Lejla Herceg
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Vienna, Austria
Toptal member since March 10, 2022
Lejla is an IT professional with 15+ years of experience currently focused on enabling project and product teams to perform more effectively and efficiently. Her strong technical background is an advantage that allows her to seamlessly understand technical solutions and communicate and address teams' and stakeholders' needs. As a certified scrum master and product owner, Lejla's had the opportunity to apply many process optimizations and lead and coach different teams toward successful outcomes.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Delivery
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Project Management
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
- Engineering Management
- Technical Leadership
- Technical Product Management
- Technical Project Management
Work Experience
Engineering Manager
MeisterLabs Software GmbH
- Successfully managed a team of nine individuals, prioritizing their growth and development, optimizing processes, and empowering them to deliver exceptional results as a cohesive unit.
- Ensured on-time project delivery through effective performance management, fostering a collaborative work environment that motivated the team to meet and exceed set targets.
- Owned the success KPIs of the team, taking responsibility for business outcomes, systems performance, and overall team effectiveness, resulting in successful delivery and high-quality results.
Senior Agile Coach
N26
- Worked with seven cross-functional teams on a segment level, helping them daily and leading them toward self-organization. This includes facilitating all the agile rituals and educating people to adopt a user-centered approach.
- Collaborated closely with product managers, helping them make product decisions and keep a productive working relationship with their team.
- Held team and cross-team workshops within a group of agile facilitators, grew the in-house agile community of practice, and organized open spaces for the wider agile community.
- Shaped the agile landscape for the company at scale, spreading agile values to non-technical teams and handling the transition toward distributed teams.
Service Delivery Manager
Symphony
- Led three feature-based scrum teams of 20+ people on-site and remotely, working on the same product built on a shared codebase while collaborating with a distributed client team daily.
- Planned and led towards the delivery of multiple major product releases during the course of two years.
- Used Jira and Confluence as an integral tool to develop a highly customized set of reports based on a client-specific KPIs' set.
- Promoted a framework-agnostic agile approach inside the company.
- Influenced the company moving towards cross-functional development teams.
- Advised the company to move towards T-shaped engineer profiles instead of focusing on highly specialized experts.
Scrum Master and Engineer Manager
Symphony
- Took an active role in project and iteration planning, tracking and reporting the project status.
- Managed day-to-day relationships with the client and coordinated the work between different teams at various locations in diverse time zones.
- Proactively identified and found ways to remove impediments and resolve issues to prevent distractions and keep projects on track.
- Guided, coached, taught, and assisted teams in agile and scrum principles and on driving the process improvement.
- Worked closely with the teams to deliver value and coordinated within and outside the groups to facilitate the completion of the team’s backlog.
- Facilitated meetings—namely daily, retrospectives, reviews, plannings, technical architecture and review sessions— and refinements, product team syncs, and more.
- Built and utilized reporting mechanisms to keep clients and teams in the loop with the latest information, capturing and reporting critical performance metrics.
Senior Software Engineer
Symphony
- Defined, designed, and implemented complex, distributed software systems throughout all phases of the software development lifecycle, meeting client requirements for functionality, scalability, and performance.
- Drove system improvements and best practices architecturally by refactoring legacy systems and creating new solutions.
- Provided leadership, inspiration, and guidance to growing teams; fostered a culture of transparency and collaboration.
- Worked across various teams within the organization to evangelize best practices and clean architecture.
Project History
Digital Transformation of the Large Diversified Chemical Conglomerate
Successfully handled the delivery of many different releases and showed a great deal of understanding while addressing specific teams' and the client's needs in each one of them.
My strong technical background proved to be an advantage to seamlessly understanding technical solutions and communicating with the team.
Virtual-first Telemedicine Application
Hired the team and kicked off the startup project. Successfully led the distributed team towards delivering the MVP according to expectations and within the expected timeframe.
Software-as-a-service Platform to Integrate Insurances, Health Care Providers, and Patients
Led the team developing a robust platform integrating multiple components and services while managing stakeholders' expectations and helping them prioritize the request to ensure growth, maintenance, and stability for existing customers.
Besides the technical tasks, I was also involved in preparing stories to describe the client's requirements, maintaining the product backlog, facilitating meetings, and cooperating with the product owner to ensure that goals were understood and achieved.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Electrical Engineering - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Certifications
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Certified SAFe® 4 Practitioner
Scaled Agile Inc
MCTS: .NET Framework 4, Web Applications
Logosoft d.o.o. Sarajevo
Skills
Tools
Slack, Jira, Confluence, Atlassian Suite
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Kanban, Agile Delivery, Agile Workflow, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Agile Leadership, Servant Leadership, Iterative Delivery, Incremental Development, Iterative Development, DevOps, Lean, Continuous Delivery (CD)
Other
Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Scrum Coaching, Agile Sprints, Agile Product Delivery, Team Leadership, Technical Product Management, Technical Project Management, Project Delivery, Product Delivery, Delivery Management, Agile Practices, Engineering Management, Sprint Planning, Sprints, FigJam, Software Engineering, Databases, Agile Scaling Frameworks, Extreme Programming, User Stories, Web Development, .NET, Web Applications, Agile Coaching, Product Discovery, Technical Leadership, Progress Reporting, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Project Management, Project Tracking, Computer Science, Product Owner, Scrum Product Owner, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Thought Leadership, Technical Program Management, Product Management, Program Management, Product Vision, Notion, Startups, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Stakeholder Engagement, Technical Hiring, Engineering, Backlog Management, APIs, QA Leadership, Workshop Facilitation, Agile Transformation, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Enterprise, Leadership, People Management, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
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