Roland Burke
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Syracuse, NY, United States
Toptal member since October 26, 2020
Roland has delivered and managed software products for more than a decade, including four years at JPMorgan Chase. With his background in computer science and full-stack development, he has led projects that helped businesses increase revenue and streamline processes. Roland achieves the strategic goals and objectives of companies through teamwork, collaboration, and servant leadership.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Leadership
- Agile Product Delivery
- Product Consultant
- Product Management
- Product Owner
- Scrum
- eCommerce
Work Experience
Product Manager
Walmart
- Oversaw a comprehensive portfolio focused on mainframe to cloud modernization projects, ensuring smooth transitions, notably migrating the HOBUS database from Informix to the Azure Cloud and efficiently coordinating 40 teams of consuming applications.
- Maintained stringent adherence to data compliance, potentially involving sensitive PII data, ensuring robust data management and compliance with regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols and adherence to CCPA guidelines.
- Excelled in managing cross-functional teams and efficiently communicating with upper management, ensuring alignment across teams towards collective objectives, presenting timelines and status updates, and effectively handling any delays or shifts.
- Reduced the mainframe system cost by $206,000 successfully within a single year while enhancing operational efficiency and improving customer experiences.
- Spearheaded strategic integration and data management efforts, such as ensuring accurate data transfer with divestiture markets and implementing Kafka for optimal data integration across departments, thereby enhancing overall data accuracy.
Product Manager
National Corporate Housing
- Shaped the long-term vision and strategy for the platform, devising a meticulous 2-year roadmap plan that adeptly catered to both immediate and futuristic business objectives.
- Proactively prepared comprehensive launch plans, established definitive release goals, and forged a collaborative partnership with the technology team to ensure the seamless development and rollout of the platform.
- Engaged in a productive collaboration with UX designers to curate a world-class customer experience, emphasizing intuitive design, user-centric functionality, and aesthetically appealing user interfaces, ensuring customer satisfaction and usability.
- Effectively gathered pivotal requirements from the business and engaged with relevant stakeholders to prioritize, planning a roadmap that balances immediate needs with strategic growth, ensuring alignment with overarching organizational goals.
- Worked diligently with the scrum team to plan sprints and goals and clarify acceptance criteria, ensuring development trajectories were in lockstep with the intended roadmap and product features.
- Navigated through the nuanced dynamics of being an acquired startup by National Corporate Housing, ensuring that the strategic roadmap and platform development harmoniously aligned with the larger organizational structure.
Product Owner
FormAssembly
- Acted as the senior product owner for the largest squad in the enterprise SaaS company and contributed significantly to developing and steering the product vision and long-term strategy in collaboration with the executive team, managing a squad of six.
- Led discovery sessions with the tech leads and infrastructure to find successful implementation strategies. Managed feature flags and rollout strategies and helped implement a go-to-market strategy. Determined success metrics and KPI's.
- Led the inception, development, and go-to-market rollout of the beta program and a new automated workflow feature by facilitating requirements gathering with alpha and beta group customers and effectively prioritizing features within the roadmap.
- Spearheaded the product council presentations, effectively communicating completed and upcoming projects to various stakeholders, and collaborated cross-functionally with customer success and application security teams to address any escaped defects.
- Acted as scrum master, conducting critical Scrum ceremonies like sprint planning, backlog grooming, and sprint review/demo, ensuring agile methodologies were adhered to.
- Ensured vigilantly that the data collected through forms adhered to stringent regulations, including protecting personally identifiable information in compliance with HIPAA laws and guarding sensitive health information that was captured through forms.
- Ensured meticulously that all product offerings were accessible, aligning with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, thereby ensuring the digital products were usable and accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.
Product Manager
PepsiCo
- Collaborated with the sales team and account executives on the pain points identified due to the changes in prices in the retailers' eCommerce stores. Worked with them to define requirements and must-have features for the initial MVP.
- Developed all user stories, market research, requirements documents, and wireframes for the new price monitoring tool in Jira and Confluence.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams that included UI/UX designers, eCommerce retail sales, product catalog, data engineering, and data science and analytics. Assisted designers with the dashboard design using Adobe XD.
- Built graphical dashboard with the UI/UX team to best display metrics and trends for all SKU's and retailers.
Product Manager
ValueMailers.Com
- Created a product strategy and roadmap according to C-suite goals to guide efficiency and process streamlining. Used Business Model Canvas to ensure that the features and projects aligned with the goals.
- Implemented and ensured all projects maintained PCI compliance.
- Wrote all technical documentation and led all ceremonies including backlog grooming, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Created user stories using stakeholder input and customer feedback, and determined acceptance criteria.
- Oversaw the eCommerce website checkout experience. Used checkout funnel analytics in Google Analytics to improve checkout conversion rate and worked with marketing on abandoned cart recovery. Carried out A/B testing to continually improve conversion.
- Added $1.2 million in revenue by launching a custom CRM system to promote frictionless telephone sales. Stored customer data and payment information in a compliant and secure cloud environment. Worked with PHP, Laravel, and JavaScript technologies.
- Saved $40,000 annually by leading the development of an automated vendor ordering system web application that has scaled with the company's growth and the number of orders received. Built it with PHP, MySQL, Laravel, and third-party vendor APIs.
- Reduced annual overhead costs by $20,000 by leading a team to develop an automated tracking system that pushes tracking to selling channels, using UPS API integrations and third-party marketplace API integrations, maintaining a 90+ seller rating.
Full-stack Web Developer
ValueMailers.Com
- Performed data migration and upgraded an eCommerce website from osCommerce to Magento 1.9.x. The Magento store has generated $10 million+ in revenue.
- Integrated Google Tag Manager and Facebook pixel into sales funnel pages. Built dashboards in Google Analytics to monitor results. Worked with marketing and copywriting when funnel opt-in did not meet standard percentages.
- Created and managed over 4,000 product listings across third-party marketplaces and the company's web store. Updated product images and descriptions from copywriters and designers. Monitored product sales metrics and made modifications as needed.
- Calculated sales tax for states in which the company collected them. Created formulas in Excel to automate the process and dramatically reduce the time to file.
- Collaborated with content and marketing to do A/B testing for Amazon listing bullet points and website product descriptions to increase conversions.
- Built landing pages and various product pages in ClickFunnels for influencer marketing and driving traffic from ads.
Application Support Analyst
JPMorgan Chase
- Worked in the identity and access management area of the risk department. Provided support for a role-based user permission web application that prevented users from accumulating overreaching access.
- Served as liaison between senior project managers and the offshore development team, transparently communicating bugs, technical roadblocks, and scope change requests.
- Led customer development and discovery interviews. Created production support documents, troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and process guides.
- Provided level 3 support for the profile center application, capturing screen shares with customers and communicating bugs with the development team and project managers.
- Performed extensive QA testing, using automated test scripts and manual browser testing for all developed features in the profile center application for treasury and security services.
- Investigated bugs and errors in code and executed fixes in C#.NET Framework in collaboration with the offshore development team.
Project History
Internal CRM
Reduced average sales call length by 20% and brought in an additional $1.2 million+ in revenue in the first year.
Served as the product owner in the Scrum team that developed a secure internal CRM that stored customer data and payment information, eliminating the need to re-enter the information for repeat orders. Added analytics to segment purchasers by last purchase date, amount spent, and geographical region.
Automated Vendor Order Placing System
Saved the company over $40,000 in annual overhead costs by leading the development of an automated vendor order placing application.
Served as the product owner on the Scrum team that developed a web application that pulled all orders from third-party marketplaces—Amazon, eBay, and Walmart—and filtered through the orders to recognize which orders needed to be sent to which third-party vendors via EDI, API, or email.
Automated Tracking System
Saved $20,000 in overhead costs by streamlining tracking updates to third-party marketplaces.
Served as the product owner in the Scrum team that developed a web application to pull tracking information from carriers like UPS and USPS and then filter the information and push it to the relevant third-party marketplace—Amazon, eBay, or Walmart.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Syracuse University - Syracuse, NY, USA
Certifications
Product Management Certificate
Product School
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Excel 2016, Google Analytics, Trello, SendGrid, NGINX, Apache, Zapier, Adaptive Insights, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Figma, HP Quality Center (QC), Affinity Diagrams, Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Project, Azure Active Directory, Behat
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile Product Management, Requirements Analysis, Key Performance Metrics, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Scrum, Kanban, Acceptance Testing
Platforms
MacOS, Linode, Magento, Ubuntu, Docker, ClickFunnels, Citrix, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Industry Expertise
eBay, Consumer Products, Music, Entertainment & Leisure
Other
Microsoft PowerPoint, APIs, Lean, Responsive Web Design (RWD), CSS, Amazon, Amazon SEO, Amazon FBA, Etsy, Documentation, Technical Product Management, Communication, eCommerce, Product Strategy, eCommerce Platforms, Dashboard Design, Data Analysis, Data Product Manager, Data Visualization, Data-driven Decision-making, Online Tracking Analysis, Statistical Data Analysis, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Strategic Planning & Execution, Business Requirements, Requirements & Specifications, SaaS, Use Cases, Web Applications, Integration, Project Management, PHP, Programming, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), SQL, HTML5, Linux, Payment Gateways, Requirements, Business Research, Market Research, Writing & Editing, Payment APIs, API Integration, Order Processing, Data, Order Management, QA Testing, Risk Analysis, Security, IT, Data Analytics, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Product Ownership, Technical Program Management, Agile Product Delivery, Product Roadmaps, User Experience (UX), REST APIs, Collaboration, Product Discovery, iOS, Startups, UX Roadmaps, Data Science Product Manager, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Behavior-driven Design, Prototyping, Backlog Grooming, Backlog Management, Business Analysis, New Product Development, Technical Consulting, Artificial Intelligence (AI), ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager, Data Transcription, MySQL, Product Owner, User Stories, Agile Sprints, Agile Leadership, Continuous Integration (CI), Laravel, Google Cloud, Facebook API, Vue, User Requirements, User Flows, Story Mapping, Affinity Mapping, Miro, JavaScript, Shipping Management, Microsoft Teams, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Product Management, Personas, Go-to-market Plans, Presentations, Lean Canvas, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition, Customer Journey, Customer Insights, Customer Interviews, Agile Certified Practitioner, Process Execution, Quality Assurance (QA), Customer Support, C#.NET, Risk Management, Customer Development, Customer Success, Client Presentations, Bash Script, MariaDB, Process Documentation, Research, Agile Delivery, Software, Databases, Sprints, Sprint Planning, Network Security, Product Consultant, Supply Chain, SAP, Enterprise, Amazon Web Services (AWS), eCommerce UI, Pricing, Price Analysis, Pricing Software, Mockups, Dashboards, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Media, Robotics, Salesforce, Bootstrap, Advertising, Microsoft Excel, React, Gantt Chart, Jira Administrator, Analytics, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Wireframing, Wireframe to Product, Salesforce API, Feature Roadmaps
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