Roman A. Abashin

I designed, planned, and rolled out a highly successful internal KPI dashboard for the fastest-growing recruitment software company in the DACH region, part of a corporation with over 1,500 employees.

WORK DONE
• Analyzing B2B sales processes at different phases in the customer lifecycle.
• Understanding the business, technology, and operations/administration perspectives of the sales process.
• Breaking down complex accounting-based figures into simple KPIs and metrics like MRR and monthly churn rate.
• Setting up a clean, reproducible data pipeline from Salesforce and the production database (MariaDB/MySQL) to the dashboard via R Server.
• Rolling out the dashboard to the company's pre-sales, sales, customer success, and customer support teams.

DELIVERABLES
• KPI dashboard for B2B SaaS sales teams

The client was the most successful coaching platform in the German-speaking market—think Netflix/Coursera for self-improvement—was looking to improve their customer lifecycle.

Customer Lifecycle Improvement Goals:
• Effectiveness of organic, referral, and paid traffic
• Conversion rates and website performance
• Engagement and upsell rates among existing customers

(The engagement is still ongoing.)

Tools:
• Google Marketing Platform (Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize)

I contributed to the design, plan, and shipment of business analytics to over 40,000 HR professionals.

We worked closely with customers, designed mock-ups, facilitated workshops, and delivered the product on budget and ahead of schedule. Furthermore, I played an active part in the scrum development process as a product owner.

DELIVERABLES
• Shipped the product in record time.

The client was the largest Austrian privately-held educational provider with 20,000+ yearly clients and 600+ employees in 50+ locations.

I led the requirements project that delivered the specifications for a new platform that was to become Aspidoo.com, the first digital educational marketplace in Austria.

DELIVERABLES
• Provided the user requirements, user stories, UX, mockups, and success metrics.
• Facilitated workshops with C-level, middle management, and operations.

The client was a Europe-based online shop that was looking to quickly sell a large number of products in a hot, highly competitive market.

I assembled and led the team (tech, operations, and sales) that set up an online shop, automated fulfillment, and optimized all elements along the lead-to-sales process. Furthermore, we penetrated deeply into adjacent regions via highly targeted long-tail advertising.

Deliverables:
• Achieved a Google PageSpeed Rating of 90+/100 (mobile and desktop)
• Built a fully automated, mobile-friendly webshop based on WordPress/Woocommerce
• Improved Google Ad conversion rates by up to 15%

The client, the number-one utility company in the region, was looking to enable potential photovoltaic (PV) clients to configure their products via a mobile-friendly web application. It should be accessible from tablets and easy-to-use even for elderly customers.

We facilitated workshops with the client, wrote Agile-friendly user requirements, and designed user workflows as well as mock-ups.

Deliverables:
• Crafted personas, UX, mock-ups, and user stories

The client was an enterprise specialized in the delivery of funeral services across France. They were looking for untapped, niche markets where service density was low, but the demand was high.

I combined geospatial and demographic data, developed a scoring formula to assess market attractiveness, and visualized the data in an accessible way for easy access by business users.

Deliverables:
• Built a visual dashboard with locations across all of France

The client was a large organization in the public sector that was looking for a new document management system (DMS) that would support their core business.

I led the project team that was hired to analyze and document all processes, create requirements and user stories, and help to the shape the look and feel of the new DMS product.

Deliverables:
• Created user stories, acceptance criteria, and UI mockups

The client was an international project (based in the UK) which was researching the effects of different weather patterns on the economy in a Central African country.

I developed innovative ways to map large amounts of remote sensing data to economic and geographic features as well as development indices of various regions. Furthermore, there was a need to create geodesic calculation methods in R that are more efficient than those currently publicly available.

Deliverables:
• Mapped the weather data to various natural and calculated geospatial and temporal features
• Extracted, cleaned, structured, and combined all the data from different sources
• Created scripts and functions that are usable for reproducible research

The client was a startup that has developed new methods to passively measure footfall (foot traffic) in areas that are interesting for retail companies.

Deliverables:
• Created a geospatial heatmap dashboard
• Extracted, cleaned raw GPS data
• Set up a data pipeline with R and SQL
• Supported the CEO with sales slide decks

The client was a large European central bank that asked for consulting support in setting up their first AI project.

I reviewed the initiative and helped the project team ensure complete success. We set up a hypothesis-driven project workflow, defined success metrics, and reported to the C-suite with success metrics.

Deliverables:
• Consulted for the project team
• Composed a project review document for the C-suite

The client was a publicly-held Central European metal foundry. They were looking for new ideas on how to stay attractive in a changing market environment and become more appealing to a younger target audience.

I analyzed the processes and current products and created personas with the project team, applied business model innovation patterns, and extracted concrete business ideas that fall in line with the capabilities of the client but targeted an untapped market.

Deliverables:
• Produced personas, product ideas, UX concepts, and UI mockups

The client was a large Chinese solar manufacturer looking to improve the QA processes for three factories with a combined output of over 200,000 photovoltaic panels per day.

I led the product side of the team that delivered a visual panel testing tool which was over 10x faster and 3x more accurate than the best human operator in the factory.

Deliverables:
• Provided the user requirements, user stories, UX, mock-ups, and success metrics

The client, the number-one utility company in the region, was looking to analyze, overhaul, and integrate their sales and project management systems.

We facilitated workshops with the client, wrote Agile-friendly user requirements, and designed user workflows as well as mock-ups.

Deliverables:
• Produced personas, UX, mock-ups, user stories, and API documentation

I was responsible for the analysis, planning, and roll-out of a CRM solution an innovative edtech company in Austria.

This project included:
• Analyzing B2B sales processes at different phases in the customer lifecycle
• Understanding the business, technology, and operations/administration perspectives of the sales process
• Match various market-leading solutions against requirements, keeping projected costs under budget
• Roll-out of the winning system (Pipedrive)

I was responsible for the analysis and improvement of sales processes along the full customer lifecycle of a recruitment software company in the DACH region with 300,000+ daily users.

This project included:
• Analyzing B2B sales processes at different phases in the customer lifecycle
• Communicating and coordinating all teams with a customer focus: marketing, product, pre-sales, sales, customers success, and customer support
• Structuring and cleaning messy data from the CRM
• Identifying churn predictors
• Identifying low- and high-performing sales teams
• Implementing a sales prediction system based on behavioral variables
• Enabling Salesforce to handle multi-touchpoint, multi-campaign leads for better marketing attribution
• Being the go-to-guy for any data and process questions for marketing, product, pre-sales, sales, customer success, and customer support teams throughout the company

Deliverables:
• Improved workflows along the sales funnel
• Self-service KPIs for sales teams
• One source of truth for sales data

A B2C SaaS in the education space (ongoing project via Toptal).
Started as a dedicated growth hacker/data specialist, I now lead product management and marketing. I am m deeply involved with the client and act as a trusted advisor for all kinds of strategic product questions.

The client is an avant-garde high-end clothing brand from Vienna, Austria, and was looking to improve ROAS through various measures.

Functional improvements:
• Matching campaigns and budget to available marketing signals.
• AI-assisted selection of marketing audiences.
• Various measures to improve user experience (UX) and conversion rates.

Technical improvements:
• Implemented measures to cluster users.
• Implemented tracking of product views for usage in dynamic remarketing campaigns.
• Implemented remarketing for users with abandoned carts.
• Various measures to improve website performance using Google PageSpeed score.
• Custom JavaScript coding to improve tracking of customer identifiers and bridge gaps related to cross-site issues.

Tools:
Google Marketing Platform including Analytics, Tag Manager, Adwords, and Dynamic Remarketing, and Shopify,

The client is the leading global sound-based brain/mind technology provider and was looking to scale their business through performance marketing.

Deliverables:
• Implemented tracking measures to send signals to all relevant platforms such as Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Facebook Pixel.
• Set up events to cluster users by specific actions like showing interest in a specific product type.
• Fixed various issues arising from the legacy sales platform.

Tools:
Google Marketing Platform including Analytics, Tag Manager, Adwords, and Dynamic Remarketing, and FastSpring

Deliverables:
• Defined product and sales strategy.
• Helped creating marketing assets such as visuals and copy.
• Set up high-converting landing pages for different stages of the campaign.
• Tracked and improved UX and conversion through A/B testing.

Tools:
Google Marketing Platform including Analytics, Tag Manager, Adwords, and Dynamic Remarketing, and Facebook Pixel.

BrainLuxury helps improve sleep quality, not time in bed. It's a radically different approach to great mornings and high-performance days. BrainLuxury has a small but growing fan base in the USA and Europe, spanning business leaders, sports stars, and nutrition hackers.

During the 2-year project, I was in charge of the following:

• Requirement elicitation workshops
• Resolution of requirement conflicts between stakeholders
• Final product requirements documentation (including mockups, maps, and sketches)

An Austrian government agency wanted to improve the usability and efficiency of their ERP implementation and foster better collaboration between departments using seamless integration of different types of media, documents, and information. I led the project team supporting that government agency. We were responsible for the organization and execution of requirements elicitation workshops, the product requirements documentation (including functional and non-functional requirements), and communicating the results to stakeholders. The project encompassed both user feedback and deep analysis and simplification of a complex matrix of SQL queries. As this was a government agency, keeping the output of all scripts and queries stable while improving the systems integration was paramount.