Nermin Catovic, Project Manager in Sarajevo, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
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Nermin Catovic

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Project Manager

Location
Sarajevo, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Toptal Member Since
July 23, 2018

Nermin is an experienced agile product and project manager with over a decade of experience in finance, insurance, real estate, social media, and healthcare. He has a strong track record in building successful products through ideation and validation and has extensive experience leading agile teams. Recently, Nermin took on the Director of Technology and Product role and established a proven history of delivering enterprise transformation projects and building MVPs for startups.

Project Highlights

Product Manager at Stitch | Your Stress Support
Stitch is America’s first everyday stress management tool that combines simple mental training with daily probiotics for stress support through one easy-to-use app.
Chief Operating Officer for Hashtag Expert
After buyout from Toptal, continued working with a client in a dual COO and product manager role as a right-hand man to the founder and CEO.
Product and Project Manager for Hashtag Expert (via Toptal)
Led the complete management for iOS apps Hashtag Expert, Command for Instagram, Caption Expert with over 150,000 active monthly subscribers, which are aimed towards small businesses, influencers, and prosumers that manage their social media.

Expertise

Work Experience

Director | Technology and Product

2022 - PRESENT
MVP Factory
  • Led the technology and product teams in developing and delivering innovative solutions aligned with the company's business goals and objectives.
  • Developed and implemented a technology and product strategy aligned with the company's overall business goals and objectives.
  • Led and successfully managed the technology and product teams, setting goals and priorities, providing guidance and support, and ensuring they had the resources and support needed to succeed.
  • Worked closely with senior leadership to define and prioritize key initiatives and ensured that the technology and product teams were aligned with the company's overall goals and objectives.
  • Oversaw the development and delivery of technology and product solutions, including managing budgets, timelines, and resources.
  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to identify and prioritize new opportunities and areas for growth.
  • Built and maintained strong relationships with key stakeholders, including customers, partners, and vendors.
  • Stayed up-to-date with industry trends and developments and identified opportunities to incorporate new technologies and approaches into the company's products and services.

Founder and CEO

2019 - PRESENT
Origin
  • Founded Origin—a Sarajevo-based consulting, coaching, and technology company—providing agile projects, product management services, and full-scale delivery of your products.
  • Expanded services to multiple streams including product management, technical product, and project management, as well as best practice analysis of software development processes within companies.
  • Achieved revenue growth of over 250% compared to initial plans, with profit exceeding 200%.
  • Established work processes and delivery methods and set grounds for a remote-first company.

Location Team Manager

2018 - 2019
HYCU
  • Managed and led two locations: a Sarajevo-based team of 60 people and a Mostar-based team of six people (developers, QAs, DevOps, sales, and support engineers) working on the HYCU product and service delivery for various clients.
  • Oversaw and managed the overall team's satisfaction, creating an amazing startup work environment with continuous investments in building up a great and skillful team.
  • Focused on each team member's professional development, performance, and career plans.
  • Achieved a 24% increase in team size while keeping retention rate at 94.5% in the first year.
  • Worked in a position that could be best compared to an engineering manager, operations manager, or COO's level of responsibility.

Lead Program Manager

2014 - 2018
Authority Partners
  • Oversaw multiple international clients and completed the delivery process within the scrum framework through all phases of SDLC and with all scrum/agile events.
  • Managed and worked with cross-functional, globally distributed project teams—both internal and external and collaborated with all functional groups, business, and technical.
  • Transformed businesses into more agile entities by increasing the delivery-and-production timelines while establishing proper continuous integration and delivery to sustain this.
  • Motivated, managed, and supported a team of program managers/scrum masters to ensure adherence to the internal process and procedures and maximize effectiveness and efficiency.

Information Security Consultant

2012 - 2014
Consalta
  • Implemented three ISO 27001 standards (information security management system) with the development of various ISMS mandatory policies and procedures.
  • Implemented information security risk management processes (ISO 27005).
  • Conducted IT audit activities for all IT projects.
  • Developed, managed, and lectured about information security awareness to clients and as an undergraduate SSST university guest lecturer.

Product Manager at Stitch | Your Stress Support

Stitch is America’s first everyday stress management tool that combines simple mental training with daily probiotics for stress support through one easy-to-use app.

I acted as the product manager from product discovery to in-market and go-live for the new Stitch Care Corp venture. I owned and managed the backlog and roadmap for Stitch | Your Stress Support product.

Responsibilities:
• Owned and managed complete release and delivery process for mobile and web apps
• Owned and built customer support process implementation from scratch using HubSpot and the app
• Continuous stakeholder management, expectations management; reporting
• Oversaw and integrated the warehouse management system using Flowspace for shipment of physical products to users
• Defined all analytics events to ensure data-driven roadmap planning, including marketing funnel conversions, app usage, and highlights in the user engagement.

• Tools and processes: AWS, Github, Vercel, Firebase, Postman, AppStore Connect, Google Play, Hubspot, Typeform, Atlassian workspace, Webflow, Stripe, Flowspace, Amplitude, Testflight, Expo Go, Mailchimp, AppFigures, TestRails

Chief Operating Officer for Hashtag Expert

After buyout from Toptal, continued working with a client in a dual COO and product manager role as a right-hand man to the founder and CEO.

• Defined roles and responsibilities keeping in mind the company's values.
• Turned strategic vision into actionable tasks and direction.
• Worked with the CEO to define quarterly and half-year goals for the company.
• Helped increase ARR from $3.5 to $5 million in a year.
• Hired and offboarded team members.
• Introduced PTO policies and procedures.
• Introduced bonus distribution policies.
• Held quarterly 1-on-1s with team members.
• Managed team overall satisfaction levels.
• Oversaw financial payouts to contractors.
• Optimized expenses to maximize profitability.

Product and Project Manager for Hashtag Expert (via Toptal)

Led the complete management for iOS apps Hashtag Expert, Command for Instagram, Caption Expert with over 150,000 active monthly subscribers, which are aimed towards small businesses, influencers, and prosumers that manage their social media.

• Overhauled development, operations, and the support process
• Introduced process improvements with regular release cadence
• Introduced a full CI/CD pipeline and delivery process for mobile apps using Bitrise
• Owned and managed backlog for all existing and new products
• Owned the whole release/manage process in App Store Connect
• Introduced and managed the quality assurance process (test case management, unit test, regression, feature testing, reporting) in both Qase and TestRails, and integrated it with Jira
• Tracked and determined action items based on changes in relevant KPIs such as revenue, conversion rates from trial to paid plans (RevenueCat, MixPanel, AppFigures, and AddsFlyer)
• Analyzed customer feedback and outlined new features based on it (through TypeForm and ZenDesk)
• Analyzed people dropping off the app and determined action items to prevent it
• Introduced multiple improvements in the customer support process through clear directions and a 100% response rate to customers
• Automated processes by integrating tools such as Jira, GitHub, Zendesk, TypeForm, Zeplin, Firebase, TestRail, Testflight, and more.

Head of Product Development | Healthpath, Ltd.

http://www.healthpath.com

Led the complete product management and technology delivery for new services and products.

• Acted as a product owner and worked closely with the founder, the business, and third parties to scope features and refine these further to take them forward into development.
• Delivered a unified customer view into development with well-articulated, detailed, and prioritized backlogs of user stories into the scrum delivery teams.
• Worked side by side with the development team to ensure the requirements are met.
• Took ownership of the complete delivery process and established adequate technology improvements—branching strategies, delivery methods, putting CI/CD into place, ensuring security, and collaborating with integration partners).
• Sourced and recruited new team members.
• Established QA manual and automation practices to support CD.

Agile Coach for a European Multinational Debt Buyer (via Toptal)

Served in an ongoing position as an agile coach for a multivendor team contributing to core product development and working with a proactive DevOps mindset.

• Identified gaps in the process and suggested improvement for the optimization in the current Kanban process.
• Optimized delivery process by focusing on teams and their satisfaction working in DevOps mode.
• Transformed team and management mindset to work in DevOps mode (from traditional).
• Improved cross-team collaboration and communication.
• Streamlined definition of OKRs and metrics which support business goals.
• Focused on multilevel retrospectives (teams and management) to increase transparency across different levels.

Agile Project Manager for eWO (via Toptal)

An ongoing position where I completely transformed the delivery process for lead affiliate commission provider.

• Transformed the software development and delivery process.
• Introduced complete delivery roadmap (biweekly scrum with weekly release cadence).
• Increased security of the release process by reducing errors and maintaining uptime.
• Organized branching strategies that supported hotfixes and regular release cadence.
• Completed a full CI/CD process from development to production environments.
• Introduced scrum and guided the team throughout all the ceremonies regularly.
• Enforced and coached the management team on the importance of quality assurance and release sign-offs.
• Continuously coached about agile practices to both team and stakeholders.

Agile Project Manager for WinOrLose App (via Toptal)

Led the development and UX team through lightning/development phases of the MVP build for WinOrLose (iOS, Android, web app).

WinOrLose (Wood Robbins, LLP) is an instant advice platform that allows anyone who thinks they might have a legal case to get instant advice from attorneys on their claims' merits. Likewise, it can be used by anyone facing legal challenges to get advice on the merits of their defenses.

Why Use It?
Instead of calling and meeting one attorney and getting one opinion, users can post their case and get multiple attorneys' opinions at once. Non-attorney users also can chime in, giving users a sense of how potential jurors might rule for them or against them.

System Delivery Lead | IWG (Regus)

Led transformation from a two-month release cycle to multiple releases in a month which also supported co-dependant systems.

I led the core system delivery for new features and supported the existing ones for an FTSE 250 company in the office rental industry. I also improved the processes, beginning from an existing two-month delivery process to a more agile environment with multiple deliveries in a month, allowing co-dependant systems to enhance and support business demands.

In addition, I managed multiple team members, including 20 developers, ten QA and automation engineers with two supporting DevOps engineers, all globally distributed.

Project Manager | CoreLogic

Led the pilot project migration of an existing app as part of an application suite within a completely new infrastructure.

For a US-based mortgage industry leader, I led an application transformation and a pilot integration for a major planned application.

Our application served as the foundation and basis for how the major-parent project should be structured and organized. The project included complete continuous integration, automated delivery, and latest technology stack.

After the project was successfully completed, I managed the delivery process for new features and supported the existing ones.

Agile Coach and Program Manager | Williston Financial Group

Delivered high-value features for a new breed of national real estate service provider and title insurance company.

This was a long-term engagement with a full agile implementation and delivery management.

I managed a team of combined developers, QAs, and DevOps consisting of 25 team members who continuously delivered high-value features for the client through new applications. We also developed a web/mobile-based application which won the Inman 2018's first runner-up award. I also acted as the interim product owner (by proxy) to alleviate the lack of direct involvement from the client product owner.
2010 - 2012

Master's Degree in Information Management

University of Hradec Králové - Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

2006 - 2010

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

University of Buckingham - Buckingham, United Kingdom

APRIL 2017 - PRESENT

Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO I)

Scrum.org

JULY 2015 - PRESENT

Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)

Scrum.org

DECEMBER 2013 - PRESENT

Certified ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer

PECB

FEBRUARY 2013 - PRESENT

Lead Auditor - IT Service Management Systems, ISO 20000 LA

IRCA

FEBRUARY 2013 - PRESENT

Lead Auditor - Information Security Management Systems, ISO 27001 LA

IRCA

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