Mina Valcic

Product: 360 Polaris is a revolutionary ad monetization platform for video, web, and mobile publishers owned by Europe’s leading programmatic advertising technology provider. It enables automated trading of digital ad inventory and helps media owners optimize their programmatic advertising strategy and maximize revenue. The platform has +120 thousand direct and +600 million indirect users.

Challenges and successes:
The platform launch enabled a +50% rise in revenue growth over one year and positioned Improve Digital on the Deloitte Fast50 list with a growth rate of 5466% over the five years. We established a Spotify organization model for 100+ team members in five countries. I led six teams (out of 18) that delivered the platform on budget and time. In a rapidly upscaling environment, we managed to onboard 40 developers in six months to become productive in two weeks. I managed complex team interdependencies, handled a scale-up on the product management side, and was a data tribe lead that helped four teams deliver several real-time and BI solutions with cutting-edge technologies.

The technology stack included: PHP, Java, AWS, Kafka, Hadoop, Samza, Cassandra.

The platform’s purpose was to enable contracting with new customers, servicing all communication, and handling payments with existing customers. As an agile project manager, I was using the scrum framework and led three development teams in the IT department, with over 60 people working on the same product during its continuous development, product launch, and maintenance period. The technology stack included: PHP, Java, CRM, BPM, Odoo, ServiceMix, and jBilling. Several customized applications, various technologies, and highly configurable systems within one platform made the development and maintenance very demanding and inefficient.

Due to the several parties involved in the project, their conflicting interests, and organizational issues within the client’s organization, we, as a team, faced many challenges of various types. The main obstacles were the reluctance of the most experienced people to collaborate, lack of functional knowledge and documentation, unsuitable platform legacy architecture, and divergence on the management level. By continually working on the improvements and resolution of issues to motivate teams and satisfy business, we learned many lessons and finally found a win-win setup. I’m thankful for being a part of this very challenging project.

Within a very young but fast-growing industry of electric vehicles and high competitiveness, the main challenge for my team was to understand users’ needs and reduce time-to-market quickly. As a part of the startup company with a rapidly upscaling development team and many dependencies, I coached them to act proactively, be transparent about concerns, and welcome changes. By organizing frequent refinement sessions and setting milestones together with a business, we built a highly trusted environment with a motivated and high performing team. As a project manager and scrum master for two teams on this project, I was part of an agile chapter and participated in the planning and establishing of an agile roadmap for the whole organization with over 70 developers. The technology stack included: Swift, Kotlin, Java, Circle CI/CD, and GC.

Consulted with a startup and led the delivery of a native mobile application that helps people solve math issues. The user enters a math problem and is entertained while playing a math quiz.

Advised the client on the technology selection and development team creation and created business and technical requirements.

Organized the testing of an on-demand stylist mobile app (iOS & Android) that serves as a marketplace for the stylists and customers.

Created the product requirements, timeline, and led the cross-functional development team towards the MVP launch.

I contributed to Alteryx, an analytics platform that can connect to various data sources (clouds and data lakes). The clients use the platform to create data pipes, transform the data, and apply multiple ML/AI algorithms.

I guided the technical product management in defining requirements for the engineering teams, created roadmaps, and planned the releases. I helped teams to successfully build cloud-based data connectivity tools that enable users to connect to and use their data from Office365, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and Snowflake remote cloud storage. I also acted as a scrum master and product owner and set up the agile environment and scrum framework within two teams. I accepted new features and proposed new deliverables based on the customers’ feedback and competitive landscape analysis.

Users can securely store and manage their personal information (end-to-end encrypted), connect with people in the desired way, and benefit from calendars, groups, notifications, and other features.

As the technical project manager, I determined the appropriate size and capabilities necessary for the design and development team and was instrumental in identifying and hiring candidates. I led the technology selection and managed the translation of business requirements into technical requirements for the MVP scope. I led the team of software developers, test developers, and UI/UX designers from the project kick-off until the product launch, fostering team spirit across a remote team and keeping activities on track when needed.