Marcelo is available for hire
Hire MarceloMarcelo Juca
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Calgary, AB, Canada
Toptal member since June 17, 2022
Bio
Marcelo is a scrum master operating close to software development teams and coaching upper management on the best practices for implementing Agile principles. He enjoys helping build new Agile product teams, believes that collaboration is required to succeed in this endeavor, and is well-versed in Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. Marcelo has a passion for learning and 18+ years of experience leading teams to build applications in the banking, insurance, retail, railway, and airline industries.
Project Highlights
WestJet Travel Privileges
Managed a web application enhancements applying Scrum. This application allowed employees to book flights as a company benefit.
Atmosphere.ca
Facilitated Scrum events with the customer team in Canada and the vendor team from Ukraine to develop the eCommerce for Atmosphere brand.
Scrum Training
Trained coworkers on Scrum framework allowing them to implement it to their projects giving an agile approach.
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Project Management
- Azure DevOps
- Business Systems Analysis
- Confluence
- Jira
- Requirements Analysis
- Scrum Master
Work Experience
Product Manager
2023 - 2024
AE Studio
- Managed small teams to develop a generative AI product. Each team had a full-stack developer, data scientist, designer, and product manager. A total of 16 products or proofs of concept (POCs) were developed.
- Worked for a startup; it was necessary to be agile to the extreme as you must use the time/funds as best as you judge and show results quickly. A total of 14 products or POCs were developed.
- Contributed to products/POCs: AI Fantasy Guys (a mobile app to get insights on the NFL), Story Visualizer (a hackathon project, 24-hour total development), PinkShoggoth (a POC for OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot), and Dermsquared (a website with a chatbot.).
- Recognized as one of the most exciting team members to work with; my energy is contagious.
- Contributed to an AE transcription project: a generative AI application (Google Chrome extension) to transcribe meeting audio and generate insights about the person being interviewed.
- Launched a chatbot platform linked to their website to support periodic events promoted by the company (Dermsquared.com).
- Developed a web app to visualize your story through voice transcription (Storyvisualizer.com). This was a 21-hour hackathon project developed to allow kids to visualize their tales. Used Python and OpenAI DALL·E (version 1).
- Refined the generative AI application to accept processing files—upload and crawl files to generate insights (Pinkshoggoth.com).
- Developed web and mobile app proofs of concept to a song context similar to Eurovision (Voxovation.com). Users can sign up and browse through all contestants by country and event.
- Integrated a generative AI application to an internal application that leverages AI and data science to analyze historical flight data using visualization tools (Azul.com.br).
Scrum Master
2021 - 2023
WestJet
- Managed about CAD $2 million in budget per year for multiple software development and SaaS configuration projects and around 15-20 team members.
- Analyzed and consolidated requirements, managed sprint backlogs, and facilitated Agile ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, backlog grooming and prioritization, user story definition, sprint planning, review, retrospective, and story estimation.
- Coached project team members to adopt the Agile approach using Scrum and Kanban on projects and how to use and configure MS Azure DevOps to support these projects. We worked on the dashboard, backlog, and queries.
- Tracked progress from each project team. I also consolidated project status information into MS Azure DevOps dashboards, including sprint burndown, velocity chart, cycle time, cumulative flow, risks, issues, schedule, budget, and test results.
- Created, implemented, and managed a software development lifecycle (SDLC) process with a team of three software engineers, three quality assurance analysts, two IT architects, and three system analysts.
Project Manager
2018 - 2021
Canadian Pacific Railway
- Managed the Positive Train Control (PTC) program. The main goal was to develop processes and systems enhancements to increase the safety of train operations. The budget was at least USD $50 million per year and there were around 40-50 team members engaged.
- Coordinated requests to the engineering team responsible for physical train track enhancements.
- Managed project and sprint backlogs, project teams, schedule, cost, and risks, using Waterfall, Scrum, and Kanban approach. One of the projects required the infrastructure team to build and install bungalows, wayside devices, and radio towers.
- Coordinated different requests from the data, mechanical, and network teams. The data team worked on updating geographic data on the Geographic Information System track file. In contrast, the mechanical team installed physical devices on locomotives and testing track files with real locomotives and trains. The network team was responsible for installing bungalows, wayside devices, radio towers, and routers.
- Organized requests to the IT team responsible for implementing system enhancements, evaluating real-time train information, identifying threat events, and applying preventive controls to reduce and avoid the likelihood and potential impact of a successful threat event.
Business System Analyst
2015 - 2018
EPAM Systems
- Joined the team as a junior business system analyst, then became a senior business system analyst and a mix of product owner and scrum master.
- Managed backlog, sprint, and requirements using user stories, behavior-driven development, and Scrum and Kanban approach. I also refined the project’s software development lifecycle (SDLC) process using distributed Scrum and DevOps approaches.
- Supported the project as a scrum master for the onshore team and align with the offshore team customer’s expectations.
- Acted as liaison between business units and technology teams to accurately gather, analyze, document, prioritize, refine, and deliver functional and non-functional requirements.
Software Engineer
2002 - 2003
FACEPE (Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de Pernambuco)
- Joined a research group in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics of Endemic Diseases to work on genome sequencing of Leishmania Chagasi. I was the tech lead responsible for gathering requirements with vets and biologists.
- Designed the solution, allowing the research team to use a front-end application where it was possible to upload the file with the DNA sequence (output from a DNA sequencer).
- Created a solution that had multiple modules, and I restructured the solution with automated tests to support a quicker development and testing solution. It was simple classes to test the end-to-end solution, allowing the development team to improve the solution quality.
Project History
WestJet Travel Privileges
Managed a web application enhancements applying Scrum. This application allowed employees to book flights as a company benefit.
I implemented and coached project team members to adopt the Scrum framework. I also managed the project and sprint backlogs using Scrum, Kanban, and user stories.
In addition, I facilitated Agile ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, backlog grooming and prioritization, user story definition, sprint planning, review, retrospective, and story estimation. I also supported test strategy, plan, cases definition, and managed project teams, including software engineers, quality analysts, IT architects, and support analysts, and schedule, cost, and risks.
Finally, I created dashboards to monitor work in progress KPIs, including velocity, sprint burndown, release burndown charts, process health and bottlenecks KPIs, including cycle time, cumulative flow diagram, risk level and matrix, and code quality KPIs, automation vs. manual tests, code coverage.
In addition, I facilitated Agile ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, backlog grooming and prioritization, user story definition, sprint planning, review, retrospective, and story estimation. I also supported test strategy, plan, cases definition, and managed project teams, including software engineers, quality analysts, IT architects, and support analysts, and schedule, cost, and risks.
Finally, I created dashboards to monitor work in progress KPIs, including velocity, sprint burndown, release burndown charts, process health and bottlenecks KPIs, including cycle time, cumulative flow diagram, risk level and matrix, and code quality KPIs, automation vs. manual tests, code coverage.
Atmosphere.ca
https://www.atmosphere.ca/Facilitated Scrum events with the customer team in Canada and the vendor team from Ukraine to develop the eCommerce for Atmosphere brand.
Introduced Scrum framework to the customer setting up the expectation on how to address new requirements to be implemented. I managed communication between onshore and offshore vendor teams, including QA, IT architects, and SW engineers, and the customer team.
Scrum Training
Trained coworkers on Scrum framework allowing them to implement it to their projects giving an agile approach.
Created the training and executed the training for 15-20 coworkers that were looking for getting introduced to the Scrum events and artifacts. I also published the training on the company intranet. In addition, I was recognized as one of the Agile evangelists in the department I was working at that time.
Education
2007 - 2008
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Economics
The University of São Paulo (USP) - Sao Paulo, Brazil
1999 - 2004
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Federal University of Pernambuco - Recife, Brazil
Certifications
MARCH 2020 - PRESENT
Certified SAFe 5 Scrum Master
Scaled Agile Inc
NOVEMBER 2013 - PRESENT
Level 2 Certified IT Specialist–Business Analysis
The Open Group
JULY 2012 - PRESENT
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
JUNE 2012 - PRESENT
ITIL Foundation Certification
EXIN
MAY 2012 - PRESENT
Level 1 Certified IT Specialist–Business Analyst
The Open Group
NOVEMBER 2010 - PRESENT
IBM Certified Solution Designer
IBM
NOVEMBER 2010 - PRESENT
IBM Certified Deployment Professional
IBM
NOVEMBER 2010 - PRESENT
Rational Requirements Management w/ Use Cases v2003
IBM
Skills
Tools
Jira, Office 365, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, Atlassian, Visio, SonarQube, HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Confluence, Slack, Zoom
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Azure DevOps, Agile Product Management, Agile Software Development, Requirements Analysis, Behavior-driven Development (BDD)
Platforms
SharePoint, Microsoft Power Automate, 1Password, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux
Other
Scrum Master, Product Owner, Business Systems Analysis, Scrumban, Scrum Coaching, Training, Software Engineering, Economics, IBM Rational RequisitePro, Rational Unified Process (RUP), Microsoft Planner, JFrog, Contrast, .NET, C#, MongoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft Office, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), OpenAI, DALL.E, Java, HTML
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