Luciano Rodrigues

This is the highest priority project on the bank for the next 2 years. It’s really the best of the company for the new digital banking era. It directly involves around 200 people from the bank, plus around 150 people from consulting firms such as Accenture.

The main challenges at this moment are:
• Creating a new platform: this is a whole new platform that serves as a digital wallet for customers, however, it must make use and comply with the bank’s legacy systems and infrastructure. We are trying to solve this by migrating the platform to a managed external cloud service.

• On-boarding people: practically as a start-up within the bank, the project is now accelerating the hiring process and new people are arriving every day. My role is to make sure that all Accenture people have a proper onboarding process and arrive at the project ready to deliver.

• Team formation: as all teams are new, we are all running through a team formation period, thus I have to make sure (along with other Agile Coaches and Team Leaders) these teams have the right support to run their first sprints, have a clear purpose and get together to work like a real team.

This was a huge project which took place during around six months and involved around 10 teams at Walmart, four of them managed by Luciano. The main goals were to bring a new user experience for customers and put Walmart to compete equally with the other big retailers in Brazil, which was not the case by the time the project started.

Luciano was directly involved during the planning phase, bringing all the teams together to discuss and come to the best solution. His role was to translate those discussions into timelines, dependencies, risk management and presentations for the executive level of the company with possible action plans and their pros and cons.

He was also deeply involved in the execution phase, leading 4 development teams to deliver their part of the project and keeping the entire project team informed and aligned about progression, dependencies, and impediments.

The project was delivered on time, on budget and with the high quality that was always expected from Walmart teams.

• Project was part of ASDA’s (Walmart Europe) eCommerce website migration to the US platform
• ASDA already used to work with promotions, but the US platform didn’t have any module do handle them
• I was responsible for gathering requirements and business needs, manage the team in Brazil, keep communication flow with and between the US and UK, report project status for the program management
• One of the biggest challenges was performance: the service APIs had an SLA limit of 50 milliseconds; we could make it down to 8ms
• From my previous experience with similar projects in Brazil, I was able to help the business people define rules and constraints for the system and create a pleasant user interface
• The module was later used in Sam’s Club migration to the US platform as well

The company is an established real estate agency building an innovative platform in their market and hired a Toptal team to build it. A project discovery was led by a product manager and a UX designer, and then I joined the team to take over project and product management and led the team into building their MVP.

The initial team provided an estimate of 14 weeks to build the MVP, and it remained our target. To achieve that, I made a strong effort by working with the client to reduce the MVP scope since the initial one was not feasible within that timeframe, and also, the team was not complete until midway through that.

I wrote most of the user stories, defined acceptance criteria, collaborated with the team to clarify technical requirements, coordinated with the client to clarify business requirements, worked with the delivery manager to build the team, led all the Scrum ceremonies, and provided a weekly status report to the client and the delivery manager.

We were able to finish the MVP scope on target schedule and cost, and the client entered into “maintenance mode” after that, without the need for a project manager any longer.