Siobhan Durcan
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since May 18, 2022
Siobhan has held global product management roles. She has technical skills in Python (machine learning), generative AI development, and Salesforce. She delights in seeing the impact of her work–whether that's measured by revenue, operational efficiency, or the number of customers reached. Siobhan stays abreast of AI trends and publishes a newsletter on AI. She thrives on untangling messy problems and has a track record of rapidly absorbing disparate information and producing clear insights.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Analysis
- Creative Problem Solving
- Data Products
- Ethics
- Feature Prioritization
- Interviews
- Operational Efficiency Improvement
- Structured Facilitation
Work Experience
Data Platform Product Manager
Citizens Advice Bureaux
- Led the discovery of how ChatGPT could be used to support the business strategy and pitched for external partners for funding. Currently supporting experiments on use in contact centers and back office operations.
- Reduced data pipeline development time by releasing an inclusion list management tool for product teams and rolling out infrastructure as code for the common pipeline and API patterns.
- Led a team of data engineers, database engineers, and data scientists to deliver management information reporting for a customized implementation of Amazon Connect.
- Delivered reporting for 230 offices to report on 1,200 contact center staff.
- Cut support tickets by 90% by automating an integration between Salesforce CRM and the public website.
- Reduced support costs for Salesforce CRM by 50% by engaging individual contractors rather than agencies.
Data Products Consultant
Various Clients via a Business Management Consultancy Company
- Enabled a London council to contact and provide support to 15,000 residents by leading a team to build a custom CRM in two weeks.
- Rescued a geographical information system project that had been running for six years. I took the product from buggy, undocumented, and untested code to a supportable enterprise data product.
- Sold £500 thousand of software development and consultancy services to clients.
- Authored guidance that was published by the Ministry of Housing and local government on data analysis and sharing.
- Led a team of two developers to deliver a data science platform in two months. The product was used by 30 organizations to access and analyze data about humanitarian issues safely.
- Defined data ethics and GDPR requirements across four high-profile projects.
- Led problem discovery and solution ideation around data sharing across 35 local government and third-sector organizations.
Salesforce Transformation Consultant
The Architech Club
- Acted as lead consultant and business analyst on client projects. Designed and defined a target Salesforce setup for a client and worked alongside a team of Salesforce administrators and developers to deliver this.
- Worked as a business analyst and led process engineering workshops with stakeholders from multiple geographies, as well as managed relationships with senior stakeholders.
- Secured a £2 million contract with a new international client. This was achieved by configuring Salesforce prototypes as part of pre-sales engineering work and working closely with Salesforce.com and senior stakeholders at the new client.
- Developed a methodology for the orientation package offered by Architech Club. Trained other consultants on delivering orientations—from requirements gathering to agile delivery.
Digital Transformation Freelance Consultant
Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists
- Onboarded 37,000 users onto the new membership site.
- Resolved a data breach that resulted in records of approximately 15,000 individuals being available on search engines.
- Persuaded board and senior management to launch the public website—which had undergone two years of build—as an MVP rather than waiting until everything was finished across both the public and member-only parts of the website.
- Rescued a digital transformation project that had no remaining budget and had not delivered any products or digital change.
- Replaced an unsecured Training Diary product, working with only one developer for two months to complete the build before migrating 25,000 users onto the new product. The product was rebuilt in the Salesforce.com experience cloud.
- Rolled out Customer Portal built on Salesforce Experience/Community Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud for case management.
Global CRM Product Manager (Salesforce)
Condé Nast International
- Acted as a business analyst and product manager. Worked with stakeholders to agree on a global set of processes and developed Salesforce requirements based on these processes.
- Achieved zero bug reports across live Salesforce CRM systems.
- Built an MVP Salesforce product that reduced reporting time from several weeks to a single click.
- Received investment for a single CRM project by producing a clear business case based on a project discovery.
- Gained buy-in to the vision of a single CRM system from local leadership. This meant engaging with a stakeholder list that included the publishers of Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair worldwide.
- Led stakeholders through process definition and requirements gathering workshops, working with a junior business analyst to turn these into process maps and Jira tickets.
CRM Products Manager (Salesforce)
Teach First
- Acted as an internal Salesforce consultant, administrator, and business analyst across the organization.
- Increased percentage of customers using self-service from 60% to 95% after product re-launch, including online signatures.
- Worked on reducing elapsed time to match a candidate to a vacancy by two weeks through internal matching product and customer self-service.
- Reduced administrative efforts required to process vacancies by one hour through process automation and effort needed to update the accounts database from one month to two days through database redesign.
- Worked on reducing the timeframe for customer reporting to a single click through a single customer view.
- Designed and delivered a CRM training program to 300 staff members that received the highest quality score amongst annual training sessions provided by the company, including those offered by professional training partners.
Digital Projects and Data Associate (Salesforce Administrator)
Speakers for Schools
- Served as the sole Salesforce business analyst and administrator in a small organization of four people.
- Migrated 50,000 customer records from the previous parent company into a new Salesforce CRM instance.
- Reduced application dropout by 30% through changes to website navigation and content and integration with Salesforce CRM.
- Cut the time elapsed when arranging an event by an average of three days through Salesforce automation.
- Increased customer response to emails from 50% to 90% (using Salesforce automation), which contributed to reducing the administrative effort required to organize an event.
- Reduced effort to match speakers to speaking opportunities by two hours by launching a process automation feature and a map-based matching product.
- Increased presence across local authorities from 60% to 100% by building products that allowed users to easily identify opportunities to run events in new local authorities.
Project History
Global CRM for Conde Nast International
Won investment from board to invest in a single Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and led team to build MVP.
Conde Nast international works across 13 geographies and each has its board, leadership team, and one CRMs used to manage clients. Conde Nast wanted to improve account management, and implementing a single CRM was a step towards this.
Beacon COVID-19 Response CRM
https://github.com/wearefuturegov/beaconBuilt a CRM to support local government to manage COVID-19 response
Lead a team of four engineers and two designers to build a Ruby on Rails CRM in two weeks. Due to the time pressure, I had to drive difficult decisions around requirements prioritization in order to provide the team with clarity on what they needed to deliver.
Coastal Erosion Analysis
Mapped erosion over the past five years across 5% of the Southern Indian coastline
Worked as part of a team using data from Google Earth Engine to identify which parts of the Southern Indian coastline had undergone erosion. This was part of a broader piece of research about how to tackle the issue of coastal erosion.
Flight Search App Research and Prototyping
Validated flight search app concept through market research, user interviews and prototyping with a budget of £10,000.
TimeFlies is a flight search app that allows you to search for the best end-to-end journey. This project involved ideation, market research, prototyping through wireframes, and user interviews. The basic concept was validated as useful and potentially profitable, but the recommendation was not to proceed due to a growing concern amongst investors over environmental impact.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of Sussex - Brighton, United Kingdom
Bachelor's Degree in English Literature and Legal Ethics
University of Manchester - Manchester, United Kingdom
Certifications
Python
HackerRank
Certified Salesforce Administrator
Salesforce
Scrum Product Owner Certified (SPOC)
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Board Reporting, GIS, Prototyping on Paper (POP), Jupyter, Web GIS, Jira
Paradigms
Data Product Management, Scrum, Requirements Analysis, Agile, Agile Product Management, User Testing, Agile Project Management
Platforms
Anaconda, Jupyter Notebook
Other
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Reports, Analysis, Creative Thinking, Creative Problem Solving, Product Management, IT Business Analysis, Discovery Workshops, Stakeholder Interviews, Lean Product Development, Data Product Manager, Data Products, CRM Systems, GAP Analysis, Process Analysis, Business Process Analysis, Process Mapping, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Stakeholder Management, IT Projects, Project Scoping, Interviews, Customer Interviews, Data Analysis, Data Quality Analysis, Backlog Management, IT Consulting, Stakeholder Engagement, Enterprise SaaS, Requirements, Business Requirements, User Requirements, Data, Workshops, Feature Prioritization, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Business Analysis, Business Process Automation, Functional Requirements, Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Product Ownership, Discovery, Project Discovery, Customer Experience, SaaS, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Product Development, MVP Design, Technical Product Management, Process Automation, Roadmaps, Machine Learning, Data Science, Ethics, Workshop Facilitation, Interviewing, User Interviews, Lean Product Management, Web Portals, Client Portals, Salesforce, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Lightning, Journey Mapping, Jobs to be Done (JTBD), User Stories, Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Product Owner Contractor, Team Leadership, Cross-functional Collaboration, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Remote Team Leadership, Remote Work, Digital Transformation, Offshore Team Management, Relational Databases, IT Project Management, Project Management, Training Content, Presentations, Board Presentations, JTBD Interviews, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Distributed Team Management, Project Rescue, System Integration, Data Integration, Consulting, Project Planning, Facilitation, Structured Facilitation, Salesforce Customization, Operational Efficiency Improvement, Technical Requirements, Software Requirements Specifications (SRS), Product Owner, Agile Sprints, Databases, Integration, User Research, Prototyping, Product Discovery, Customer Discovery, Voice of the Customer (VoC), Customer Research, Statistical Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Product Conceptualization, Python, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Image Processing, Research, Google Colaboratory (Colab), Training & Training Content Development, Training Materials, Project Finance, Account Management, P&L Management, Profit & Loss (P&L), Design Workshops, Lean Product Manager, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Product Leadership, Digital Services, Pandas, Sales Enablement, Value Proposition, Training, Technical Training, Requirements & Specifications, Procurement, Agile CRM, IT Product Management, Vendor Management, Vendor Selection, Proof of Concept (POC), Global Product Management, Lean, Remote User Testing, P&L Responsibility, Salesforce Community, Ideation, Validation, Telephony, Contact Centers, Data Pipelines, Data Mesh, Agile Product Delivery, Automation, Project Timelines, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), CRM APIs, Salesforce API, Salesforce Reports, Migration, Data Migration, Database Migration, Product Consultant, New Business Development, ChatGPT, Regulations, Technology Trends, APIs, Data Mining, UX Design, Artificial Intelligence Product Manager
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