Liat Hoffman, Project Manager in Kefar Sava, Israel
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Liat Hoffman

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Project Manager

Location
Kefar Sava, Israel
Toptal Member Since
January 23, 2020

Liat is an experienced technical project manager (TPM) and scrum master who has worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to fast-paced startups. Past clients include Expedia, Microsoft, Capital One, Rackspace, T-Mobile, and Spacemesh. Liat is a project management professional (PMP), PMI-ACP, and Certified Scrum Master (CSM) with agile, blockchain, DevOps, AWS, UX, research, eCommerce, gaming, and marketing automation/CRM expertise.

Project Highlights

Spacemesh App
Worked with UX designers, developers, and the CPO to produce a desktop application to mine Smesh—a proof of space-time (PoST) cryptocurrency.
Spacemesh Local Testnet
Worked with a core developer to create the framework for running a 6-node Spacemesh testnet locally on one computer.
Spacemesh Testnet Infrastructure
Managed the DevOps team working on the technical infrastructure on AWS for iterative closed testnets with 200-1,500 nodes.

Expertise

Work Experience

Cybersecurity Technical Project Manager

2022 - PRESENT
Enterprise Technical Services (Toptal Client)
  • Pioneered the creation and adoption of RAID and decision issue types in Jira. The types were rolled out to the entire services organization's Agile process and supported by comprehensive documentation.
  • Served as the scrum master for an elite Tiger Team of security engineers dedicated to proactively mitigating cybersecurity risks and enhancing the organization's overall security posture, mitigating 15 cybersecurity risks across seven business units.
  • Collaborated with stakeholders to create a risk management process, utilizing a bespoke risk triage methodology to prioritize risks and guiding the organization to tackle critical issues efficiently.
  • Assisted in tracking NIST CSF audits and facilitating remediation efforts across three business units, ensuring compliance and strengthening the organization's cybersecurity posture.
  • Worked with three business units' technical organizations to track remediations of critical security risks in Jira and report on status, including AWS migrations, EOL server shutdowns, vulnerability management, patching, and other SecOps areas.
  • Created a dashboard to reflect the current risk posture for individual businesses and began monthly reviews to discuss open challenges and security metrics with actionable takeaways.

Project Manager

2022 - 2022
Financial Services Startup (Toptal Client)
  • Aligned efforts across two subteams to migrate from their legacy hard-coded website to a Contentful-driven solution, enabling modern business practices, an enhanced security posture, and increased organizational agility.
  • Worked with a team of 40 web producers, leads, UX designers, and front- and back-end engineers to form consensus around processes for program governance, enabling effective decision-making and consistent delivery within the scope and on schedule.
  • Leveraged comprehensive documentation and reporting to create the level of transparency necessary to build a shared understanding across previously siloed subteams, enabling effective self-organization and cross-team collaboration.
  • Triaged the “Keep the Lights On” Kanban board and managed the KTLO process, working with stakeholders and individual contributors to identify process improvement opportunities and improve SLAs.
  • Managed the content, design, development, translation and localization, quality assurance, release, and post-go-live testing activities for multiple product page launches into production.
  • Proactively managed and mitigated risk via a RAIDD log (risk, actions, issues, decisions, and dependencies); used this tool to significantly shorten the projected timeline and successfully deliver program exit criteria.

Integration Project Manager

2021 - 2022
Gambling & Gaming Enterprise (Toptal Client)
  • Acted as the interim head of delivery, creating a single view of all features in development with third parties (over 100), leveraging Jira, creating a roadmap for the technical readiness of all features, and keeping relevant stakeholders updated.
  • Coordinated with sales, marketing, operations, customer support, compliance, and tech to analyze technical deliverables to capture work packages necessary to achieve operational readiness for the business.
  • Worked to drive good-faith implementation of German gaming compliance topics, including annual KYC rechecks, Oasis, Lugas, and other Santana 3 requirements.
  • Collaborated with the QA team to define a user acceptance testing (UAT) and business acceptance testing (BAT) process for all third-party technical deliverables to ensure changes to production were tested, approved, and operationalized.
  • Consolidated four brands of the sportsbook into one new brand, working with local markets to define a process for prioritizing feature requests and ongoing demand management.

Digital Data Project Manager

2020 - 2021
eCommerce Enterprise (Toptal Client)
  • Leveraged the Agile methodology to drive the successful delivery of a customer data platform (CDP) for a pilot market, which provided a proof of concept that led to the CDP program being greenlighted for implementation across the entire enterprise.
  • Acted as a scrum master for a team of 23 data scientists and developers, working to integrate five data sources into a customer data platform (CDP) to implement marketing use cases and activations, leveraging machine learning workflows.
  • Coached team members in the agile process, facilitating daily stand-ups, backlog grooming meetings, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, managing sprints and tasks on Azure DevOps and Jira, and driving project delivery.
  • Created and maintained project documentation on teams, ensuring that data layer documentation was kept up to date as entities and fields evolved in the unification and harmonization process.
  • Managed teams of front- and back-end developers implementing time-sensitive critical web tagging for Google Tag Manager (GTM) on two separate Magento eCommerce stores to integrate web behavior data into the CDP, keeping the project on schedule.
  • Coordinated the technical go-live of the CDP, partnering with a DevOps engineer to create and implement the release process, go or no-go process, and navigate enterprise approvals (IT security).
  • Managed the hyper-care period, fixing bugs and ensuring that the communication between the CDP and the applications it enables was efficient and working smoothly, preparing the system for operational readiness and handover to global IT.
  • Composed weekly operating committee one-page reports, weekly market updates, and steering committee reports, ensuring all relevant achievements were highlighted, and any risks were surfaced to successfully mitigate or avoid them.
  • Implemented a risk and issue register, effectively managing risk to ensure the project was delivered within scope, budget, and on schedule.

Project Manager

2019 - 2020
Spacemesh
  • Contributed to key deliverables, including the complete rebranding, new website, Spacemesh app, protocol overview online experience, local testnet, testnet guide and documentation, protocol paper v1.0, and media placements in major publications.
  • Managed the design and development teams to ensure all technical deliverables were within the scope, budget, and schedule.
  • Supervised the DevOps team working on the technical infrastructure on AWS for iterative closed testnets, resulting in Terraform scripts that could be configured to launch between 200-1,500 nodes across one to five regions.
  • Oversaw a cross-functional team of core protocol developers to deliver the local testnet and the Spacemesh app.
  • Facilitated agile meetings to drive delivery across development, research, and marketing teams, including daily standup, sprint planning, retrospective, review, and backlog grooming meetings, and managed backlogs across various tools.
  • Created a unified view of all priorities across research, development, and marketing teams to get everyone on the same page and drive delivery using Unito.io, saving time and effort on the project management tool migration.
  • Collaborated with our PR vendor as a point of contact, achieving 87 media placements across mainstream, finance, investing, and crypto-trade media, including Forbes and Cointelegraph in FY2019.
  • Linked with the research team and design and development teams to deliver the protocol overview online experience.
  • Launched and ran the Spacemesh Ambassador program, managing a community of ambassadors around the globe who put on events and promoted Spacemesh via social media.
  • Coordinated and posted weekly updates to the Spacemesh website and promoted those updates across social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, various blockchain communities, and the proof of work (PoW) mailing list.

Technical Project Manager

2018 - 2019
CodersClan
  • Served as a technical project manager working across nine customer accounts, managing various technical initiatives, including full website builds and web and mobile application development.
  • Contributed work on accounts such as Panaya, Pepperi, Verint, Checkmarx, 21M Capital, iAngels, CoinMama, Blueseedling, LawGeex, and Ace Labs.
  • Gathered customer requirements, wrote technical specifications, created estimations, and managed teams of cross-functional developers to deliver various technical deliverables within scope, budget, and schedule.
  • Acted as the sole point of contact for customers, ensuring operational excellence and the highest quality of deliverables.
  • Conducted work on the complete website builds of 21Capital.com, LawGeex.com, and Ace-labs.io.
  • Optimized the page load speed performance for Panaya.com to improve SEO ranking. Reduced the page load speed from 12 to 4.9 seconds.

Technical Project Manager

2018 - 2018
T-Mobile
  • Served as the technical project manager in a short-term consulting role to move a CI/CD platform serving internal and frontline T-Mobile applications onto a self-service model. Acted as a scrum master for the Kubernetes Telemetry Service project.
  • Collaborated with senior management to create a walking deck for the cloud workload solutions team and pitch for increased funding, leading to a $720,000 increase to the personnel budget for Q2 2018.
  • Worked with the principal CI/CD architect to support the agile development process for one cross-functional DevOps team developing the Kubernetes Telemetry Service, a Prometheus-based API to monitor, alert and emit events for customer workloads.
  • Coordinated the design and build of self-service customer portal for the CI/CD platform, automating 80% of customer use-cases by reducing needed human touchpoints, increasing customer intake capacity, and customization capability to increase revenue.
  • Worked with the customer site reliability engineering team to create a unified ticketing portal for customers of the CI/CD platform leveraging Jira, enabling more accurate metrics and reporting, including cost per ticket information.
  • Managed a small team to automate common operations tasks, including turning Slack messages into Jira tickets, product monitoring metric creation, and reporting in order to expand the capacity of operations personnel and reduce cycle time.
  • Maintained project management deliverables on Confluence, including the project plan, project schedule, status reports, meeting minutes, risk and issue logs, and any other documentation related to the management and administration of the project.
  • Advised senior management on strategy, creating a "pitch" deck for budget—leading to a 21% increase in personnel budget for Q2 2018.

Technical Program Manager

2017 - 2018
Rackspace
  • Coordinated cross-team collaboration and integration efforts and the Agile process for five cross-functional DevOps teams developing an end-to-end CI/CD platform to accelerate the deployment of business applications to the cloud.
  • Worked with the director of product development to support the Agile development process (both Scrum and Kanban) for five cross-functional DevOps teams, including AppSec, developer services, CICD, infrastructure and logging, and metrics and eventing.
  • Coordinated the governance of open-source projects with executive leadership, including defining a strategy for managing OSS licenses, developing best practices, and implementing correct fair use documentation in SCM.
  • Provided daily support in diverse areas, including project planning, reporting, costing, team building, and workshops, and facilitated standard Agile meetings such as daily Scrum, sprint planning, retrospective, sprint review, and backlog grooming.
  • Supported the engineering teams to manage their epics and stories in Jira, working to achieve appropriate granularity in story size, and driving achievable, actionable sprint commitments, ensuring delivery every iteration.
  • Maintained project management deliverables on Confluence, including the project plan, project schedule, status reports, meeting minutes, risk and issue logs, and any other documentation related to the management and administration of the project.
  • Worked with the product owner to iterate on a high-level roadmap and maintained organizational alignment in the development efforts across teams.
  • Worked proactively to navigate stories through dependencies with other teams, spearheading cross-team collaboration and integration efforts to reduce team silos and increase the internal adoption of microservices.

Technical Program Manager

2017 - 2017
Datapipe (acquired by Rackspace)
  • Coordinated cross-team collaboration and integration efforts and the Agile process for five cross-functional DevOps teams developing an end-to-end CI/CD platform to accelerate the deployment of business applications to the cloud.
  • Worked with the director of product development to support the Agile development process (both Scrum and Kanban) for five cross-functional DevOps teams, including .AppSec, developer services, CICD, infrastructure and logging, and metrics and eventing.
  • Provided day-to-day support in diverse areas, including project planning, reporting, costing, team building, workshops, and facilitating standard Agile meetings such as daily Scrum, sprint planning, retrospective, sprint review, and backlog grooming.
  • Supported the engineering teams to manage their epics and stories in Jira, working to achieve appropriate granularity in story size and driving achievable, actionable sprint commitments—ensuring delivery every iteration.
  • Maintained project management deliverables on Confluence, including the project plan, project schedule, status reports, meeting minutes, risk and issue logs, and any other documentation related to the management and administration of the project.
  • Collaborated with the product owner to iterate on a high-level roadmap and maintained organizational alignment in development efforts across teams.
  • Worked proactively to navigate stories through dependencies with other teams, spearheading cross-team collaboration and integration efforts to reduce team silos and increase internal adoption of microservices.

Scrum Master

2016 - 2016
Capital One
  • Served as the scrum master and backlog owner for three DevOps teams within Capital One Investing, a platform with 1.5 million daily active users and $30 billion in investments under management.
  • Implemented an agile process (both scrum and kanban) for the DevOps teams migrating from legacy data centers to AWS public cloud by creating and maintaining an automated CI/CD pipeline and associated digital infrastructure.
  • Composed necessary documentation, including timelines, dashboards, and project charters, and maintained team space on Confluence and Pulse.
  • Managed and owned the backlog on VersionOne and Jira to assist the product owner, ensuring that stories were well-groomed and prioritized correctly.
  • Facilitated standard agile process-driven meetings and coached individual team members on agile best practices.
  • Coordinated the releases to production across multiple cross-functional teams, including release management, system integration, and database support.
  • Collaborated with teams to define requirements, capture these in user stories on Jira, prioritize these, refine them with key stakeholders, and technically scoped them to enable four sprint planning, similar to Program Increment (PI) Planning.
  • Developed, communicated, and drove project-schedule commitments.

Project Manager II

2015 - 2016
Microsoft
  • Served as the project manager and was assigned to two strategic initiatives within MS Procurement, including responsible sourcing (supplier diversity and sustainable sourcing) and CSS outsourcing consolidation.
  • Assisted senior project managers in meetings—taking and distributing detailed notes.
  • Recorded and followed up on action items—capturing and reporting relevant updates.
  • Produced detailed project reports and status updates in a weekly cadence.
  • Developed and maintained accurate and detailed project timelines.
  • Performed a gap analysis, assisted in project prioritization and selection, and created an engagement plan with internal MS stakeholders.
  • Composed and edited communications in various media for distribution.
  • Created and maintained a project with SharePoint sites with key project deliverables and task lists.
  • Formated PowerPoint decks for monthly strategic reviews, responsible sourcing’s walking deck, and weekly status meetings, maintaining alignment with MS procurement brand identity.
  • Designed the layout of the committee on supplier ratings (COSR) phase 1 report.

Project Manager I

2015 - 2015
Expedia
  • Served as scrum master and agile process manager in charge of enabling Agile process adoption for five cross-functional user experience teams.
  • Managed the Agile tool migration to Trello, resulting in 98% of designers switching to the new toolset within six weeks.
  • Facilitated Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Worked with five teams to identify blockers and remove them to ensure velocity remained high.
  • Drove the project/sprint lifecycle by driving trade-off decisions between schedule, functional scope, and quality.
  • Identified, communicated, organized, and resolved project issues and actively managed risk.

Project Manager

2014 - 2015
CRE8 Independent Consultants
  • Managed various technical initiatives, including website and database development.
  • Edited reports and assisted with technical writing, blueprinting, and creating change action plans.
  • Collaborated with the president to plan, develop, and implement marketing campaigns—resulting in the acquisition of new client accounts.
  • Researched AM LAW 200 companies to create detailed lead sheets and databases. Maintained the databases by updating client records and information.
  • Worked with a team of two developers to implement internal tools and processes.

Spacemesh Rebrand and New Website

https://spacemesh.io

Launched the updated Spacemesh website and implemented updated branding assets across social media in one month.

I managed the project to create a new brand for Spacemesh and developed an updated website hosted on Ghost CMS. The project team consisted of the brand, design, and development vendors. We coordinated the project timeline and status using Asana and aligned the designs using Figma.

Spacemesh App

Worked with UX designers, developers, and the CPO to produce a desktop application to mine Smesh—a proof of space-time (PoST) cryptocurrency.

The current version of the app is available for download here: https://spacemesh.io/start - the open-source code is located here:
• https://github.com/spacemeshos/smapp/
You can download the app, join the live testnet, start Smeshing coins, and experience it for yourself.

Spacemesh Protocol Overview

https://spacemesh.io/overview

Created a high-level online explanation of the core protocols that power Spacemesh.

I worked with the Spacemesh research team, content writers, core developers, UX designers, and front-end developers to articulate the architecture of the Spacemesh platform and define the core interactions and key concepts to demystify the underlying protocols.

Spacemesh is a decentralized platform based on a novel block mesh rather than a blockchain structure. Under the hood, Spacemesh uses a novel proof of space (PoS) protocol, structured by a mesh (layered directed acyclic graph).

Spacemesh Local Testnet

https://github.com/spacemeshos/local-testnet/

Worked with a core developer to create the framework for running a 6-node Spacemesh testnet locally on one computer.

This deliverable was the first public proof of concept (POC) from Spacemesh. It enables any interested party to simulate a P2P network on their local machine.

This was a key interim deliverable to developing the Spacemesh App front end because we used it as the back end to mock data until the node binary was actually included in the app build, before our initial public testnet launch.

I recommend watching the video in the repository for a demonstration.

Spacemesh Testnet Guide

https://testnet.spacemesh.io/

Wrote the documentation for participating in the Spacemesh testnet.

I worked with the chief product officer, content writers, and copy editors as well as the development, research, and marketing teams to create this documentation for the Spacemesh open testnet. I also worked with the development vendor to implement the design for the Docsify theme used to style the GitHub page. This implementation allows for easy-to-manage documentation. The content is updated via edits to simple Markdown files and the docs are generated dynamically straight out of a GitHub repository.

Spacemesh Protocol Paper V1.0

https://spacemesh.io/spacemesh-protocol-v1-0/

Delivered the Spacemesh protocol paper V1.0 using Kanban.

I tracked the research team's efforts to deliver an updated paper outlining the core cryptographic theorems and motivations for Spacemesh. I had the opportunity to collaborate with some of the greatest mathematical minds of our time.

Spacemesh Testnet Infrastructure

https://github.com/spacemeshos/go-spacemesh

Managed the DevOps team working on the technical infrastructure on AWS for iterative closed testnets with 200-1,500 nodes.

I worked with the DevOps team and AWS partner vendor to produce Terraform scripts, and necessary bootstrapping protocols to instantiate configurable testnets across up to five AWS regions, with between 200-1,500 Spacemesh Smeshers (nodes), and POET service. (For more information about these components, please check out the Spacemesh protocol overview.)

Also, I set up the necessary telemetry to debug the go-Spacemesh client using the ELK stack, enabling the core development team to stabilize and debug the network. This deliverable comprises the infrastructure needed to enable friends and family and open public testnets (Tweedledee 0.1 launched in early 2020, now on version 0.2)

Unified Project View

http://spacemesh.io

Created a unified view of all priorities across research, development, and marketing teams to get everyone on the same page.

Much non-value-added time was spent on project management tool migrations and manually moving information between different systems used by different teams to facilitate cross-organization collaboration. For example, the research team was using Asana, the development team was on ZenHub, and some developers wanted to use Trello as they preferred the interface and useful shortcuts available on that platform.

In order to reduce the effort spent on non-value-added activities, as well as create a unified shared understanding of the project to drive delivery, I used Unito.io to create a unified single-board view of the project.

All teams were able to continue to use the tool of their choice (Asana, GitHub Project, Trello, or ZenHub)—and the project moved forward at a much more rapid pace after this initiative was implemented. The true value is allowing people to focus on the outcomes they deliver, and no one is subjected to a project management tool that they find oppressive. This led directly to increased morale, greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and directly increased collaboration because everyone was able to be on the same page, rowing together in the same direction.

21MCapital Full Website Build

https://21mcapital.com/

Delivered a full website build based on the customer's design and ensured the highest quality UX across browsers and devices.

I used the agile process (scrumban) to manage a team of developers to deliver a WordPress-powered marketing site for 21MCapital. I worked with the developers to define estimations based on the provided designs for technical implementation, then managed those estimates, ensuring we remained within the scope and schedule, thus controlling project costs.

Lawgeex Full Site Build

https://www.lawgeex.com/

Developed a WordPress-powered website integrated with Marketo and Chili Piper based on the customer's design.

I used the agile process to deliver the Lawgeex site—coordinating a team of four developers using a scrumban process and ensuring the highest quality UX across browsers and devices. I also integrated the site with the Marketo CRM and ensured all the code was modular and reusable.

ACE Labs Full Site Build

https://ace-labs.io/

Developed the recruiting site for ACE Labs based on the customer design.

I worked with one developer, the QA team, and the customer's in-house designer to build the site and implement animations. I used Kanban to track project status in Asana. We completed this project within a very limited timeframe due to the small team size and precise requirements.

Committee on Supplier Ratings (COSR) Phase 1 Report

Designed the layout for the committee on supplier ratings (COSR) phase 1 report.

I worked with the responsible sourcing team at Microsoft to produce this deliverable. It is a best practices guide for rating suppliers regarding sustainable and responsible sourcing. I mainly worked on the design side and contributed some minor copy edits.
2008 - 2011

Bachelor's Degree in Psychology

American Jewish University - Los Angeles, CA, USA

AUGUST 2023 - PRESENT

edX Verified Certificate for Introduction to Backstage: Developer Portals Made Easy

edX

NOVEMBER 2015 - PRESENT

Six Sigma Green Belt

MindEdge Learning

MAY 2015 - MAY 2024

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)

Project Management Institute (PMI)

APRIL 2015 - JANUARY 2024

Certified Scrum Master

Scrum Alliance

MARCH 2015 - MARCH 2024

Project Management Professional (PMP)

Project Management Institute (PMI)

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