Goran Bokun
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Vukovar, Croatia
Toptal member since October 18, 2024
Goran is a versatile professional with extensive experience as a consultant, project and product manager, and developer at large corporations and startups. He has coordinated small and complex projects in resource-starved and glutted environments, specializing in ERP, billing, CRM, integration, prepaid energy, localization, and compliance. As the director of screening operations, Goran led a 300+ strong team of experts to validate hundreds of applicants' skills daily across diverse expertise.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Project Management
- Leadership
- People Management
- Product Management
- Project Management
- Project Management & Delivery
- Remote Team Leadership
Work Experience
Director of Screening Operations
Toptal, LLC
- Led the establishment of a high-performing dedicated team to rigorously vet project management skills from the ground up, developing comprehensive, flexible, and scalable processes that ensured consistent, high-quality evaluations.
- Pioneered cross-vertical process alignment. Successfully aligned vetting processes across multiple verticals, establishing a unified framework that set the stage for significant, accelerated growth.
- Scaled screening operations to meet high demand—growing a team of over 300 experts to manage the vetting of hundreds of applicants daily across diverse areas of expertise.
- Steered organizational transformation. Led the evolution of the screening operations team into a dynamic, agile entity, strategically shifting its focus toward speed, efficiency, and adaptability to meet emerging business needs.
- Cultivated a culture of excellence. Promoted an environment of collaboration, transparency, and integrity, while actively mentoring team members and championing their professional growth.
Product Manager
Advisera Expert Solutions
- Steered the development of Conformio, a compliance and cybersecurity platform for small- and medium-sized businesses.
- Defined the product strategy for addressing a new market.
- Transformed the development process from an unmanaged Waterfall-like approach into a nimble combination of Scrum and Kanban.
- Created product roadmaps based on strategic direction and regular contact with clients.
- Led the product technology transformation from a legacy, overengineered application requiring a dozen servers to run to a modern, standards-based web application running on two servers.
Project Manager
Inchoo
- Managed multiple eCommerce projects on the Magento platform.
- Established a PMO team, defined PM practices, and trained junior PMs.
- Provided pre-sales and project consulting and participated in marketing and sales activities.
- Defined company-wide PM processes and practices as part of Agile transformation.
Product Manager
Siemens Convergence Creators
- Managed products in billing systems, indoor positioning localization services, smart energy prepaid systems, and mobile money such as toll payments.
- Created budgets, roadmaps, and plans, leading dislocated teams and participating in solution architecture design.
- Took over the product in a difficult situation and prepared and executed a successful pilot project.
- Reduced R&D costs by over 25% while planning and executing the product line's transition with several parallel-running offshore and nearshore projects.
Director of Product and Technology
Farmeron
- Handled all operational aspects of the company, including business plans, technology strategy, resource management, customer contacts, and product, team, and partner development.
- Grew the company from 5 to over 30 employees in two years and drove the development of processes and organizational structure change that made Farmeron fit, fast, and flexible.
- Established a development process that reduced the bug backlog by 90%, doubled the planning window, and increased the feature delivery date reliability to almost 100%.
- Implemented an employee onboarding process that reduced the time to productivity for new employees from months to two weeks.
- Achieved a 2x increase in paying customers and improved customer satisfaction in small family farms and large enterprises by steering product development to successfully combine simplicity and ease of use with complex enterprise-grade capabilities.
Consultant | Project and Delivery Manager
Siemens IT Solutions and Services
- Consulted on presales and business activities for CRM, integration, ERP, business relationship management, and SOA.
- Worked with TIBCO and Oracle technologies, performing business and system analysis, enterprise application integration, SOA, consulting, and requirements engineering.
- Led a team of 30 people located in four cities and two countries, overseeing planning, resource allocation, competency management, and all team-related issues.
- Trained requirements engineering team members and junior project managers.
- Increased the client list by 200%, grew the team by 50%, improved team know-how and expertise, and completed 10+ projects—all within a year of taking over an ailing and disorganized SOA team.
Developer | Application Lead
Siemens Program and System Engineering
- Developed Java code and led projects around the world.
- Led application operations, handling the product, coaching project leaders, and managing a team of 5-10 people.
- Grew served subscribers by over 50% in 18 months for the application under my leadership.
- Handled $10+ billion worth of vouchers stored in and managed by VoMSXpress in installations worldwide.
Research and Teaching Assistant
School of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, University of Osijek
- Taught courses in computer science, probability, and statistics.
- Handled projects in applied mathematics, numerical mathematics, and statistics.
- Published two papers in numerical mathematics and statistics.
Project History
Farmeron | Dairy Farm Management
Drove the development of processes and organizational structure change—managing the product from early stage to maturity. Reduced the bug backlog by 90%, doubled the planning window, and boosted the feature delivery date reliability to almost 100%.
As the company grew from 5 to over 30 employees in two years, I drove the development of processes and organizational structure change that made Farmeron fit, fast, and flexible. I set up the development process that reduced the bug backlog by 90%, doubled the planning window, and increased the feature delivery date reliability to almost 100%. I also established an employee onboarding process that decreased productivity time for new employees from months to two weeks.
During my tenure, the product was enhanced with many large and small features, changes, and improvements such as protocols, various software and hardware integrations, advanced reporting, and usability optimizations.
CPS | Indoor Positioning Platform
Led product strategy development, prepared and executed a pilot project, and defined a framework for intellectual property rights (IPR) monetization.
I took over the product in the early technology demo stage. After defining strategy options for two different markets—consumer and industry/security—and executing a pilot project, I helped define the next steps for the technology, thus monetizing IPR.
Conformio | Compliance Software
http://www.conformio.comSteered the transformation of product technology from a legacy overengineered application requiring a dozen servers to run into a modern standards-based web application running only on two servers.
I defined the product strategy for addressing a new market and transformed the development process from an unmanaged Waterfall-like approach into an elegant combination of Scrum and Kanban. I also created product roadmaps based on the strategic direction and regular client communication.
Education
Master's Degree in Mathematics and Physics
University of Osijek - Osijek, Croatia
Skills
Tools
LaTeX, Jira, Slack, Zoom, Trello, Confluence, Mathematica, R, SPSS, IBM Rational ClearCase, Siebel CRM, Oracle BPM
Paradigms
Waterfall Development, Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile Software Development, Agile Product Management, Change Management, Scrum, Database Design, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
Industry Expertise
Telecommunications, Agrotech
Platforms
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), J2SE, Magento, Magento 2, Magento 1
Other
Project Management, Technical Business Analysis, Scope, Projects, Project Management & Delivery, Leadership & Coaching, Web, Product Management, Management, Leadership, Operations, Interviewing, Team Leadership, Remote Team Leadership, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Scaling, People Management, Technical Product Management, Stakeholder Management, Product Delivery, Web & Mobile Applications, Billing Systems, Project Planning, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Director, Product Development, Discovery, eCommerce, Business Analysis, Recruiting, Growth, Product Strategy, Program Management, Mathematics, Statistics, Statistical Data Analysis, Mathematical Modeling, Physics, Probability Theory, Java, Eclipse, Oracle, Waterfall Methodology, Waterfall Delivery, Enterprise, Enterprise Sales, Enterprise Systems, TIBCO BusinessWorks, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Delivery, IT Projects, TIBCO, Business Process Management (BPM), Agile Delivery, CTO, SaaS, Software as a Service (SaaS), Lean Product Development, Strategy, Location Services, Mobile Payments, Enterprise Project Management, Business Strategy, Web Project Management, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO Standards, Compliance, Service-level Agreements (SLAs), Technical Recruiting, Location Tracking
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