Lavinius Marcu, Product Manager in London, United Kingdom
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Lavinius Marcu

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
London, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
January 14, 2021

Lavinius is a hands-on product manager who helps clients improve product performance and scale their businesses. He has founded startups and held leadership product roles at large-scale corporations. He saved a client over $7 million in support costs and helped bring a company he co-founded public. Lavinius blends empathy for customer pain points with expertise in the latest trends. Outstanding product managers are storytellers who transform vision into reality—something Lavinius is known for.

Project Highlights

2Performant Co-founder
Contributed to the initial PRD when 2Performant went public, assisted with the company launch, and acquired the first clients.
Product Internationalization
Assisted GTA with the relaunch of an established API product ($200 million) in China.
AI Price Prediction Engine
Led an agile team that built a price prediction engine for the cruise industry, enabling companies to gain 7-15% more margin.

Expertise

Work Experience

Product Management Consultant - Operations

2022 - 2023
The Collinson Group
  • Worked with the CPO and senior management to implement a product operations management framework that allowed the company to accelerate delivery by 30% and increase the top-line revenue by 15-25%.
  • Helped the company define a long-term product strategy and instill a product planning process.
  • Trained and coached product managers and worked with stakeholders to define and track process metrics.
  • Published operational dashboards for all relevant stakeholders exposing product processes' effectiveness and efficiency to speed up decision-making and transparency.

Product Management and Strategy Consultant

2021 - 2021
Alteryx
  • Assisted the VP of strategy to identify new markets for the company, estimated to be $4 billion in revenue.
  • Contributed to Alteryx, an analytics platform that is able to connect to various data sources (clouds, data lakes). The clients are using the platform to create data pipes, transform the data, and apply multiple ML/AI algorithms.
  • Guided product management in defining and setting up experiments to validate market opportunities, allowing the company to sell its products under new use cases.
  • Assisted product management in identifying and setting up metrics aimed to measure feature success from an early stage.
  • Helped business stakeholders formulate business hypotheses and use data to find answers.

Product Management Consultant - Freelance

2020 - 2021
EMC Spark
  • Assisted companies in AI and SaaS segments with their product strategy and market penetration scenarios.
  • Defined the product management best practices and supported implementation.
  • Assisted the existing team with market research and customer development.

Product Management Consultant

2019 - 2020
Travelport
  • Identified systemic product inefficiencies and helped the VP of product and an ex-Accenture senior consultant to restructure the product team.
  • Led the restructuring strategy for the product management function.
  • Saved the client over $7 million in support costs and unlocked more than $200 million in potential revenue.
  • Performed in-depth user research and helped build a vivid picture of the customer experience.

Head of Product (APIs)

2018 - 2020
Hotelbeds
  • Productized the API offering acquired Google as a client.
  • Implemented experimentation and hypothesis testing to validate growth opportunities.
  • Led a 3-way product integration when Hotelbeds acquired its two main competitors and shifted over $4 billion in revenue under the Hotelbeds brand.

Product Manager

2012 - 2014
Aprefis
  • Won the RFP and proof-of-concept with Carnival Cruise Lines.
  • Architected and deployed a big-data/AI prediction engine.
  • Developed an algorithm that improved margin by 7-15%.
  • Led an agile team of four people composed of a UI/UX designer, software engineer, data scientist, and business developer.

Co-founder

2009 - 2010
2Performant
  • Set up the vision, validation, and execution, and managed the product through the initial stages. Today 2performant.com is a public company with +$50 million in turnover.
  • Constructed and ran experiments to validate market opportunities while coordinating with a team of developers to deliver the MVP.
  • Led the product management and scaled the company to +$1 million in revenue.
  • Performed user research and validated business hypotheses.

2Performant Co-founder

https://2performant.com/

Contributed to the initial PRD when 2Performant went public, assisted with the company launch, and acquired the first clients.

2Performant is the first affiliate software company launched in Romania. Currently, it is the market leader in its segment and became a public company. The company is a spin-off from my first startup, Captaingo, a hotel distribution company that needed affiliate marketing distribution.

Product Internationalization

Assisted GTA with the relaunch of an established API product ($200 million) in China.

GTA wanted to relaunch a specific set of travel APIs into China, a growing travel market. The project involved local market research, customer profile definition, PRD, and marketing strategy.

We uncovered key requirements during early customer sessions, like speed, error rates, and regulatory restrictions, which formed the backbone for differentiation and client acquisition.

China's largest OTA (Ctrip) became a client with other local leaders.

AI Price Prediction Engine

Led an agile team that built a price prediction engine for the cruise industry, enabling companies to gain 7-15% more margin.

Served as product manager for a price prediction engine that used machine learning to forecast optimal price levels for cruises. The tool helped revenue managers to make better pricing decisions by gathering large amounts of data from various sources.

Key improvements: 90% less friction in price-setting efforts; 7-15% margin uplift.

Product Strategy for Analytics Leader

Assisted a leader in the analytics industry (+$400 million revenue) to unlock a market of +$4 billion through market research and analysis.

Assisted the VP of Strategy and Product Management to define and set up experiments to validate market opportunities which allowed the company to sell its software under new use cases.

Analytics software is a hyper-competitive space where the client competed against established leaders (Tableau, Microsoft, SAS) from Gartner Quadrant. To differentiate, I helped the client identify new use cases in new verticals.

Growth Marketing for Cryptocurrency Trading Platform

http://www.altrady.com

Scaled userbase of Altrady 5x and assisted the company in developing a user acquisition process.

Altrady is a cryptocurrency trading platform that enables users to buy and trade cryptocurrencies. They work with all major exchanges and support a wide range of tokens. Users can implement their trading strategies or rely on trading bots.
2011 - 2012

Master's Degree in Business Information Management

Rotterdam School of Management - Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2001 - 2005

Bachelor's Degree in Management Science

Bucharest Business School - Bucharest, Romania

MAY 2014 - PRESENT

R Programming

Coursera

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