Laszlo is available for hire
Hire LaszloLaszlo Kardos
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Location
Budapest, Hungary
Toptal Member Since
July 16, 2020
Laszlo has been a product leader for the past decade. He worked at global businesses like Skyscanner, Prezi, PwC, and Reward Gateway. He's led teams of up to 30 people while working in Tokyo, London, San Francisco, and Budapest. Laszlo is experienced and knowledgeable in the travel industry. He built and served as CEO of two startups and was part of two acquisitions. He is a software engineer by trade who speaks English, German, Hungarian, and a little Japanese.
WebTechnical Project ManagementWebsitesIT Project ManagementLean DevelopmentCloudProduct ManagementMinimum Viable Product (MVP)Data AnalyticsProject ManagementSoftware as a Service (SaaS)Stakeholder ManagementSaaSSaaS Product ManagementProduct Strategy ConsultantEngineering Product ManagementProduct Development Consulting
Project Highlights
Building, Launching, Growing, and Managing Trekhunt
Led the design and development of Trekhunt, an online travel marketplace for outdoor activities and adventures from zero to over 200,000 monthly visitors.
Token Economy Simulation for A Decentralized Job Marketplace
Designed and simulated various token economy models and scenarios with cadCAD using Python to assess the non-linear dynamics of a potential decentralized job network for the client.
Designing, Managing, and Growing Motomoshi | Car Expense Tracking
Designed the Motomoshi Android application from scratch and led a product team of three to develop and launch it in five European markets and reach a 4.6+ rating on the Play Store.
Expertise
Work Experience
Director of Product Management
2023 - PRESENT
Reward Gateway
- Redesigned and improved the product organization structure and product development process.
- Onboarded and managed 11 product managers, ensuring they understood the company's philosophy, values, and product principles, and had the technical skills needed to succeed.
- Collaborated with the engineering team, which includes the director of engineering and CTO, to align work with the overall product strategy and vision.
Growth Product Manager
2020 - PRESENT
Reward Gateway
- Grew the revenue by 30x in net ARR and the number of paid clients by 15x in two years with strategic growth focused on product management.
- Increased the average client size by more than 130% in two years by prioritizing specific activation-related growth product features.
- Explored and evaluated the opportunity to expand the business into the blockchain space and communicated it to the executive leadership.
- Launched over 20 large product features and improvements in two years.
Co-founder and CEO
2018 - PRESENT
Trekhunt
- Conceptualized, designed, and built the MVP of Trekhunt, an online travel marketplace for outdoor activities and adventures.
- Led the team of 12 people to build the platform and scale it from zero to 220,000 organic visitors.
- Introduced Agile product development processes and trained a team of engineers about how to take ownership of product development initiatives.
- Trained, managed, and mentored 11 people with various backgrounds, including engineering, finance, sales, and design.
- Doubled booking conversion rates by introducing new product features that channeled visitors to the right points in the funnel.
- Prototyped, user-tested, designed, and A/B tested 80% of the features of Trekhunt.
- Did over 200 hours of user interviews to understand key user needs related to outdoor adventures. Built a process of collecting these insights and turning them into valuable features.
- Designed and built marketing automation tools for Google Ads and Facebook Ads that sped up new digital campaign deployments from zero by 80%.
- Designed, built, and launched the Trekhunt Magazine by writing the first blog posts. Created a process of working with external content writers to organically scale the blog up to 220,000 visitors per month within three years.
Blockchain and Token Engineering Consultant
2021 - 2022
profession.hu - Contractor
- Worked with the executive leadership on a potential job market-related decentralized spin-off organization.
- Simulated several token economy models and scenarios with cadCAD to assess the non-linear dynamics of a potential decentralized job network.
- Designed and evaluated various NFT issuance models incorporated into the aforementioned decentralized token economy.
- Provided financial models for various fundraising scenarios for the project, for example, ICO.
- Designed and evaluated in programmatic simulations various fungible crypto token issuance models and semi-autonomous monetary policy contracts.
Co-founder and Managing Director
2018 - 2019
Motomoshi
- Designed the Android application from scratch and led a product team of three to develop and launch it in five European markets.
- Redesigned and led the development of the web platform of Motomoshi, which resulted in a 250% growth within a year of monthly active users.
- Introduced the premium version of Motomoshi on Android and led the product to a 4.6+ rating on the Play Store.
Senior Product Manager
2016 - 2017
Skyscanner
- Established product management processes in the big data tribe that was responsible for the big data platform of Skyscanner.
- Trained and mentored a product manager with a financial background in the big data tribe.
- Led the product development of the big data platform, which enabled data analysts and data scientists to both analyze and build data products on top of the platform, enriching the core product of Skyscanner.
Product Lead and Senior Product Manager
2015 - 2016
Skyscanner Japan
- Led the product and product organization of a newly founded joint venture of Skyscanner and Yahoo! Japan.
- Built a product team from scratch by hiring designers and product managers; established product development processes and kicked off major product initiatives.
- Led the development of a key product initiative that introduced travel discovery features and expanded the funnel to appeal to more users earlier in the travel cycle.
- Built partnerships with key Japanese and Korean businesses such as LINE, JTB, Kosoku, and Yahoo! Japan by negotiating with decision-making executives.
Senior Product Manager
2014 - 2015
Skyscanner
- Led the rebuild of both the Android and iOS apps of Skyscanner from the ground up within nine months.
- Trained, managed, and mentored a junior product manager who co-led a feature team in the organization.
- Trained, managed, and mentored two product researchers who eventually became senior researchers in Skyscanner.
Senior Product Manager
2014 - 2014
Distinction
- Established product management practices and culture in the organization by working with co-founders and key people in the team.
- Introduced product research and user testing in the organization, improving the process of developing new products.
- Implemented the Google Design Sprint methodology by establishing a small team that continuously ran sprints and shared their experience and knowledge with the rest of the organization.
Product Manager
2012 - 2014
Prezi
- Revamped the entire Prezi sharing experience by leading a small cross-functional team of six that doubled the number of presentation shares.
- Led the workgroup team and introduced the shared folder experience inside the product, enabling users to organize their presentations into dynamic folders.
- Refurbished the Prezi for Teams experience inside the product that enabled thousands of small businesses to start using Prezi for business purposes.
Senior Consultant
2011 - 2012
PwC
- Established cloud computing consulting, a new service type in the risk assurance services (RAS) business unit in the Hungarian office that got traction on the local market.
- Built a small tool to generate Excel-based audit evidence reports for the risk assurance services and speed up documentation of audits by 75%.
- Coordinated with executives and senior management for PwC to enter the pan-European nonprofit organization EuroCloud and led the security working group inside the local organization.
Software Engineer
2009 - 2010
Robert Bosch
- Reverse-engineered an officially undocumented FPGA programming protocol and built a custom programmer for the internally built testing hardware for electronic parking systems (EPS), which decreased the programming time by 90%.
- Led the project of building a parking system parameter downloader in Java from scratch that sped up the development team's efforts and is still in use after 10 years.
- Worked with German and Hungarian engineering managers and developers to understand their needs for speeding up EPS development, and derived a roadmap and software architectural plan based on these insights.
Project History
Building, Launching, Growing, and Managing Trekhunt
https://trekhunt.comLed the design and development of Trekhunt, an online travel marketplace for outdoor activities and adventures from zero to over 200,000 monthly visitors.
Trekhunt is an online travel marketplace in the CEE region for outdoor activities and adventures, such as hiking, biking, and skiing.
I conceptualized, designed, and developed the MVP of the product, built the team and raised funds for further development, established the product development processes, and trained and managed a cross-functional team of 12 engineers, designers, sales associates, and a small back office team.
I conceptualized, designed, and developed the MVP of the product, built the team and raised funds for further development, established the product development processes, and trained and managed a cross-functional team of 12 engineers, designers, sales associates, and a small back office team.
Token Economy Simulation for A Decentralized Job Marketplace
Designed and simulated various token economy models and scenarios with cadCAD using Python to assess the non-linear dynamics of a potential decentralized job network for the client.
The client is a leading job marketplace and was considering bootstrapping a new Web3.0 decentralized job marketplace. They needed someone who could deeply understand their needs, translate them into token economy design primitives, construct a potential parametrized token economy, and simulate its non-linear dynamics using cadCAD (Python).
I took on a long-term consulting role and, working with the executive leadership, designed, constructed, simulated, and evaluated various economy models, including various token issuance models, semi-automatic parametrized monetary policies, and unique NFT strategies.
I took on a long-term consulting role and, working with the executive leadership, designed, constructed, simulated, and evaluated various economy models, including various token issuance models, semi-automatic parametrized monetary policies, and unique NFT strategies.
Designing, Managing, and Growing Motomoshi | Car Expense Tracking
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.motomoshi.motomoshiapp&hl=enDesigned the Motomoshi Android application from scratch and led a product team of three to develop and launch it in five European markets and reach a 4.6+ rating on the Play Store.
Motomoshi is a vehicle fuel and expense tracking Android application and web platform with a freemium business model. It enables users to track their vehicle's fuel consumption and expenses. It automatically syncs with a web back end and the Motomoshi website, so users will never lose any data.
I managed the design, development, and launch of the Android application with a team of three and reached a 4.6+ rating on the Play Store. I also managed the entire product on the web, which increased its monthly active users by 250% after the product improvements I oversaw.
I managed the design, development, and launch of the Android application with a team of three and reached a 4.6+ rating on the Play Store. I also managed the entire product on the web, which increased its monthly active users by 250% after the product improvements I oversaw.
BlockSci-based Bitcoin On-chain Metric Development
Designed and implemented new parametrized Bitcoin on-chain metrics and built an active Bitcoin on-chain pipeline to get them using BlockSci.
Bitcoin on-chain metrics are frequently used to assess the market's sentiment in the crypto industry and with that, provide a new decision-making tool for investors. It's a new field of market analytics. BlockSci is C/C++-based open source blockchain analytics software. I've set up a Bitcoin node, built and extended BlockSci to analyze the chain, and implemented new parametrized on-chain metrics for Bitcoin as derivations of well-known existing ones., like RHODL, MVRV-Z, and NVT
Education
2009 - 2011
Master of Science Degree in Computer Engineering
Budapest University of Technology and Economics - Budapest, Hungary
2005 - 2009
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering
Budapest University of Technology and Economics - Budapest, Hungarry
2007 - 2008
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Karlsruhe, Germany
Certifications
JULY 2022 - PRESENT
Cardano Developer Associate
Emurgo
JUNE 2020 - PRESENT
Problem Solving Certificate
Hackerrank
MAY 2014 - PRESENT
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Scrum Alliance
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