
Ihsan Ahmed Zaheer
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Lisbon, Portugal
Toptal member since December 2, 2020
Ihsan has over 10 years of diverse product management experience and a background in DevOps and business analysis. Having worked in the enterprise and startup ecosystem, he is an entrepreneur at heart with a tech background. Ihsan has led cross-functional teams of 5 to 40 people to launch successful B2C and B2B products. Data management, AI, fintech, and healthcare are the domains in which Ihsan has subject matter expertise. He can lead development teams to measurable development initiatives.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- BigQuery
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Business Systems Analysis
- Data Flows
- Data Product Management
- Master Data Management (MDM)
- Stakeholder Management
Work Experience
Technical Program Manger - Data Governance & Compliance
Stuart
- Led data governance, compliance, and metadata standardization for financial transactions across back office, operations, PSP, internal pricing engine, and NetSuite, ensuring GDPR and PSD2 compliance, improved data integrity, and audit readiness.
- Developed and enforced metadata governance policies, data dictionaries, and taxonomies, improving data discoverability, consistency, and governance adoption across finance and operations teams.
- Designed data lineage tracking to map pay-ins, invoices, and payouts, reducing reconciliation errors by 20% and enhancing auditability across financial systems.
- Drove governance adoption and change management, ensuring cross-functional teams adhered to metadata standards, data access best practices, and compliance workflows.
- Improved data traceability by 30%, reducing manual effort in tracking financial transactions across systems and ensuring audit readiness and compliance reporting efficiency.
- Enabled governance-driven decision-making by ensuring that metadata, taxonomy, and financial data models aligned with regulatory and business needs, increasing compliance reporting accuracy.
Technical Product Owner, Business Process Automation
Berry Appleman & Leiden - Main
- Collaborated with the machine learning (ML) engineering team to develop an ML model trained on organizational data, including documents and questionnaires, to score immigration applications for foreign nationals internally.
- Led the integration of the ML model with existing systems, automating the filing package process, which enabled the organization to process 12x more cases while reducing backlog and communication efforts by 50%.
- Collaborated closely with legal and paralegal teams to define model requirements, ensuring compliance with immigration policies and internal scoring mechanisms.
- Managed cross-functional stakeholder relationships across operations, mailroom, knowledge management, and engineering teams to drive adoption and process automation.
- Designed and implemented automation workflows that streamlined case management and significantly improved operational efficiency.
Technical Product Manager, Training Data Management
Cruise
- Led data governance, metadata standardization, and data quality management for AI model training datasets, ensuring structured data lineage, compliance, and AI model integrity.
- Developed and enforced metadata governance policies, taxonomies, and data dictionaries to standardize AI datasets, improving data discoverability and compliance adoption.
- Designed data lineage tracking to map data transformations in AI pipelines, ensuring auditability and regulatory compliance while improving AI model performance.
- Drove governance adoption by aligning AI engineers, legal, and compliance teams to implement structured metadata and quality controls across AI training data.
- Designed data quality control processes using SQL and Python (NumPy, Pandas) to eliminate redundant, inconsistent, and atrophied datasets, increasing AI model accuracy by 50%.
- Enabled governance-driven decision-making by ensuring metadata, taxonomy, and AI model datasets aligned with compliance and business objectives, improving data integrity and reducing liability risks.
UX Product Owner Platform Services
Modern Product Consulting LLC
- Spearheaded the end-to-end documentation of 15+ user journeys and personas for a key billing product line, translating complex qualitative insights, requirements, and user workflows.
- Collaborated with 5+ product managers to gather and synthesize user research data, structuring it into actionable documentation that directly informed UX improvements, reducing redundant stakeholder queries by 30%.
- Integrated user journey documentation into sprint planning and backlog refinement sessions, ensuring UX considerations were prioritized in agile workflows, leading to a 20% faster feature validation cycle.
- Applied user experience methodologies (e.g., empathy mapping, scenario analysis) to refine billing system workflows, resulting in a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores for a flagship product’s digital interface.
Data Compliance & Security Product Manager
IQVIA
- Led data governance, compliance, and security initiatives to ensure HIPAA, CCPA, and CPRA compliance, improving data availability, access control, and regulatory enforcement.
- Designed and implemented role-based access control (RBAC) policies, ensuring secure and restricted access to healthcare data based on compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Developed data governance policies, taxonomies, and metadata standards to improve data consistency, accuracy, and compliance-driven data structuring.
- Improved healthcare data security and governance, reducing unauthorized data access risks and ensuring real-time availability of validated datasets.
- Drove governance adoption by collaborating with business intelligence, data engineering, healthcare partners, legal, and compliance teams, ensuring aligned data management strategies.
- Increased data accuracy for analytics by 60%, improving healthcare reporting and regulatory audit efficiency across compliance frameworks.
Technical Product Owner
Navetor
- Led the effort to strip a monolith in .NET 4.5 to a lightweight .NET Core-based microservice that ran a SaaS application.
- Took ownership of the product, moving from a desktop application to cloud-based B2B SaaS. It is the 3rd most trusted product in its domain across North America.
- Transformed the codebase from a TFS/VSS-based codebase to a Git-based version control.
- Spearheaded the initiative for CI/CD and containerisation of the codebase.
- Led the initiative to give an entirely new direction to the product, which we monitored using customer data and product analytics.
Product Manager, Business Analyst, Product Owner
Arbisoft
- Launched successful B2B and B2C products for Arbisoft, Pakistan's top offshore web and data engineering service. One of the products saw 40 million downloads in two years.
- Led the UX research, translating UX requirements into detailed user stories and documenting UX findings.
- Collaborated with stakeholders and ensured transparency in the entire development lifecycle while directing a 20-person cross-functional team.
- Ensured a free flow of internal and external feedback regarding the product and incorporated the feedback while focusing on the metrics.
- Removed redundancies proactively and mitigated risks to ensure a seamless delivery of value.
- Contributed to data engineering, data warehousing, and master data management products as a business analyst and product manager.
SCM/DevOps Engineer
CureMD
- Ensured successful deployments of multiple embedded systems, including large medical devices and hospital building management systems.
- Undertook the cloud migration of the codebase in C++ in git from the native server-based version control in VSS.
- Executed the transition of a web application from .NET 2 to .NET 4 and MS SQL server upgrade.
- Spearheaded the data migration initiative for 5,000 hospitals from different data sources to the platform.
Project History
ML Training Data Quality & Governance at Cruise AI
http://www.getcruise.comIncreased data accuracy by 30%, improving autonomous vehicle decision-making, reducing false-positive detections, and implementing lineage tracking to improve California Regulatory Compliance for safety validation reports and audit logs.
Cruise AI faced challenges in data accuracy and governance due to inconsistent metadata management, duplicate records, and atrophied datasets impacting AI model performance and compliance reporting needed for licensing in the state of California. Without a structured data governance framework, it was difficult to ensure autonomous vehicle decision-making was based on reliable, high-integrity data.
Solution and Contributions:
• Established Data Quality and Governance Policies: Defined data validation standards, metadata structures, and lineage tracking to improve AI model reliability.
Standardized Master Data Management Practices: Created data dictionaries, taxonomy classifications, and business rules for structured data governance.
• Led Data Cleaning and Transformation Initiatives: Used Python (NumPy, Pandas) and SQL to identify redundant, atrophied, and inaccurate data records, improving dataset reliability.
• Worked with AI and Engineering Teams: Ensured data consistency across training datasets, reducing biases and improving the reliability of machine learning-driven vehicle navigation.
HIPAA-compliant Healthcare Data Exchange
Increased data processing efficiency by 25%, reducing latency in healthcare data exchange while achieving 100% HIPAA compliance, ensuring secure data access and governance enforcement.
Healthcare providers struggled with data inconsistency across multiple EHR systems, compliance risks (HIPAA), and lack of metadata standardization.
Solution and Contributions:
• Defined Metadata Standards and Data Governance Policies: Established data dictionaries, access controls, and taxonomy frameworks for regulatory compliance.
• Optimized ETL Pipelines (AWS Glue, Redshift, Snowflake): Improved data processing efficiency and quality assurance in health data exchange.
• Implemented Data Validation and Audit Mechanisms: Ensured compliance with HIPAA and GDPR, improving data quality for healthcare decision-making.
PSD2/GDPR Compliance for Stuart
http://www.stuart.comImproved data traceability by 30%, reducing manual reconciliation workload. Ensured 100% GDPR compliance with structured access controls and governance enforcement. Reduced reconciliation errors by 20%, enabling more accurate financial reporting.
Stuart’s financial transaction data was fragmented across the back office, 3rd party PSP, NetSuite, and internal PSP Services, making compliance tracking, reconciliation, and governance difficult. The lack of a unified governance strategy led to inconsistent financial reporting, security risks, and audit challenges.
Solution and Contributions:
• Established Data Governance Policies: Defined metadata standards, data dictionaries, and ownership structures to standardize financial data.
• Implemented Metadata Management and Data Cataloging: Ensured clear documentation of financial data flows across BO, OPP, and NetSuite for governance and audit readiness.
• Designed Data Lineage Tracking: Mapped how delivery, invoice, and payment data moved between systems, improving traceability and reducing reconciliation errors by 20%.
• Developed Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) for GDPR Compliance: Enforced data security protocols, ensuring only authorized teams had access to sensitive financial data.
• Streamlined Compliance Workflows: Worked with finance and compliance teams to automate audit logs, anomaly detection, and financial data validation.
Healthcare Providers Information Consolidation Product
Improved provider data integrity, reducing scheduling inconsistencies by 30% while achieving HIPAA compliance through standardized metadata governance and access controls.
Healthcare providers faced data inconsistencies across multiple systems, making provider availability, scheduling, and compliance tracking difficult. The lack of a centralized governance framework resulted in duplicate records, inaccurate scheduling predictions, and challenges in maintaining regulatory compliance.
Responsibilities and Solution:
• Led Requirement Gathering and Stakeholder Engagement: Worked with healthcare providers, compliance teams, and engineering to define data consolidation needs and governance requirements.
• Implemented Metadata Governance and Standardization: Developed data dictionaries, taxonomy classifications, and validation rules to ensure consistent provider information across systems.
• Designed Data Validation and Compliance Workflows: Ensured accurate provider records and HIPAA-compliant access controls, reducing errors in availability predictions and scheduling.
• Enhanced Data Accessibility and Integration: Established structured governance policies to enable seamless provider data access for scheduling systems and analytics dashboards.
Business Process Automation for Legal Workflows
Led the discovery for automating complex legal workflows for an immigration law firm and reduced turnaround time from 5-7 days to 12-36 hours.
• Worked with internal stakeholders to understand existing workflows and design the automation framework to remove manual monotonous tasks and tedious back-and-forth.
• Worked with seven different engineering pods to define the technical specifications for the automation framework.
• Revolutionized the Internal Programm Guide (task management system designed to help legal and paralegal users process the cases) by opening up 100s of automation opportunities and a continuous improvement system.
Technical Product Manager - Autonomous Vehicles
Released a successful dev tool for AI and robotics engineers working on next-gen autonomous vehicles technology, reduced simulation costs by 20 % in one quarter, and improved testing accuracy by 35 % over two quarters.
Healthcare Billing Platform
Led the initiative of a comparative billing model for a remote mental healthcare platform and worked with the business and providers to outline the solution that would work in 25 different states.
EHR and Practice Management System
Served as a product owner in Navetor. Took ownership of a desktop application and transformed it into a B2B SaaS product that the customers loved as the subscriptions grew from 40 to 900 in the first six months.
Micro Bank and Money Transfer Mobile Application
Served as an independent product consultant. Led the user experience overhauling effort for money transfer via a mobile application that saw the number of weekly returning customers increase by 5-fold, the metric at that time.
Price Comparison and Booking Application
Led the price accuracy leg of the product, which compares hundreds of travel websites for the price of hotels, flights, and car rentals for its 2 million active monthly customers.
Customer Journey Research for SEO/SEM
Led the customer journey research of a comprehensive SEO/SEM optimization strategy for Toptal, improving search visibility and lead generation through data-driven keyword prioritization and user intent analysis.
Food/Goods Delivery System
Served as an Arbisoft product manager and led the CX design, development, and growth of Cheetay to score $10 million in Series B funding. It has web and mobile apps for over 10 million active monthly users.
Fintech Remittance Mobile Application
Worked as an independent product consultant, leading the user experience, interface design, P/L strategy, and success metrics of the mobile application that saw a user rating of 4.8 after more than 10,000 downloads in the first month post-launch.
Customization and Implementation of EdX
http://www.edx.orgWorked as a product manager and business analyst with a team behind a complex and customised implementation of an open-source LMS for one of the biggest business consultancies worldwide.
DAO Enablement and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Platform (Web3)
Discovered, designed, and road mapped a DAO enablement platform, built the product development processes from scratch working with the CEO and eng team from Ethereum, and drove the underlying DeFi product to support the DAO enablement platform.
Product Manager for Real Estate Application
http://www.zameen.comWorked with C-level executives to discover the requirements for the idea for Pakistan's largest real estate tech app and discovered, roadmapped, and launched it, leading the product and UI/UX design initiative to bring the product from zero to one.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Bahauddin Zakariya University - Multan, Pakistan
Skills
Tools
Jira, Atlassian Suite, Asana, Trello, Slack, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Visio, Confluence, DeepSeek, GitHub, IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC), Office 365, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, BigQuery, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Cucumber, Apache JMeter, LoadRunner, VSS, Figma
Paradigms
Scrum, Software Testing, Azure DevOps, Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile Product Management, Requirements Analysis, API Architecture, Data Product Management, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Agile Business Analysis, Scalable Application, Key Performance Metrics, B2C, Acceptance Testing, Change Management, Kanban, Keyword Research, HIPAA Compliance
Platforms
Mixpanel, Blockchain, Azure IaaS, Azure
Industry Expertise
Education Technology (Edtech), Marketplaces
Other
Microsoft Teams, Clubhouse, SQL, Jira Administrator, Technology Consulting, Product Growth, B2B Product Management, Business to Consumer (B2C), Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master, CX Strategy, Story Mapping, Storyboarding, User Flows, User Stories, Product Management, Pendo, Product Analytics, Product Vision, Customer Insights, Product Design, Product Owner, Backlog Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Feature Prioritization, Agile Leadership, Product Ownership, Requirements & Specifications, SaaS, User Experience (UX), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Analysis, Business Systems Analysis, Business Requirements, Documentation, Functional Requirements, Technical Product Management, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Requirements, Metrics, Communication, User Research, User Journeys, Stakeholder Interviews, Data Flows, Process Flows, Product Roadmaps, Product Strategy, Stakeholder Management, Mobile eCommerce, Team Management, Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, Technical Requirements, Quality Assurance (QA), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), IT Business Analysis, Project Management, Discovery, Process Mapping, Business to Business (B2B), Data Analysis, Technical Documentation, User Requirements, Technical Writing, Project Planning, Cross-platform App Development, Technical Business Analysis, Web & Mobile Applications, Product Research, Agile Sprints, Flowcharts, Business Process Flow (BPF), Technical Project Management, Payment Gateways, Stakeholder Engagement, Stakeholder Management, Marketing Strategy, Customer Research, Research, Acceptance Criteria, Product Discovery, Diagrams, Platforms, Mapping, Distributed Team Management, Troubleshooting, Data Management, Data Quality, Data Security, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Technical Project Management, Product Management, Program Management, People Management, Change Readiness & Adoption, Data Science, Data, System Requirements, Cross-functional Collaboration, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Launch, Operational Efficiency Improvement, Cloud Migration, Data Migration, Migration, RDBMS, IT Security, Remote Team Leadership, Team Leadership, Customer Journey, Mentorship, Tech Sales, Business Advisory, Healthcare IT, EdX, Salesforce, Business Process Automation, Use Cases, Fintech, Digital Payments, Mobile Payments, Cryptocurrency Wallets, Machine Learning, Healthcare Product Manager, eCommerce, Coaching, Edtech Design, E-learning, Growth, Data Pipelines, Data Warehousing, Databases, Design Requirements, Master Data Management (MDM), Miro, Implementation, API Integration, Excel 365, AI Product Management, Go-to-market Plans, Go-to-market Strategy, Law, Legal Technology (Legaltech), Process Automation, Process Improvement, Data Lakes, Marketing Management, Technical Support, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Data Privacy, Data Governance, AWS Glue, ChatGPT, Business Transformation Project Management, Client Management, Direct to Consumer (D2C), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Cloud, Data Structures, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), .NET, Python, Product Delivery, Agile Coaching, Mobile Apps, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Open Source, Security, WordPress, UX Design, Finance, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Azure Data Factory (ADF), Redshift, Web Services, APIs, System Integration, Billing Systems, Stripe, Sprint Retrospectives, Business Intelligence (BI), Strategic Planning, Feature Roadmaps, Education, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Google SEO, SEO Tools, Semrush, Keyword Analysis, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, New Product Development, Marketing, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Data Product Manager, PSD2, Compliance, Data Dictionaries, Snowflake, C++, Azure SQL, .NET Core, CI/CD Pipelines, Microsoft Server 2008, UX Research, UX Documentation
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