Erica Gasparini

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 myself, the lead developer, and the lead designer 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 down the scope to a limited set of features that bring value to customers (MVP).

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

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

By the end of the project, we had a fully functioning app ready to be released to the App Store.

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, and two weeks later we deployed to the remaining 22 locales, making it one of Bazaarvoice's fastest implementations.

Working with a team of 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 their 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 of crucial importance.

Together with a team of three HR administrators representing the business, two payroll specialists, three workday consultants and 2 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' request 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 involved, among which the agile development team I was PO of, who were in charge of the front end side and integration with back-end systems.

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 which 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 root cause of the outage 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.