent and regular feedback.
- Groomed product backlog and developed user stories with robust acceptance criteria.
- Utilized market research and analysis to anticipate changes in market dynamics/models and adapt the mid-office platform accordingly, providing research-driven recommendations to stakeholders.
Systems Team Leader
The Infinity Group
- Implemented the scrum framework resulting in 20% faster feature deliveries.
- Inspired a shared vision with the team and provided consistent direction.
- Performed regular one-on-ones with team members to foster team member professional development aspirations.
- Managed technology financials including capex and opex expenditures.
- Participated in answering support queries for system usage.
Product Owner
The Infinity Group
- Provided strategic system vision and direction to the business.
- Provided leadership to retail partners and within the business where required.
- Ensured continuous system enhancement delivery maintained optimum levels.
- Maintained financials including capex and opex expenditure and budget forecasting and management.
- Analyzed and assessed market and competition, devising strategies to maintain a competitive edge.
Project History
Family Insights Parental Control
Successfully relaunched cross-platform mobile application that improved onboarding conversion by over 30%.
Family Insights Parental Control is a child cyber safety tool that focuses on empowering both parent and child with knowledge of how to stay safe online, as opposed to simply “blocking” potentially harmful content. The app is aimed at providing parents and children with usage statistics of the child’s online activity along with notifications and commentary whenever content is accessed that has the potential to not meet with the child’s best interests. The commentary is backed by a globally recognized digital wellbeing expert.
Sunset of Legacy Product
Successful sunset of legacy accommodation booking platform resulting in business saving over 25%.
The Infinity Group was maintaining two separate accommodation booking platforms so I undertook a discovery initiative to identify the requirements of sunsetting the lesser used product and rolling in any sought after features into the more popular tool.
Travel Booking RPA
Drove adoption strategies with travel consultants to achieve a 45% uplift in travel booking RPA.
Tens of thousands of bookings are made per week for corporate travel, and in the background of these travel bookings are physical human resource, tailoring the booking to enhance the experience for corporate travelers. As part of an initiative to ensure corporate travel consultant’s time was spent 100% on tailoring the important areas of a corporate customer’s travel plans, robotic process automation was implemented for the ticketing of flight tickets.
Certifications
Agile Business Analyst
Software Education
Certificate II Creative Industries
QANTM College
Certificate II Business
Southbank Institute of Technology
Skills
Tools
Confluence, Atlassian Suite, Google Workspace, Firebase Analytics, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Trello, Jira
Paradigms
Scrum, Acceptance Testing, Agile Product Management, Agile Workflow, Agile, Kanban
Platforms
Firebase, Mixpanel, AppsFlyer
Other
Product Management, Roadmaps, Communication, Web, Backlog Management, Backlog Grooming, Feature Backlog Prioritization, User Stories, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Customer Interviews, Customer Support, Amplitude, Product Ownership, Product Delivery, Customer-centered Product Development, HTML, HTML5, CSS, Product Owner, Business Analysis, Requirements, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-market Plans, User Research, Business Models, Product Design, Product Marketing, Product Frameworks, Innovation, Product Discovery, Global Product Management, SaaS Product Management, Web Product Management, Education, Lean Product Development, Windows, Communication Strategy, eCommerce, Retail & Wholesale, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), PCI DSS, Quality Assurance (QA), Requirements & Specifications, Customer Research, Customer Development, Customer Success, Customer Segmentation, Product Research, New Product Development, Platform as a Service (PaaS), SaaS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, iOS, Android, Finance, Mobile, JavaScript
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