Mina Valcic
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Mina is a passionate project manager with thirteen years of experience and eight as an agile project and product manager leading software teams with 50+ staff distributed worldwide. She worked on web and mobile app projects for B2C and B2B organizations within the digital marketing, eCommerce, and energy industries. After working in Ericsson and Oracle, Mina developed a profound understanding of the most effective project management practices.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
Project and Product Manager
Funding Options - Acquired by Tide
- Served as a project and product manager for the leading marketplace for business finance in the UK. The Funding Cloud platform connects businesses, lenders, and partners to facilitate fast, accurate, and secure access to funding at scale.
- Formulated, executed, and adapted the marketplace roadmap to reflect business goals and market demands.
- Translated product strategy into detailed business and technical requirements for prototyping and development by interdependent engineering teams.
- Redesigned the internal configuration tool for determining customer eligibility, reducing primary stakeholder-induced errors by 90%.
- Led a cross-functional, agile team to deliver a document management system, new lender integrations, and multiple product enhancements from the discovery phase to production.
- Initiated and collaborated with user research and operations teams to improve users' problem understanding by collecting feedback via surveys, in-app tools, and customer support team calls.
- Introduced the analytics strategy by defining 20+ usage metrics and KPIs and led the build of three interactive dashboards to help track and modify product performance.
- Improved delivery timelines and planning accuracy by 40% by introducing Scrum, knowledge sharing, new reporting frameworks, and team spirit.
- Increased revenue of the automated digital sales channel by 22% by introducing a business credit card offering to the marketplace.
Technical Project Manager
Rachel McGregor
- Led the build of Android, iOS, and web applications that help people improve their life productivity and relationships.
- Determined the appropriate size and capabilities necessary for the design and development team and was instrumental in identifying and hiring candidates.
- Led the technology selection and managed the translation of business requirements into technical requirements for the MVP scope.
- Led the team of software developers, test developers, and UI/UX designers from the project kick-off until the product launch.
Project and Product Manager
Alteryx - Product Management
- Led two service teams on data connectors and engines in delivering crucial features for the new analytics cloud platform.
- Helped teams to successfully build the cloud-based data connectivity tools, asset management, and search functionalities.
- Guided the technical product management in defining requirements for the engineering teams, created roadmaps, and planned the releases.
- Acted as a scrum master and product owner and set up the agile environment and scrum framework within two teams.
- Accepted new features and proposed new deliverables based on the customers' feedback and competitive landscape analysis.
Scrum Coach
Levi9 Technology Services
- Performed as a scrum master/agile coach on projects, and was the company's official scrum/agile trainer.
- Trained around 60-70 of the company's newcomers and around 12 external teams about scrum and agile practices (ceremonies, artifacts, and principles). Organized basic and advanced scrum training, agile/scrum harmonization, gap analysis, and other workshops.
- Coached around 10 product management teams about their roles.
- Organized lessons, best practices, and knowledge-sharing sessions with teams.
Project Manager | Scrum Master | Product Owner
Levi9 Technology Services
- Collaborated with Levi9 in many capacities. It is a nearshore technology service provider with 1,000+ engineers, 70+ customers, operations in 10+ countries, a 25-30% year-over-year revenue growth, and a 100% recommendation score from its customers.
- Owned and led all aspects of over 15 engineering teams in building out 10 B2B/B2C products in various industries (programmatic advertising, energy retail, electric vehicle charging) across the entire product lifecycle.
- Led product development by maintaining a prioritized product backlog, leading all Scrum team ceremonies and cross-functional coordination.
- Ran product discovery workshops to assess the requirements and limitations, defining the goals, user journey, scope, timeline, budget, and risks using a User Story Mapping technique.
- Collaborated with stakeholders to analyze requirements, write specifications, and create release plans.
- Discussed status and created plans in operational, tactical, and strategic meetings with clients.
- Acted as a scrum master, Kanban, and so-called Spotify model coach in various teams.
Bid Management Specialist
Ericsson
- Collaborated with six account managers and the sales department. Created a telecommunication service and product offers for customers on request.
- Reviewed eight tender documentation for projects in six countries and arranged the collection of necessary data.
- Created proposals in accordance with tender requirements.
Project Office Specialist
Ericsson
- Created over 50 work orders and organized logistics with around 10 Ericsson third parties.
- Supported risk, change, and financial analysis on around 40 projects with 12 project managers in four countries.
- Led the planning and delivery of about ten learning services to Ericsson's customers, the biggest mobile operators in the region.
- Coached, supported, and monitored 12 project managers in four countries in adopting new processes, methods, and tools for managing about 40 projects.
Facility Services Specialist
Oracle
- Planned and managed operations with multiple vendors.
- Managed, monitored, and improved accounts payable processes.
- Monitored and managed the company documentation system.
Project History
360 Polaris
https://www.improvedigital.com/360polaris/Led two development and four data teams that created and implemented a solution for a real-time advertising platform.
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.
Energy Retail Platform (under NDA)
Agile project manager in the delivery of an E2E platform to sell and service energy retail products and services.
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.
EVDriver Mobile App
https://everon.io/Led the build of an Android and iOS mobile application that helps electric vehicle drivers find charging stations and pay.
Mathematics Mobile App (Toptal Client)
Assisted client in creating a business plan and project kick-off.
Advised the client on the technology selection and development team creation and created business and technical requirements.
Stylist Mobile App (Toptal Client)
Launched and managed the testing of a stylist mobile app for iOS and Android.
Created the product requirements, timeline, and led the cross-functional development team towards the MVP launch.
Analytics Cloud Platform (Toptal Client)
https://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-cloudAs the technical product manager, I led the service team on data connectors and engines in delivering crucial features for the new analytics cloud platform.
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.
E2EE Personal Database and Social Network Mobile and Web App (Toptal Client)
Led the building of Android, iOS, and web applications that help people improve their life, productivity, and relationships.
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.
Education
Master's Degree in Quality Management
Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade - Belgrade, Serbia
Bachelor's Degree in Operations Management
Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade - Belgrade, Serbia
Certifications
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
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