Edgar Emilio Polanco Gomez

• Facilitated Scrum ceremonies (daily stand-ups, sprint planning, grooming sessions, demos, and retrospectives), ensuring efficient Agile delivery across teams.
• Collaborated with stakeholders to gather, define, and document customer requirements in detailed user stories, driving alignment across all phases of the project.
• Designed workflow charts and process diagrams to visualize user stories, improving cross-functional team clarity and execution.
• Managed and clarified user interaction requirements with UI/UX designers to ensure a seamless user experience aligned with customer needs.
• Reviewed test plans and strategies to ensure comprehensive quality assurance, meeting the high regulatory standards required in healthcare products.
• Oversaw and successfully achieved HIPAA compliance certification for the product, refactoring key elements to meet industry standards.
• Demonstrated project deliverables to executives during milestone reviews, fostering stakeholder confidence and transparency.

• Developed and documented PMO metrics and established a system to track them, improving tracking efficiency by 25%.
• Created standardized templates and process guidelines, reducing project initiation time by 15% across the organization.
• Tracked project progress, risks, and client expectations for Kanban and Scrum projects, ensuring timely delivery and alignment with goals.
• Documented and presented project review scorecards (milestones, risks, and issues) to the client services director, enhancing executive reporting.
• Validated and improved standard operating procedure (SOP) documents, streamlining teamwork processes for internal and external teams.
• Interviewed and selected project management candidates for the PMO team, strengthening organizational capabilities.

• Developed and implemented comprehensive testing strategies (regressions, smoke, and integration), improving product quality and reliability.
• Led performance and load testing strategies using Blazemeter/JMeter, ensuring scalability and efficiency for healthcare applications.
• Managed bug triage processes, prioritizing and addressing critical issues to maintain development timelines.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to demo deliverables during monthly executive reviews, ensuring alignment with client expectations.
• Contributed to ensuring regulatory compliance through quality assurance practices tailored for healthcare software requirements.
• Interviewed QA candidates to strengthen team capabilities and maintain high-quality standards.

• Developed and managed a global project plan, budget, and schedule across multiple waves/releases (Wave 1, 2, 3, 4, and ISC) for the Order Management workstream.
• Conducted weekly meetings with global teams to monitor progress milestones, budget tracking, and risk/issue management across regions (US, Canada, LatAm, EMEA, Asia).
• Led stakeholder alignment by clarifying requirements, tracking blockers, and resolving budget inconsistencies to maintain project momentum.
• Prepared and presented project scorecards, highlighting achievements, risks, and next steps, ensuring the Order-to-Cash executive stakeholders were informed and aligned.
• Achieved seamless transitions across geographic areas by mitigating risks and fostering cross-functional collaboration.

• Designed and delivered Agile best practices training material, enabling teams to transition effectively to Scrum methodologies.
• Developed guidelines for transitioning from Waterfall to Scrum, focusing on complex projects to ensure shorter deployment cycles and reduced delivery risks.
• Managed a group of Project Managers with Agile expertise to serve as coaches, mentoring internal teams to adopt Agile practices and improve project delivery efficiency.
• Facilitated collaboration across teams to align Agile processes with organizational goals, enhancing cross-functional workflows.

• Built and coached the QA team from scratch, tailoring it to customer needs, which led to a 20% reduction in defect rates across different projects.
• Collaborated on-site with clients in the US (Missouri, Seattle, Portland) to define processes and provide tools training, ensuring alignment with client expectations.
• Managed multiple nearshore teams under tight deadlines, delivering projects with high visibility and exceptional quality.
• Created and reported detailed QA metrics to executive stakeholders (CTO, CEO), driving data-informed decisions on software quality and testing progress.
• Developed and implemented recommendations to enhance the SDLC by integrating QA processes within Agile and Waterfall environments, improving efficiency.
• Prepared and reviewed SOW documents to establish clear deliverables and timelines, ensuring alignment with business goals.
• Led ISTQB foundational certification efforts, elevating the team’s global credibility and strengthening customer confidence.

Directed the migration of project management tools from YouTrack to Jira, ensuring a seamless transition and alignment with team workflows. Collaborated with stakeholders to gather requirements and customize Jira workflows, ticket types, and automation to meet operational needs. Designed and implemented custom dashboards for tracking team performance and project progress, enhancing visibility for leadership. Developed a customized Jira add-on to provide a hierarchical view of initiatives, projects, and tasks, offering both broad overviews and detailed insights. Facilitated team training and created comprehensive documentation to ensure smooth adoption and operational continuity. Tracked project execution, reported progress, and maintained continuous communication with engineering leadership, driving ongoing improvements in team efficiency.

Led the planning, execution, and tracking of a performance management tool development project at Toptal. Managed stakeholder expectations by providing regular updates and conducting retrospectives to gather feedback and adjust project direction. Facilitated Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives, ensuring clear deliverables and alignment with stakeholder priorities. Collaborated with cross-functional teams to implement features using Ruby on Rails and React. Designed dashboards for leadership, enabling informed decision-making with real-time performance data. Ensured timely project delivery by continuously tracking progress and addressing blockers.

• Built and coached a global QA team, ensuring readiness to meet aggressive automation goals for 10+ enterprise products.
• Streamlined QA processes, improving test automation efficiency by 20% through metric-driven insights and tracking tools like Jira and GSheets.
• Tracked team progress and performance using custom dashboards, ensuring alignment with organizational compliance metrics.
• Enhanced collaboration by resolving escalations, unblocking issues, and reallocating resources to meet project objectives on time.
• Improved coding standards with automated quality checks in GitHub and continuous integration pipelines.
• Delivered progress reports and actionable insights to engineering VPs, ensuring transparency and alignment with business objectives.

Led the implementation of an incident management framework at Toptal, aligning teams globally and improving response times. Defined workflows, roles, and escalation paths in collaboration with engineering, product, and operations teams. Designed and coded a custom Jira add-on to track incident SLAs by priority, while enabling seamless integration between Jira, Slack, and other third-party tools for automated notifications and escalations. Delivered real-time tracking and reporting, ensuring transparency and actionable insights for stakeholders.

Led the requirements gathering for a fraud prevention system integrated with an online payment processing tool at TrustVesta. Collaborated with stakeholders, including clients like Western Union, to align operational needs with compliance requirements. Defined user stories and technical specifications, ensuring features like tokenization and data encryption were prioritized. Coordinated with development teams to deliver a secure and scalable solution. Assisted the technical documentation team in creating clear and precise documentation for the public fraud prevention API functionality, ensuring usability for client integration. Documented progress and facilitated continuous communication between teams to meet project goals effectively.

• Tracked progress, identified bottlenecks, and facilitated solutions using Kanban boards, ensuring timely delivery of prioritized tasks.
• Held regular 1-on-1s and team meetings to align individual contributors with project goals, fostering a collaborative and motivated team environment.
• Monitored and communicated progress status to stakeholders, ensuring visibility and alignment across teams.
• Enhanced team collaboration by implementing Agile practices, improving delivery efficiency by optimizing workflows and reducing task cycle time.