Project Manager in Amsterdam, Netherlands

HealthJay is a ground-breaking suite of wearable, mobile, and web apps that provides seniors and their families with the necessary tools for an independent and worry-free retired life.

This Toptal project started with a two-week lightning start, during which the lead developer, the lead designer, and myself worked closely together with the client to get to the core of the business idea. We expanded on it to understand the bigger picture and then narrowed the scope to a limited set of features that bring value to customers (MVP).

We focused on building the product during the following eleven weeks using the lightning start findings as our first building block. We further refined and adjusted the initial ideas as they matured into a concrete product in this period.

My responsibilities included:
• Facilitating scrum ceremonies
• Tracking risks and blockers until resolved
• Maintaining the backlog up to date and prioritized

We had a fully functioning app ready to be released to the App Store by the end of the project.

Simple Online Pharmacy is a well-established UK online pharmacy that wants to step up its game by offering patients repeat prescriptions through a mobile app.

Through Lightning Start, the lead developer, lead designer, and I worked closely with the client to understand business requirements and challenges.

During these two weeks, we put together the epics and user stories for an MVP, user flows, wireframes, personas, and a proposal for a recommended tech stack.

As the project manager of the Bazaarvoice implementation, I was the link between the Bazaarvoice support team and Bugaboo's internal development teams.

My main responsibilities included:
• defining requirements
• assessing potential risks and road-blockers
• liaising with internal stakeholders, such as the marketing department, customer service, product development, etc.
• prioritizing user stories across different development teams
• providing regular status updates
• maintaining the Bazaarvoice config hub

Within six weeks from the start of the project, we were able to do a soft launch in our pilot market. We deployed to the remaining 22 locales two weeks later, making it one of Bazaarvoice's fastest implementations.

Working with three Node.js developers, we implemented a data feed API to connect Bugaboo's product catalog with external parties.

The goal is to make it possible for Bugaboo to increase its online presence by expanding the operational work necessary when partnering with retailers, e-tailers, advertising channels such as Google Shopping or AdRoll, and social media.

Within a few months, we saw an outstanding 10% increase in traffic via Google Shopping.

At Booking.com HR, we had a strong need to improve our processes, and we identified that absence management was crucial.

Together with three HR administrators representing the business, two payroll specialists, three Workday consultants, and two data experts, we implemented a tailor-made solution for employees working in 16 countries in the Asia Pacific.

From a technical standpoint:
• we implemented absence rules according to the different legal requirements of each country,
• functionality was developed and released in an agile way, with small iterative steps
• before rolling out the new functionality, we performed an intensive data clean up the process and migrated data from the existing SAP system to Workday
• user acceptance tests and user training for admin users
• to support payroll processing, we created customized absence payroll reports
• to support the business and operations, we developed a two-directional systems integration with the existing workforce management tool

From the discovery phase to full completion, the project took around 11 months.

The HR operations team saw a decrease in employees' requests by 70% after the new absence management system went live.

Reduced overhead, minimized risk and time to business by working with the same payment service provider across different markets.

The analysis phase was very extensive, and it included a thorough review of requirements, risks, and possible points of failure.

Multiple teams across the business were in charge of the front-end side and integration with back-end systems, including the agile development team I was PO of.

Unfortunately, the functionality was never rolled out because the project leads couldn't get the buy-in from all stakeholders involved.

The messaging engine, Booking.com's core system for transactional messages, suffered a severe outage that saw a newly formed team of three senior developers work around the clock for 48 hours to mitigate the issues.

Once the system was stable again, I was put in charge as the product owner of a newly formed team of senior developers to ensure the outage's root cause was solved; the system was strong, scalable, and resilient.

Once it was clear that we needed to significantly increase the number of servers and lines, we took the chance to challenge the relationships with our existing suppliers. We sent out an RFP to existing and new suppliers, and at the end of the process, one of the existing suppliers was let go of in favor of a new one.

As part of this process, we tested supplier performance per country and added that dimension to routing rules, which initially were only based on costs.

The team involved in this project was composed of three senior developers and one system admin, and we worked in close cooperation with our data center engineers.