Cristina Gabriela Cocan

This project involved delivering a global payroll and compliance service MVP and implementing SOC 2 Type 1 compliance to ensure high-security standards. It was a greenfield, startup-style project focused on creating a new legal entity and developing an entirely new product.

From the beginning, I contributed by defining the project scope, ramping up the project team, and setting the roadmap ahead of the product launch. The project unfolded in two key phases: phase one entailed launching the first product MVP, and phase two involved attaining the cybersecurity compliance certification. For phase two, I developed a custom delivery framework for non-engineering teams to coordinate thousands of contributions, ensuring all were aligned on timelines and expectations.

I led this large-scale program involving over 80 team members, achieving on-time delivery with no bugs reaching production. This success required extensive coordination across multiple functions and departments to ensure alignment and seamless collaboration. The main challenge was aligning stakeholders across engineering, product, design, research, finance, legal, marketing, and operations to enable unified goals and decisive actions.

The project aimed to integrate additional payment types into the payment gateway for a leading European payment solutions provider. I led a cross-functional team of five internal and two client teams, overseeing the project roadmap and managing essential dependencies, including complex external system integrations. We emphasized quality throughout, as we could not afford any escaped bugs in production. Testing posed particular challenges, given the extensive integrations with 3rd-party systems that were sometimes difficult to validate comprehensively.

I led a greenfield project to launch a new product designed to offer career growth services to professionals. Managing two engineering teams and all operational streams, I focused on driving rapid iterations, ensuring that we included only essential functionalities in the MVP and removed non-critical features.

Once we launched the MVP, we immediately started gathering data to inform our next steps, ensuring that all subsequent decisions were data-driven. In addition, I worked to eliminate process inefficiencies and empowered the team to choose simple, effective technical solutions for faster delivery. I helped define and implement interim manual operational processes to ensure a seamless user experience and compensate for the limited features available at launch. Another challenge was to plan capacity effectively and strategize for future scalability.