Nino Melikidze

I came in as a director of operations in an early-stage healthtech startup to support idea validation and product launch planning.

I acted as a highly qualified external consultant to take on the role of an operations director for one month to set up a healthtech startup. During the month, I took the project from the early idea concept to a set corporate structure, with an outline of steps for user discovery and a detailed company setup plan.

I helped the client organize their thoughts around what kind of company they wanted to build, what problem they were going to solve initially, and how to validate their solution with their target user base. Based on their feedback, I fleshed out every step they had to follow to set up the company and have a firm understanding of the problem they were solving, as well as the MVP launch and GTM plan.

Key Activities
• Conducted an Agile transformation within the organization to streamline the development processes, starting with the MVP launch.
• Established a new talent acquisition/evaluation and interviewing process for bringing on new hires.
• Supported the CEO and created new team member onboarding and employee termination processes.
• Managed all team software tools and accounts by initially setting them up for the project and ensuring that all were consolidated in one place.
• Worked closely with the product team to provide community and development team feedback when planning future features.
• Helped manage the startup community by conducting weekly community calls and taking end-user feedback into consideration for the startup operations, marketing, and development.
• Wrote up the initial processes for almost every single key function of the organization (development, product, marketing, HR, and community management).
• Documented the key product and company information and FAQs while maintaining an external knowledge base.
• Managed the community-reported bugs and issues through HubSpot by supporting the development team.

I managed and supported a team of up to ten members, including over five developers, QA, the design lead, and the product manager, throughout the product scope definition, prototyping, development, and launch stages.

Key Activities:
• Collaborated closely with the main product manager in the capacity of a product owner to define the product vision, create detailed user stories for feature development, clarify functionality during QA and UAT, and document technical and business requirements.
• Established an Agile development process and supported the team by leading and managing all related meetings, including async team stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, and sprint retrospectives.
• Supported the Toptal Projects delivery manager in stakeholder management, ensuring all of the main stakeholders were on the same page at all times regarding MVP delivery timeline, scope, and resources required.
• Maintained the project and its human resources in the majority of the tools required (e.g., Jira, Slack, Confluence), ensuring all team members and documentation remained up to date.

I managed a team of eight across three time zones (EST, PST, and Eastern Europe) and regularly supported the client during the platform launch and all subsequent releases for 1.5 years.

Key Activities
• Documented, scoped out, and supported the implementation of the top feature requests from the client.
• Supported the client with technical issues and bug reports in a timely manner and involved relevant team members when immediate fixes were required.
• Managed the design process and brought the impact of all key functionality changes to the client's attention for approval.
• Conducted product roadmap planning meetings, sprint planning, and sprint demos every two weeks prior to releases.
• Managed the feature estimation process and sprint capacity.
• Groomed the product backlog and prioritized features based on epics and the priority of the functionality.

Worked with the product manager and 9-person development team to completely revamp the product development process, resulting in a faster, better-defined, and streamlined process.

Key Activities
• Conducted an Agile transformation within the development organization to consolidate the product work across various projects and tools.
• Reduced misunderstandings and friction between team members by clearly defining communication, feature documentation, development, and testing rules.
• Collaborated with the product manager and lead stakeholder to create one Scrum board and establish a Scrum process for the main product.
• Established a Kanban approach for smaller, ad hoc projects and worked out a process for more accurate time and resource allocation among projects.

The result was a clearly organized Confluence space with guidelines and process documentation for each aspect of the project, reduced ambiguity about the next steps, and simplified onboarding experiences for new members. The project is now running on pure Scrum and improving every month with each retrospective.

I managed a team of 5-7 developers, designers, CRM experts, and product managers while working on various web projects. The clients ranged from startups to small businesses that were mainly US-based matchmakers.

Key Activities
• Gathered requirements for custom WordPress websites.
• Assisted the UX expert and UI designer with soliciting, receiving, and effectively implementing customer feedback.
• Supported websites post-launch, ensuring that all issues were resolved promptly.
• Adjusted WordPress settings and resolved non-development-related support requests.
• Participated in the project and new feature estimation processes, providing accurate feature descriptions and gathering team feedback to ensure a full understanding of estimates.
• Gathered and approved custom CRM-related requirements.

I managed a team of eight (in Russian) across three time zones to deliver a large, custom CRM project for a US-based client from scratch. I used the Agile methodology and Scrum to co-create a two-week sprint-based delivery schedule.

Key Activities
• Ensured that deliverables in each sprint were scheduled so that the requirements and designs for all features that had to be developed sooner were completed in earlier sprints.
• Provided sprint report summaries to the client at the end of each sprint.
• Regularly reviewed and groomed the backlog to ensure that Jira tickets for all relevant, upcoming features were created and properly described the work to be done.

I managed a team of two developers (front and back end) and collaborated with the CTO over across three time zones to build an MVP for an app in three months.

Key Activities
• Designed and conceptualized the product functionality.
• Wrote the product technical specifications.
• Broke down the delivery process into two-week sprints.
• Collaborated with the developers to continuously test the implemented features, document bugs, and ensure that the bugs that most impacted functionality were fixed pre-launch.
• Managed and prioritized a small feature backlog and bug list.
• Conducted product demos and solicited feedback from potential customers.

Although the project was eventually shut down due to insufficient funding, it was a great experience in product and project management.