Marian is available for hire
Hire MarianMarian Toader
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Bucharest, Romania
Toptal member since March 11, 2022
Bio
Marian is a seasoned senior project and program manager with a track record at leading firms like IBM, Unicredit, and Toptal, alongside a history of guiding small teams and startups. With proven expertise in delivering MVPs, he brings hands-on experience from infrastructure setup to go-live. Skilled at assembling and leading cross-functional teams, Marian excels in navigating the complexities of startup environments, ensuring projects meet timelines, budgets, and quality standards.
Project Highlights
Founder at GestiuneSala.ro
Launched GestiuneSala.ro as a cloud business management software trusted by hundreds of customers in Romania.
GestiuneSala helps businesses leverage technology to streamline operations and make their services more accessible to their clients.
Founder at EasyPass.ro
Launched the EasyPass mobile app for the software as a service platform for GestiuneSala.
Expertise
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Project Management
- Business Process Analysis
- Kanban
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Project Management
- Scrum
- Scrum Master
Work Experience
Program Manager
2022 - 2024
Toptal
- Spearheaded the launch of a cross-functional program that unified Engineering, Product, Legal, and Finance teams, reducing project delivery timelines by 25% and enhancing cross-departmental collaboration through Agile methodologies.
- Mentored and supported over 10 Toptal teams in adopting continuous integration and delivery practices, which improved deployment frequency by 40% and minimized release cycle times by 30%, ensuring faster, more reliable delivery of MVPs.
- Led the implementation of a strategic risk management framework that identified and mitigated over 90% of high project risks, resulting in a 20% reduction in program delays and ensuring transparency and accountability in project health reporting.
- Played a pivotal role in managing integrations, in addition to program delivery, for mergers and acquisitions at Toptal, ensuring a seamless blend of acquired teams and assets into our existing structures.
Agile Project Manager
2021 - 2022
ThoughtWorld
- Helped startups founders build their team, engage their staff, achieve business results, delight customers, deliver innovative tech solutions, and shape culture.
- Defined the product vision and narrowed the focus to target MVP at a specific user type for five main initiatives, web platforms, iOS and Android mobile apps, Unity engine development, and reporting platform.
- Consulted management decisions regarding technology and business initiatives aligned with the startup's growth strategy.
- Suggested creative solutions to reduce and mitigate risk and handled uncertainty by applying empirical models.
- Developed processes to manage changing client requirements and development team capacity.
- Oversaw scope changes and prioritized the backlog to eliminate nice-to-have features and focus on critical features.
- Managed project staffing requirements, engineers, and artists.
Delivery Manager
2021 - 2022
Tremend
- Joined the team as an agile project manager, then became the delivery manager.
- Consulted top management decisions regarding agile adoption and transformation, technology strategy, and outsourcing and insourcing approaches.
- Interviewed, selected, onboarded, and coached candidates from a regional talent pool to meet the aggressive goals of the company's high growth pace.
- Worked together with the delivery management team to create a Google Sheet project health dashboards with summarized pulled data from Jira, Tengine, an internal management tool, and other web services like intervals.
- Reviewed and tracked the project's health dashboards and team summaries like billable and non-billable hours, cost, schedule, quality metrics, and aligned activities and goals.
- Followed, tracked, and reacted to the organization's compliance program on a daily and weekly basis.
- Followed up on escalations, communicated and removed blocked issues, and adjusted the plan and team allocation to meet our goals.
- Held weekly value streams meetings to communicate strategies, weekly goals, and review team and individual performance.
- Performed Gemba walks to all the team to identify best and bad practices, especially on topics like non-functional requirements, risks, and budget monitoring.
- Worked to formalize the organizational PMO with templates, process guidelines, and metrics.
Agile Project Manager
2019 - 2021
Tremend
- Led multiple concurrent projects in website and mobile development and restructured internal processes.
- Managed projects using Agile methodologies. Suggested creative solutions to mitigate risk and reduce uncertainty by applying empirical models.
- Conducted project discovery workshops, project take-overs, project kick-offs, team set up, and MVPs builds.
- Performed daily and weekly track of the team effort based on quality, scope, timeline, risks, and budget metrics.
- Facilitated Scrum events like stand-up and daily scrum, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint demos, and sprint retro for different teams and customers.
- Held one-on-one meetings to coach individual contributors and removed blockers.
- Contributed to creating and reviewing SOW documents, for different projects and customers, as part of pre-sales initiatives.
- Consulted and provided recommendations to improve the software development lifecycle.
- Managed customer requirements and expectations directly.
Senior Business Relationship Manager
2018 - 2019
UniCredit
- Assured transparency about prioritization and roadmap process inside the central and eastern Europe group.
- Operated as the lead point of contact for any and all matters specific to Unicredit Bank Romania's account.
- Prioritized the needs of stakeholders while balancing the scope, budget, and factory delivery capabilities.
- Building and maintaining strong, long-lasting customer relationships with business transformation teams from all business areas.
Release Manager
2016 - 2018
UniCredit
- Led multiple geographical-distributed teams such as QA, TA, developers, solution experts, customers, and vendors during the deployment.
- Worked closely with project and program management as well as managers of related applications.
- Improved the performance of the team regarding deployment practices.
- Took prompt decisions that may have involved tough choices or considered risks.
- Acted as a single point of contact for client counterparts for end-to-end delivery of projects and services throughout the deployment process.
- Followed the end-to-end delivery process and assured service rollout.
Scrum Master
2014 - 2016
UniCredit
- Managed a geographical-distributed engineering team working on UniCredit's online banking system.
- Supported the collaboration with other teams by initiating the scrum of scrums.
- Worked closely with product owners coordinating product backlog grooming and story estimation.
- Introduced code quality practices, including refactoring, automated testing, and increased code coverage, leading to fewer customer-reported bugs.
- Trained and offered technical onboarding to junior team members joining the company as trainees.
- Developed a module for the automatic API health status check, part of an initiative that had the goal of synchronization processes with an evolved system of processes dependency.
- Migrated from HPSM to Jira for workflow and issues management throughout the company's IT department.
- Tracked project progress, risks, issues, and client expectations from Kanban and Scrum projects.
Scrum Master
2013 - 2014
AQUASoft
- Served one team, which had the goal of adding new features for an existing product part of the Tivoli Storage manager family.
- Facilitated Scrum events, including stand-up and daily scrum, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint demos, and sprint retro for different teams and customers.
- Performed daily and weekly track of the team effort based on quality, scope, timeline, risks, and budget metrics.
- Worked closely with product owners, coordinating product backlog grooming and story estimation.
- Introduced Scrum practices and Agile values, principles, and practices while serving as a scrum master selected through team voting.
- Coached the team using the Agile methodology, encouraged best practices, and provided guidance.
- Managed a geographical-distributed engineering team, which had the goal of adding new features for an existing product part of the Tivoli Storage manager family.
Software Quality Assurance Engineer
2007 - 2013
AQUASoft
- Worked on design, development, and reviewed and executed test cases through analysis of product specifications and software requirements.
- Involved in different types of testing like black box testing, integration testing, regression testing, acceptance testing.
- Worked with Agile methodologies like planning, daily stand-up, review, retrospective, and release planning. Also utilized Waterfall model.
- Installed and configured different applications used in the testing process, namely Oracle database, Microsoft SQL Server, Domino server, and Microsoft Exchange configurations for TSM client usage.
- Tested the integrated version of the software and discovered more than 20 bugs per phase that were fixed until the scheduled release date.
- Maintained proactive communication between the development team located in San Jose, US, and the local testing team.
- Prepared and reviewed software test plans and test strategies. Verified the test cases elaborated by the testing team and reported to the test lead.
- Contributed during software development engineering tests with Gherkin scenarios and built automation in Power Shell.
- Elaborated functional and technical installation user guides in English.
Project History
Founder at GestiuneSala.ro
http://gestiunesala.roLaunched GestiuneSala.ro as a cloud business management software trusted by hundreds of customers in Romania. GestiuneSala helps businesses leverage technology to streamline operations and make their services more accessible to their clients.
The team had one front-end developer, one back-end developer, one React Native developer, and one quality assurance engineer.
Adjusted the plan and team allocation to meet our goals. Reviewed and worked closely with the client to determine the needs and then planned and built an interactive web-based platform to suit them.
The solution keeps managers and users updated on their membership status.
Adjusted the plan and team allocation to meet our goals. Reviewed and worked closely with the client to determine the needs and then planned and built an interactive web-based platform to suit them.
The solution keeps managers and users updated on their membership status.
Founder at VederePanoramica.ro
Launched VederePanoramica.ro, a virtual tour company based in Bucharest.
VederePanoramica is a virtual tour company based in Bucharest, Romania. Since 2010 we have created a tool that inspires, enthralls, and excites our customer's audience.
The product was addressed mainly to customers in the hotels and restaurants industries.
The product was addressed mainly to customers in the hotels and restaurants industries.
Founder at EasyPass.ro
https://easypass.roLaunched the EasyPass mobile app for the software as a service platform for GestiuneSala.
The team had one front-end developer, one back-end developer, one React Native developer, and one quality assurance engineer.
Adjusted the plan and team allocation to meet our goals. Reviewed and worked closely with the client to determine the needs and then planned and built an interactive web-based platform to suit them.
The solution keeps managers and users updated on their membership status.
Adjusted the plan and team allocation to meet our goals. Reviewed and worked closely with the client to determine the needs and then planned and built an interactive web-based platform to suit them.
The solution keeps managers and users updated on their membership status.
Education
2008 - 2010
Master's Degree in Economics
Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies | Economic Cybernetics - Bucharest, Romania
2005 - 2008
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies | Economic Cybernetics - Bucharest, Romania
Certifications
AUGUST 2021 - PRESENT
Jira Fundamentals
atlassian.com
NOVEMBER 2019 - PRESENT
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)
Scrum.org
SEPTEMBER 2018 - PRESENT
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
OCTOBER 2014 - PRESENT
Certified Scrum Developer
SCRUMstudy
SEPTEMBER 2014 - PRESENT
Certified Scrum Fundamentals
SCRUMstudy
Skills
Tools
Slack, Jira, Skype, Zoom, Google Workspace, Confluence
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Agile Project Management, Management, Testing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Lean
Platforms
Amazon EC2
Other
Quality Management, IT Management, Project Management, IT Product Management, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Scrum Master, Jira Administration, Agile Coaching, Project Planning, Delivery Management, Build Processes, Management Consulting, Process Design, Process Mapping, Business Process Analysis, Budget Management, Project Timelines, Google, Economics, Computer Science, Programming, Databases, APIs, Marketing, Multimedia, IT Program Management, Product Management, Personal Finance Management, Teamwork, Web UX, User Experience (UX), Business Setup, Release Management, Software Release Management, Business Management, Project Budget Management, Portfolio Management, Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Scrum Testing, Legacy Software, QA Testing, QA Test Plan Management, Test Case Execution, Test Cases, Black Box Testing, Regression Testing, Product Owner, Product Ownership, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Certified Scrum Developer, Sales, MVP Design, Mobile App Development, Estimation & Planning, Software Design, Projects, IT Projects, Leadership, Acquisitions, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Startups, Lean Startups, Infrastructure, IT Operations Management (ITOM), IT Outsourcing, Amazon RDS, Cost Control, Agile DevOps, Interpersonal Skills, Coaching, Scrum Coaching, Business Coaching
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