Vanessa Soares

• Defined differentiator features that drove 47% of the total revenue.
• Wrote requirements documentation and liaised with 3rd-party companies.
• Defined website information architecture and pages.
• Worked with 50+ markets to get translations, built their sites, and helped them with customization.
• Helped markets achieve their KPIs by monitoring and analyzing metrics across multiple countries to identify user engagement improvements that could be applied to all markets.

The project started around six months before I joined, but it hadn’t moved much due to unalignment on scope. I met and interviewed several stakeholders, designers, development, and test lead.

I put together a document outlining the high-level front-end and back-end scope across all platforms within two weeks. I presented it to the department, enabling everyone to understand what were the “must,” “should,” and “could” have requirements, as well as what was out of scope.

Before signing the contract to develop a video-on-demand website, the client wanted to have the full scope detailed in a document. I joined the project as the product owner and business analyst responsible for this document.

I drove the discovery workshops with technical teams, designers, and product managers on the client-side, as well as developers on her team. After several workshops and meetings, the 100+ pages document was finalized with all requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, priority, and designs for all website breakpoints.

My team had to build and deliver websites for 50+ countries, using the company’s internal content management system (CMS). The whole process was manual—from sending a spreadsheet for countries to translate to outsourcing the site build where the pages were built one by one and translations copied from the sheet (one of the projects was over 1,500 pages). Needless to say, the whole process had a lot of back-and-forths, took a long time, and it was prone to human error.

I replaced the sheet with a Sharepoint form, eliminating the need to manually check if each country filled in the sheet correctly. The site build, which had been done by an outsourcing company, was replaced by an internal tool I adapted, which created all the pages using the translations provided by each country on Sharepoint.

I was part of a team that created editorial content and distributed it to over 50 countries. When I joined the team, the automated process to distribute the content was slow, unreliable, and very time-consuming to troubleshoot. This process failed once or three times a week, and it used to take 1-2 hours to investigate and fix the problem. Sometimes the issue couldn’t be fixed by us and had to be escalated to a team in a different time zone, which meant longer waiting time for markets to get the content they needed.

I took the initiative to look at alternative solutions and run a proof of concept.
The new solution improved the time to get the content to markets, was easier to troubleshoot, and was more reliable due to using more stable services.

I was part of a team where the feature prioritization depended on several stakeholders across different teams. The documentation used in the process was scattered and sometimes inconsistent—it ranged from feature request, voting, and ROI calculations to estimated development costs.

I took the initiative to replace these documents with Sharepoint forms, workflows, and a site, automating the process where possible. The workflow included the process from feature request to release and KPI tracking.

The client wanted to migrate their sales data from three systems into Salesforce but had a very limited budget. Since I have a lot of experience with databases, I offered help to merge and deduplicate the data and export it so that the company setting up Salesforce could import it.

To merge and deduplicate the data, I set up Microsoft SQL Server, created the database, and used data extraction and transformation tools. And to export the data, I used database views and SQL Server tools.

After making several shows and series available on a video-on-demand service, the support team identified some shows or episodes that were missing on some platforms. Various teams were mobilized to manually check whatever they could on the devices they had at home (the lockdown made it more difficult to cover all platforms).

I automated these checks on a Google Sheet by adapting a Google Apps script to work with the service APIs, cross-checking that all 11 platforms had all the shows and episodes specified on the content planning sheet. This saved everyone’s time and enabled the content planning team to consistently check if the content was distributed to all platforms.