Silviu Dan Tanasie, Product Manager in Bucharest, Romania
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Silviu Dan Tanasie

Verified Expert  in Product Management

Product Manager

Location
Bucharest, Romania
Toptal Member Since
August 3, 2022

Silviu is a product manager with a rare skill set combining economic research experience, software development proficiency, and DevOps skills. He is skilled in implementing and acquiring enterprise software, with over ten years of development background in PHP, JavaScript, and Python. Silviu is an expert with Fedora-based Linux distributions, such as CentOS and Red Hat, and is accustomed to Amazon EC2, Google Cloud, Azure, and IBM Cloud.

Project Highlights

Physical Security 2.0
Underwent proof of concepts (POCs) with two top national banks and won the first RFP with a major oil and gas company.
Noteb.com
Built the first and only laptop search engine in the world, which creates a market snapshot of over three million products every 24 hours.
ERP Implementation
Implemented a company's first ERP enabling management to gain insights into its business performance and establish control and responsibility over the company's business processes.

Expertise

Work Experience

Head of Product Management

2020 - PRESENT
Hyperfy
  • Devised and oversaw the company's long-term strategy to develop existing and new products to achieve its 2025 financial goals. These products include an AI-drive platform for managing security devices and an Uber-like platform for security services.
  • Analyzed the security market, company's sales, and profitability to identify the best-fitting customer profiles and their primary users, enabling the company to maximize its revenue in the next five years.
  • Constructed revenue, costs, and profit predictions based on different spending budgets and product market strategies.
  • Pitched the product strategy to management and other interested stakeholders to secure the implementation budget and incorporate their feedback into the product strategy.
  • Drafted and composed the final high-level product specifications handed down to the product owners and the presales teams. Drafted the overall solution architecture for each product, later reviewed and approved by the technical team.
  • Elaborated the high-level specifications for a new security device management platform, built around an edge device (Ubuntu), server (Kubernetes), and client app (Flutter) architecture with AI at its core for crucial process automation.
  • Pitched the EIC successfully to finance the scale-up version of the company's Uber-like SaaS platform for security services. The pitch included market research, competition research, business plan, go-to-market strategy, and sustainability impact.
  • Oversaw product owners implement their specifications, follow the overall product vision, and establish their high-level priorities.
  • Collaborated with the sales and marketing teams to establish pricing and licensing models and offer presales guidance. Drafted the KPIs to measure product success.
  • Provided weekly and monthly updates to management on product plan fulfillment in terms of development and market performance.

Developer | Product Manager | Owner

2018 - PRESENT
Starchaser
  • Developed a configurable and undetectable Python scraper to collect data from dozens of websites daily.
  • Created an automated and configurable tool to structure and interpret product data in Python.
  • Contributed to various machine learning, blockchain, and NFT research projects.
  • Collaborated on multiple cloud infrastructure maintenance and deployment projects, primarily based on CentOS, Red Hat, and Ubuntu Linux distributions on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and IBM cloud.
  • Worked on various projects as a developer in Python or PHP.

Information Technology Consultant

2018 - PRESENT
Lidas
  • Supervised and consulted on the new and ongoing software and hardware projects.
  • Analyzed client needs and internal processes regarding IT solutions.
  • Installed, configured, and maintained the company's Linux servers, including the on-premise installation and configuration of several Linux Red Hat servers for SAP.

Founder | Manager | Developer

2018 - 2020
Noteb.com
  • Built a laptop search engine to deliver results in under two seconds from over three million entries updated daily, ranked by the best value for the money, lowest price, or maximizing the features that fit the budget.
  • Calculated the subsequent development costs and time-to-market for each potential product or service based on the existing company's technologies to pick the best option for potential revenue versus costs and time-to-market. Defined the KPIs.
  • Explored products and service creation delivered to different market segments based on existing company technologies. Settled selling market data collected for the search engine as market and pricing data to US-based laptop retailers.
  • Performed B2B marketing campaigns through cold emails, LinkedIn, and affiliate contacts. Managed signing contracts with Hewlett Packard USA and Erste Bank Romania for daily data on market pricing indexed by consolidated product characteristics.
  • Coded most of the project's back-end services, including a Python web scraper, an indexing and data cleaning service, the website's back end in PHP, and most of the front end in JavaScript. Created a flexible and future-proof product data model.
  • Set up and maintained the cloud and on-premise infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure is mainly on AWS, with some machines on Google Cloud and Azure. Regardless of the environment, everything runs on Centos 7/8 and Alma Linux machines.
  • Analyzed the search engine's metrics in terms of user demographics, user actions, and generated revenue. Engaged users directly on multiple Reddit boards to gather feedback. Adjusted the search engine's features and roadmap based on user feedback.
  • Successfully pitched the business plan for a spin-off YouTube channel to obtain financing from the European Union. The spin-off is now expanding to TikTok.
  • Participated in multiple pitching competitions and startup conferences. In most of these, noteb.com had a presentation stand. The pitches included market research, competition research, business plan, go-to-market strategy, and sustainability impact.
  • Gained significant insights into the user experience of retail websites and marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart through the thorough analysis needed to collect their data.

Chief Information Officer

2015 - 2018
Lidas
  • Implemented the company's first enterprise resource planning (ERP), which was challenging since it had 24/7 production, retail, distribution business lines, and faced resistance to change from its employees.
  • Did several months of business analysis at the company's HQ alongside the ERP supplier's business analyst to devise and approve the ERP requirements and implementation specifications.
  • Devised the implementation schedule for the ERP and worked together with the supplier's project manager to assure issue-free business continuity throughout the entire implementation.
  • Prioritized issues and new business requirements during the ERP implementation depending on their resolution time and impact on the company's business processes.
  • Enabled management to gain insights into the company's business performance and established a structured control and responsibility over the company's business processes due to the ERP implementation.
  • Analyzed, planned, and oversaw the company's IT infrastructure overhaul to accommodate its future needs. This overhaul was all done post ERP implementation.
  • Prepared and approved all major IT-related acquisitions and organized the company's IT support and maintenance.
  • Set up and configured a CentOS Linux server to manage traffic between networks with different access rights and provide automatic fail-over internet connection.

Founder | Manager | Developer

2011 - 2018
Uplift
  • Managed the product journey from an idea to the market and provided several years of post-launch support.
  • Analyzed the market and client needs, designed a revenue model, created a product roadmap, and ultimately adjusted development based on user feedback.
  • Innvotated the product to provide a more immersive experience while keeping the same repetitive gaming mechanics prevalent among mobile games.
  • Gathered a development team without employing or paying anyone since most of the project's collaborators worked free and no financing was available.
  • Conducted some of the JavaScript coding and most of the game's level design and UX in Unity3D.
  • Executed the go-to-market strategy and did a small-scale community-driven marketing campaign.
  • Analyzed Google Play metrics such as app crashes, app installs/uninstalls, and user feedback to prioritise post-launch features and bug fixing.

Product Manager

2014 - 2015
Star Storage
  • Obtained several RFPs and signed a significant deal with Allianz Romania.
  • Analyzed market opportunity, competition, potential clients, and pricing to structure the market into clients of small, medium, and large sizes and devise different go-to-market strategies for each client type. Defined the product KPIs.
  • Gathered feedback on the company's new products and validated how these address their needs and pains after several months of grassroots market research through personal meetings with potential clients.
  • Participated regularly in client demos to showcase product capabilities, advocate their business cases, and acquire feedback on the company's B2B products.
  • Collaborated with the sales and marketing teams to establish pricing and licensing models and offer presales guidance. Upon request, created custom licensing and pricing for large enterprise clients.
  • Established the long-term product roadmap to anticipate client demands and incorporated the requests of existing leads.
  • Filled in the product owner role for two products. One was a medical records platform offered both as SaaS and on-premise. The other one was a mobile app for automating contract filling and signing.
  • Devised and executed several marketing campaigns for the medical records product, including cold emails, cold calling, and client pitching through the company's sales force.
  • Participated in multiple conferences and international B2B events, usually with a stand showcasing the company's products.
  • Aligned the product backlog with scheduled client demos and product roadmap and supervised the overall activities of the development team.

Expert Analyst in Economic Research

2011 - 2012
CIVITTA
  • Delivered an economic study on clusters and innovation commissioned by the Romanian Ministry of Economy.
  • Created a 120-page statistical analysis on the competitiveness of Romania's industrial sectors for the Ministry of Economy.
  • Composed a four-chapter contribution to a study commissioned by the Romanian National Commission for Prognosis on the competitiveness of Romania's industry and recommendations to improve national research spending results.

Systems Administrator

2010 - 2011
Intexim
  • Developed two simple software solutions to improve internal operations, one to manage the work allocation and another to monitor employee activities.
  • Installed and maintained the company's Linux servers running on CentOS, SUSE, and the company's workstations. The services run by the servers are the internet gateway, firewall, company website, internal web applications, email, and FTP transfer.
  • Implemented several workstation management automation tools.
  • Accustomed to document indexing, digitization, data entry, OCR, and metadata structures.

Physical Security 2.0

Underwent proof of concepts (POCs) with two top national banks and won the first RFP with a major oil and gas company.

Developed and pitched the 5-year product strategy to management based on several months of market research and analysis of the company's revenue and sales performance.

The product strategy is built on three core products, enabling the company to offer end-to-end security as a service and later expand its offering into business intelligence. The long-term plan is to provide business insights by applying computer vision functionalities to the client's security infrastructure to generate business intelligence data and predict future events and behaviors. Through this strategy, the company grows outside the security field, where clients want "regulatory compliance with minimal costs" into an "innovative business intelligence" field. As an additional challenge, the product design and architecture must accommodate SaaS and on-premise deployments with no internet access.

After one year of accelerated development, the first product of the new strategy reached the MVP stage, and the first POCs began with major national banks.

Overall, the market feedback is incredibly positive. If the company raises funds to complete the product suite, it will likely become a unicorn.

Noteb.com

http://noteb.com

Built the first and only laptop search engine in the world, which creates a market snapshot of over three million products every 24 hours.

Every 24 hours, Noteb collects data from over 15 different retailer websites in the US, indexes it with incredible accuracy and granularity, and creates a market snapshot in which each product listing has a unique ranking score. Moreover, the data model at the project's core is so well designed that it has remained unchanged for the past five years despite numerous new laptop models and technologies.

Based on this market snapshot, the search engine quickly recommends laptops from multiple producers, giving users the best options for their needs. The website offers compatibility guidance to search and customize laptop models for users looking to build their notebook configuration. Users can also compare up to four different laptops and choose based on a complex rating system that evaluates each laptop's characteristics against other laptops on the market, including battery life, weight, processing power, storage size, and building materials.

The product's revenue is generated through affiliate sales and B2B deals on market data.

ERP Implementation

http://www.lidas.ro

Implemented a company's first ERP enabling management to gain insights into its business performance and establish control and responsibility over the company's business processes.

The company had a €4 million turnover and no ERP, but as the company grew, management no longer had visibility over the company's internal processes, individual product profitability, and employee performance. The ERP implementation took almost one year. It was particularly challenging since the company had three business lines, production, retail, and distribution, along with the 24/7 production lines, and faced significant resistance to change from its employees.

The biggest challenge was getting the company's employees to work with the ERP, as many departments used pen and paper reports. Only several employees used Excel, while some did not even know how to use a PC.

The second challenge was ensuring business continuity during the implementation, considering that the company's operations and production lines work 24/7, and any downtime generates high costs and delayed deliveries.

The final goal of the ERP was to post-calculate the total cost associated with every product made by the company.
2006 - 2011

Bachelor's Degree in International Business

The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies - Bucharest, Romania

2006 - 2010

Master's Degree in International Relations

The University of Edinburgh - Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2008 - 2009

Exchange Student in International Relations

Catholic University of Leuven - Leuven, Belgium

NOVEMBER 2022 - PRESENT

CS50P: CS50's Introduction to Programming with Python

HarvardX

MAY 2021 - PRESENT

Bootcamp - Entrepreneurship 102: What Can You Do for Your Customer?

MITx

OCTOBER 2019 - PRESENT

Disciplined Entrepreneruship

InnovX

AUGUST 2019 - PRESENT

The Iterative Innovation Process

MITx

MARCH 2011 - PRESENT

Award for Excellence in Economic Research

Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies

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