Konstantin Solnushkin
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
La Orotava, Spain
Toptal member since February 26, 2020
Konstantin prides himself in his ability to help his clients on many levels, from engineering and processes to human interactions—one sprint at a time. He is an AWS-certified Professional Scrum Master and PhD holder with 20 years of engineering experience, including software development and DevOps. Konstantin helps companies big and small, from publicly traded on the Fortune 500 list (Kohl's) to lean and nimble startups, including one he co-founded.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Project Management
- Agile Software Development
- Continuous Delivery (CD)
- Discovery Workshops
- Microsoft Project
- PSM-1
- Scrum Coaching
Work Experience
Technical Product Manager
Materials engineering company
- Helped a materials engineering company improve its flagship product, a database of steels and alloys, by making the development process aligned with industry best practices.
- Oversaw the forking of new promising features into their own mini-products, using the database of materials as the foundation.
- Liaised with research partners of the company on building EU-funded scientific software for the circular economy.
Technical Software Product Manager
Customer Data Platform for Shopify
- Acted as a product manager of the first customer data platform intended specifically for Shopify stores.
- Helped the company bring the MVP of the product to the finish line for publishing in the Shopify app store.
- Managed the work of three developers, a designer, and a QA engineer.
- Served as a liaison with the first paying client of the product.
Technical Software Product Manager
CRM software company
- Organized the work of an offshore development team in Asia.
- Described upcoming functionality of the product with user stories and clickable Figma prototypes.
- Interviewed and hired a new React developer to speed up development.
Agile Product Manager
Healthcare company
- Prepared a roadmap for the company's new product, a hospital management software system.
- Created user stories and wireframes for a web-based SaaS application and its mobile app counterpart.
- Consulted the client in Agile and Lean approaches to work.
Software Project Manager
Form Energy, Inc.
- Automated R&D laboratory operations of Form Energy, a rapidly growing green energy company that has so far raised over $360M of venture funding.
- Project managed the work of a distributed software development team which delivered a web portal in a lean fashion that replaced disconnected legacy systems and concentrated all battery and laboratory equipment data in one place.
- Decreased time to enter battery build and test data manifold; made precise tracking of every laboratory item and its status possible.
- Unlocked company's ability to scale their R&D operations and build further system modules such as warehouse inventory management and chemical preparations.
Software Project Manager
5MinuteMondays
- Created a brand new learning management system, helping industrial and service companies across the U.S. train their workers in occupational safety with quick and easy video-based training.
- Added capabilities to track viewing segments of video lectures to ensure full training and generate training rosters for OSHA regulatory compliance.
- Enabled online payments by integrating with Stripe, allowing the company to acquire new clients directly through the website without relying on bank transfers that would lower conversion rates.
Software Project Manager
PeerStream, Inc.
- Managed software projects for a 50-person development organization with a full suite of Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS apps for a global online video community.
- Served as a one-person project management office (PMO).
- Created a schedule in Microsoft Project detailing activities for the next 12 months, highlighting task dependencies between teams.
- Formalized and streamlined processes and workflows in Jira and GitLab.
- Liaised with the business intelligence department to create real-time dashboards with company-wide analytics.
- Helped create a culture of transparency and teamwork with offshore teams.
Chief Technical Officer
Amlab.me
- Built a learning management system with eCommerce capabilities from scratch in Python and Django, serving as the system's architect.
- Developed a customer portal with in-house CRM implementation, an administrative portal, and a reporting dashboard.
- Introduced and matured Scrum as the development workflow.
- Established DevOps and CI/CD practices with GitLab and Docker.
- Handled all architecture, project management, and DevOps in a team of five engineers.
- Delivered the production version of the system in just six months, from ideation to launch.
Co-founder | Software Project Manager
Strategway
- Developed the foundations of a startup company that tried to reinvent urban public transportation planning based on big data and artificial intelligence.
- Defined the company's path to the MVP by conducting discovery workshops with potential clients.
- Handled all aspects of project delivery, hiring staff, eliciting requirements, and developing algorithms.
- Managed the creation of an Android mobile app for passenger surveying.
DevOps Engineer
Kohl's
- Guaranteed DevOps support for an international, geographically distributed 250+ strong development team working around the clock at one of the largest US retailers from the Fortune 500 list.
- Deployed Java code in the Oracle ecosystem in the VMware cloud.
- Collaborated with the release team by preparing artifacts and guides for production deployments.
Project History
Online Learning Portal for Creative Arts
Architected and built an online learning system in a lean fashion.
I built a two-sided marketplace with payment system integrations for coaches and their students. Thanks to the prototype, the company founders were able to raise venture and private funding for further development.
Event Aggregator Website
Web app for people to market their events, similar to Eventbrite.
I managed website creation with a Lean team and on a shoestring budget in Python/Django. I released an MVP where event organizers could add their events with descriptions, photos, and locations displayed on a map.
Work Order Management System for a Utility Company
Created system specifications, schedules, and financial plans.
The task was to capture requirements for a new SaaS system that would allow the USA’s leading partner of utility companies with nationwide coverage to offer a software solution for work order management, emphasizing IoT-based fleet tracking with 4G-connected devices.
I helped my client develop a concept of the future system and gather its requirements. We also chose a vehicle tracking partner that would become a module of the future system and tested hardware for vehicle tracking compatible with my client’s fleet.
Agile Coaching for a Team of Eight
Improved Scrum processes for a development team of a niche social network website.
I was hired to perform Agile coaching in a team of eight developers to improve their processes and make sure they use Scrum to its full potential.
Together with the team, we identified 16 points of improvement, and in the next two months, acted on them. Improvements ranged from high-impact technical ones such as a proper Git branching strategy to communication improvements, such as introducing a new format for a daily stand-up meeting.
Overall, the team is now in a much better shape than before, more organized, and empowered with best practices.
City-wide Air Quality Monitoring Project
Created a custom Linux distribution for a network of air quality measurement stations.
I equipped a network of internet-connected air quality measurement stations, some of them vehicle-mounted, with a custom Linux distribution based on Debian Linux, resilient to failures, power outages, and loss of network connectivity, so that they can send gathered data to the monitoring center.
It was an early example of the internet of things (IoT) technology implemented in the interests of the regional government.
Project Schedule for a Massive Software Development Undertaking
Created a project schedule for a development team of 50 people.
I cooperated relentlessly with onshore and offshore teams to compose a project schedule for a piece of work that had been under consideration long before I arrived. Seeing the result helped the executive team quantify their risks and change company direction altogether to avoid them.
System Architecture for a Canadian Green Energy Company Website
Architected a new customer portal and RESTful API for it.
I was hired to compose a user story map for a customer portal and a RESTful API-based back-end web service that were intended to work together.
I also prepared the architecture documentation for all the involved software components and a description of the database schema and API calls.
Education
PhD in Computer Engineering
Technical University of Munich - Munich, Germany
Certifications
Stripe Professional Implementation Architect
Stripe
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
Python and Django Full Stack Web Developer
Udemy
Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals
University of Virginia on Coursera
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Skills
Tools
GitLab, Jira, Office 365, Google Workspace, Virtualenv, Atom, Git, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub, Apache JMeter, Microsoft Project, Nagios, NGINX, Shell, Trello, Zoom, SQL, Atlassian, Confluence, GIS, Gerrit, Web GIS, Jenkins, VirtualBox, WP eCommerce, VMware, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), ETL, Stripe Checkout, Asana, Figma, BigQuery
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Leadership, Agile Software Development, Agile Project Management, Agile Product Management, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, Management, Scrum, Agile Delivery, Requirements Analysis, Implementation Project Management, Kanban, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Waterfall Delivery, Waterfall Development, DevOps, Marketplace Platforms, Lean, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, High-performance Computing (HPC), Database Design
Industry Expertise
Higher Education, Entertainment & Leisure, Energy, Renewable Energy, Green Energy, For-profit Education, EH&S, Logistics, Retail & Wholesale, Public Transportation, Transportation & Shipping, Utilities, Electronics, Healthcare
Platforms
Amazon EC2, Red Hat Linux, LEMP, Linux, Linode, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Linux, Unix, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Docker, WordPress, iOS, Oracle, Shopify
Other
Requirements & Specifications, Product Discovery, Continuous Development (CD), Customer Service Management (CSM), PSM-1, Education, Helpdesk, IT Helpdesk, Jira Administrator, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Microsoft 365, Offshore Development, Offshore Team Management, Offshoring, Outsourcing, Product Owner, Product Ownership, Policy, Best Practices, Projects, Project Discovery, Project Delivery, Project Analysis, Project Management, Mobile/Web Project Management, IT Project Management, Scrum Coaching, User Requirements, Information Technology, Research, Software Project Management, Software Development Management, Product Development, Communication, Task Management, Technical Project Management, Software Release Management, Technical Documentation, Feature Backlog Prioritization, User Stories, Client Delivery Management, SaaS Product Management, Digital Project Management, Product Roadmaps, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Requirements, IT Projects, Consulting, Project Design & Management, Business to Consumer (B2C), Progress Reporting, Sprint Planning, Backlog Management, Web App Deployment, Agile Sprints, Roadmaps, Project Scheduling, Scope of Work (SOW), Request for Proposal (RFP), Jira Administration, Discovery, Documentation, Agile Coaching, Business Analysis, APIs, Bash, CTO, Custom APIs, DB, Database Management Systems (DBMS), DHCP, DNS, Fabric, GitFlow, HTTP, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), LAMP, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), RDBMS, SaaS, SSH, SSL, Ubuntu Server, User Research, User Interviews, Web, E-learning, Educational Portals, Software Development, System Administration, Linux Administration, Risk Management, Project Planning, eCommerce, Waterfall Methodology, Web Applications, Capacity Planning, Design Sprints, Startups, Product Management, Project Timelines, Team Management, Planning, Project Tracking, Web App Development, Technology Strategy & Architecture, Product Vision, Relational Databases, Estimations, Training, Data Analytics, REST APIs, Cost Estimation, Project Estimation, Project Scoping, Metrics, Team Mentoring, Serverless, AWS Lambda, Data, Data Visualization, ANSYS, CAE, Cloud, Django, GPS, PMO, Python, Python 3, Automated Testing, REST, Two-sided Marketplaces, Vimeo, Events, Discovery Workshops, Process Improvement, Stakeholder Management, Mobile Apps, Internet of Things (IoT), Software as a Service (SaaS), Business Intelligence (BI), High-load, Data Centers, Databases, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Wireframing, Data Analysis, API Integration, Cloud Migration, Fintech, Stripe, Government Contracting, Schedule Optimization, Scope Management, Innovation, Forecasting, Pitch Decks, New Products, Budgeting, Booking Systems, Data Warehousing, Cloud Architecture, AWS Cloud Architecture, UI Design, Workshops, Stripe API, Business Reporting, Regulatory Compliance, Ruby on Rails (RoR), React, System Architecture, CRM Systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Data Platform (CDP), Next.js, Django REST Framework, MongoDB, TypeScript
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