Christian Nwafor
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Dallas, TX, United States
Toptal member since October 26, 2022
Christian is a senior technical project manager with over 10 years in Agile delivery for data engineering, cloud, and AI product teams. He manages distributed teams, leads project intake, and reports to executives. Recently, Christian focused on integrating AI tools like Claude, Gemini, and MCP into the SDLC, reducing manual effort and speeding up delivery, including replacing a $1+ million offshore contract with a quicker in-house team.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Delivery
- Agile DevOps
- Facilitation
- Jira
- Kanban
- MURAL
- Rally
- Scrum
Work Experience
AI Technical Project Manager
MJH Life Sciences
- Led 3 distributed data engineering and reporting teams, consisting of 16 engineers across the U.S., using blended Scrum and Kanban cadences, and reported directly to the CTO and VP of Data Engineering & Machine Learning on delivery, risk, and roadmap.
- Delivered over 10 projects, ranging from backend architecture revamps to internal apps that transformed daily operations for teams in data, marketing, and sales.
- Shipped an AI-powered audience insight and segmentation app, now the most-used internal tool for sales, marketing, and outreach, driving direct ad revenue and saving the company approximately $300,000 annually.
- Managed delivery scope after a $1+ million annual offshore contractor budget cut, achieving a delivery rate about 10x faster than the previous vendor team.
- Owned project intake end-to-end, covering stakeholder discovery, scoping, estimation, prioritization, status reporting, blocker escalation, and final delivery sign-off.
- Acted as Jira admin for all 3 teams, creating workflows, custom fields, automation rules, dashboards, and JQL-driven reports relied on by leadership.
Sr. Scrum Master/Project Manager
ButcherBox - Main
- Improved story management by resolving bottlenecks, enhancing PR flow, and launching a dedicated Teams channel for SHOP to reduce distractions. Supported QA integration with enhanced testing capabilities, aligning processes for better efficiency.
- Implemented project lifecycle management processes to ensure project requirements were documented and tracked throughout the project.
- Developed a comprehensive project plan that outlined the key tasks and milestones for a major consulting project, resulting in the successful completion of the project on time and within budget.
- Facilitated team charter sessions to set standards like the definition of ready/done and PR/WIP management, aligning team goals, and fostering trust. Guided the SHOP team in defining their purpose, clarifying priorities, and values for stakeholders.
- Coached managers to clarify roles through 1:1 sessions and actionable feedback. Addressed team overwhelm by implementing a "doing" Scrum culture and establishing clear stakeholder communication channels for a collaborative work environment.
Sr. Scrum Master/Agile Project Manager
Kroger Pharmacy
- Led the rollout for two teams - one team built an order-flow visibility platform, the other handled scheduling/capacity, fees, and incentives to improve order fulfillment and cost. Delivery rose by around 30% and cycle time dropped by about 25% over the engagement.
- Coached both teams through norming, backlog cleanup, and sprint planning to make delivery more predictable.
- Worked with product owners and stakeholders to keep the roadmap and backlog priorities current, which cut down on scope creep mid-sprint.
- Ran team health and maturity assessments each quarter and used the results to set concrete improvement goals with each team.
- Coached engineering managers and other scrum masters on Agile practices to keep delivery consistent across teams.
- Rebuilt the Jira board with custom filters, dashboards, and automation rules to track defects and clean up workflow, and wrote Confluence docs so the team had a shared reference.
Sr. Scrum Master/Project Manager
Deckers - Deckers US
- Spearheaded the development of multiple products, from concept to production release, by championing agile values, principles, and practices, resulting in enhanced product quality and accelerated time-to-market.
- Supported two development teams by tracking timelines and providing regular status updates to enterprise leaders. This proactive approach ensured transparency and alignment with key stakeholders, contributing to project success.
- Enabled the teams to achieve high performance and cross-disciplinary collaboration, leveraging agile methodologies, ultimately contributing to the organization's overall success and competitiveness.
- Demonstrated exceptional coaching abilities by facilitating the adoption of Scrum within director-level and higher management teams, effectively addressing pushback and fostering a culture of agility within the organization.
- Implemented innovative coaching techniques and frameworks that led to a 20% reduction in development cycle times, significantly improving team productivity and enabling faster response to changing market demands.
Agile Coach/Sr. Project Manager
Capital One Financial
- Led five cross-functional teams in designing and deploying secure, scalable landing zones tailored to specific business needs, ensuring compliance with industry standards, governance policies, and long-term scalability for future cloud expansions.
- Directed cloud migration and mobilization initiatives, collaborating with DevOps and security teams to plan, execute, and optimize the transition of mission-critical applications and data to the AWS cloud, minimizing downtime and mitigating risks.
- Performed in-depth risk assessments and developed tailored mitigation strategies throughout migration projects, ensuring business continuity, maintaining data integrity, and adhering to strict regulatory requirements.
- Facilitated key Agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives, driving team alignment on infrastructure development and cloud integration goals, while ensuring tasks were prioritized to meet strategic deliverables.
- Collaborated closely with senior leadership and key stakeholders to define/refine project roadmaps, ensuring that technical cloud infrastructure implementations were closely aligned with overarching business objectives and long-term strategic vision.
- Spearheaded an initiative alongside product owners to introduce continuous integration into the product lifecycle.
- Developed and delivered targeted training workshops focused on Agile methodologies, cloud adoption strategies, and AWS best practices, ensuring team members were equipped with the skills to maintain and continuously improve cloud operations.
Sr. Scrum Master/ Sr. Project Manager
Capital One Financial
- Facilitated and coordinated user story inter-dependency meetings across multiple Scrum teams to review and align the team's work to meet the delivery schedule.
- Collaborated closely with product owners and senior management to define AWS migration goals and timelines, ensuring alignment with business priorities.
- Evaluated the metrics of two teams using Jira and identified improvement opportunities that increased performance by 15%.
- Worked with the development teams to ensure requirements and designs were completely understood while tracking key metrics through burndown, team velocity, backlog health, and defect summary reports, radiating progress to the team and stakeholders.
- Coordinated inter-team dependencies to ensure smooth project execution during AWS mobilization, tracking key performance metrics, and identifying areas for improvement.
Scrum Master/Technical PM
Cigna
- Increased the development team participation level in daily scrums from 75% to 100% and improved the team's morale through education and aggressive preemptive impediment removals, positively impacting velocity.
- Coordinated backlog grooming and refining sessions for ongoing sprints and advanced preparation for product owners for upcoming sprints.
- Worked with other scrum masters in launching the Scale Agile Framework (SAFe) quick start and coached teams on SAFe principles and guidelines.
- Executed brainstorming sessions with the development team and identified daily scrum activities and stand-ups.
- Utilized Jira to track and effectively communicate team velocity, burndown charts, and sprint release progress to the team.
- Removed impediments through consistent communications with the development team, observing behavior and interactions.
Project Manager/Scrum Master
Belk
- Facilitated sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and backlog refinements for 2-week sprint cycles emphasizing continual improvement.
- Created training documents and trained team members and leaders on Agile and Scrum principles, values, benefits, and other Agile frameworks like Kanban and SAFe.
- Worked with development teams to decompose user stories into tasks and take ownership of those tasks.
- Encouraged teams to consistently practice the core Agile principles of self-direction, collaboration, business prioritization, team accountability, and transparency to ensure consistent delivery of the working product.
- Facilitated weekly backlog grooming sessions with the team, ensuring work items were estimated and ready for work per the product owners' priorities.
- Applied creative techniques in scrum ceremonies to coach development teams transitioning to Scrum in understanding and practicing agility, resulting in increased team performance and overall product quality.
Project Manager
Martin Gold
- Created a full-scale project plan, including work breakdown structure, task dependence, task estimate, resource, and project milestones.
- Ensured project control procedures and policies as part of my role.
- Managed changes to the project scope, schedule, and costs using appropriate verification techniques to keep the project plan accurate, up to date, and reflect authorized project changes.
- Tracked and managed project execution following the company's financial management practices.
- Estimated the required work effort, created resource plans, and adjusted program plans based on dependencies, capacity constraints, and time frames.
- Worked with other business and technical teams to establish processes to collect and share project status information efficiently.
Data Analyst
Martin Gold
- Analyzed customer data for market trends to maximize ROI using MS SQL and Tableau.
- Migrated data from source systems to the destination database using SSIS.
- Created stored procedures using MS SQL for fast and efficient queries.
- Used SQL aggregate functions to collect, aggregate, and segment data to make it usable by end users and stakeholders.
- Collaborated with stakeholders and users to ensure alignment with industry data standards and identify potential data gaps.
- Gathered requirements and orchestrated meetings to ensure project progress and standardized work execution.
- Documented data mappings from source to destination and maintained visible data lineage and associated logic.
- Built data models and database objects to store and maintain data.
- Ensured data governance rules were followed and met by all developers and analysts.
Project History
Capital One App
https://www.capitalone.com/digital/mobile/Delivered a cloud-based feature that provides in-depth transaction insights for the Capital One app.
Served a team of 20 developers, QA, and UX designers across two teams within an ART to add new features to the Capital One app. This feature provided more insight to users, giving them access to more details on their transactions. Since launch, the usage rate has increased by 35%.
Express Scripts by Cigna
https://www.cigna.com/individuals-families/member-guide/home-delivery-pharmacyLaunched and maintained the release of Express Scripts by Cigna.
Served over 25 developers, UX designers, testers, and analysts across two Scrum teams to launch Express Scripts integration with Cigna. Express Scripts is a home delivery pharmacy that provides a convenient option for users taking regular medication. It’s simple, safe, and saves users’ trips to the pharmacy. I led the development teams, coordinated backlog grooming, and refined sessions for ongoing sprints to make this project successful.
Belk.com
Oversaw the web maintenance and mobile gift-giving integration of Belk.com.
Leveraged Agile methods to coach, motivate, organize, and develop Scrum teams within the organization at a sustainable pace while facilitating progress toward high-value incremental delivery. I supported multiple teams in delivering several initiatives that set the company apart from its competitors, most notably providing mobile gift-giving integration for our different shopping sectors like private-label apparel, shoes, jewelry, and cosmetics.
Education
Associate's Degree in Computer Science
Middlesex College - Edison, NJ, USA
Certifications
ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Certified Coach (ICP-ACC)
ICAgile
ICAgile Certified Professional - Agile Team Facilitator (ICP-ATF)
ICAgile
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA)
AWS
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Skills
Tools
Jira, Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Azure Boards, Microsoft PowerPoint, Rally, Asana, MURAL, Miro, ETL, SQL, Tableau
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Servant Leadership, Agile Project Management, Agile Software Development, Kanban, Agile Delivery, DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Change Management, Azure DevOps, Agile Product Management
Platforms
Productboard, Blockchain, SharePoint
Industry Expertise
FMCG, Healthcare
Other
Whiteboard Software, Microsoft Teams, Agile Coaching, Scrum Master, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Stakeholder Management, Backlog Management, Facilitation, Project Management, Sprint Ceremonies, Sprint Planning, Scrum Coaching, Backlog Grooming, Feature Prioritization, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Business Analysis, Software Architecture, Technical Program Management, Technical Project Management, Project Delivery, Project Planning, Cloud Platforms, Agile Program Management, Data, Startups, Manufacturing, Technical Writing, Image Generation, Delivery Management, Agile DevOps, Vendor Management, Workday, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Integration, QA Testing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Java, Data Structures, Python 3, IT Systems Architecture, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrumban, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Waterfall Methodology, IT Project Management, Life Science, Data Analytics, Jira Administration, Stakeholder Alignment
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring