
Roxana-Maria Grigore
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Roxana has extensive experience with founders and new software product kick-off initiatives. She has 17 years of expertise in the software development industry, including technical leadership and management roles, leading new product initiatives, and programming. In a previous Toptal engagement, Roxana supported a startup founder to launch a new product, assess the business viability, minimize risk, build the team, get excellent customer feedback, and secure a significant investment budget.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
Remote Startup Management Consultant
Toptal Client
- Helped startup founders and managers build their teams, engage their staff, achieve business results, delight customers, deliver innovative tech solutions, and shape culture.
- Consulted tech startup founders on strategic staffing decisions: hiring, outsourcing, building partnerships, offshore, developing internal competencies, vendors analysis, and comparison.
- Supported founders in creating business proposals and business cases for strategic MVPs and calculating ROI.
- Coached on prioritizing requirements, validating customer needs hypotheses, discovering customer value, and launching MVP.
- Consulted management decisions regarding technology and business initiatives aligned with the startup's growth strategy.
- Defined the screening process for recruiting Agile coaches, product owners, scrum masters, and other team roles.
- Suggested creative solutions to reduce and mitigate risk and handle uncertainty by applying empirical models.
Freelance Agile Coach and Consultant
Toptal Clients
- Trained scrum masters, and technology and business managers on people skills and transformation leadership, building high-performing teams.
- Coached scrum masters. product owners, transitioning project managers, and other IT, business leaders, and teams towards the mindset of a learning organization, able to adapt fast to market changes.
- Guided on how to increase the customers' delight and optimize the end-to-end value chain.
- Suggested creative solutions to mitigate risk and reduce uncertainty by applying empirical models.
- Consulted top management decisions regarding agile adoption and transformation, technology strategy, and outsourcing/insourcing approaches.
- Developed frameworks for HR and technology management regarding performance reviews, career tracks, OKRs, and other target systems, recruitment, and job descriptions.
- Partnered on creativity and innovation tools to build the environment for safe experimentation.
- Facilitated problem-solving cross-silos, cross-cultural, and cross-hierarchy for win-win solutions leading to a high-performing system.
Director of Agile Coaching
Adidas | Digital Brand Commerce
- Consulted executive stakeholders regarding agile initiatives in digital brand commerce, a department with more than 500 business and IT experts responsible for all consumer-facing Adidas software products.
- Served as the line manager of two agile coaches, collaborating with five other external coaches in 45 development teams.
- Supported the agile transformation core team and the volunteered working teams focused on delivering transformation key enablers.
- Developed the agile coaching strategy in collaboration with business and IT stakeholders to be applied cross-teams, cross-hierarchy, and cross-location.
- Advised management on the outsourcing strategy in line with Agile considerations and the transition of Waterfall projects to Agile, including timing, prerequisites, risks, budget impact, and team composition impact.
- Consulted key executive stakeholders, including the VP of digital IT, in his agile transformation executive sponsor role.
- Guided the agile transformation initiative on the executive level for the software department across Germany, Netherlands, and Spain.
- Initiated the scrum masters’ community of practice and the Agile coaching forum.
Technology Agile Line Manager as Country Manager
NAPA Romania
- Increased staff performance each year (79.8 in 2016), beyond the global expert norm of 65.8 by applying agile values, principles, and practices. Reported directly to the CTO.
- Facilitated the bottom-up creation of the technology unit strategy.
- Led the global customer experience (CX) team to raise the net promoter score from 16 to 25 (target 20) with a volunteered cross-functional involvement of the staff.
- Consulted the development of IT's agile career tracks and job descriptions in harmony with cross-cultural expectations between Finland, Romania, and India. Career tracks were seen as beneficial by 41.2% and very beneficial by 11.8% of the staff.
- Defined the agile performance evaluation process by distributing self-assessment forms, resulting in feedback that people feel more engaged with their work (47.1%) and equally highly engaged (52.9%).
- Collaborated with the HR manager and financial manager to adapt the target setting practices and competencies development and the salary system to Agile.
- Contributed to the company's label as the first employer of choice in IT in the city, after building a referral-based recruitment system, universities' collaboration, and conferences' participation (brain spotting public report available on request).
- Accomplished excellent staff survey results each year, measured by an external partner survey: commitment index 2015–78; leadership index 2015–73.9; engagement index 2015–84.6. The global expert norm is 72.8, 70.5, and 75.8, respectively.
- Supported competency development by introducing a competency analysis framework, one-on-one development discussions, and mentorship and soft skills programs. Index raised from 0.01 (2013) to 0.13 (2014) and 0.23 (2015) measured by an external survey.
- Started as the first employee in Romania, growing the team from 18 to 32 experts as the line manager.
Scrum Master
NAPA Romania
- Introduced Scrum practices and Agile values, principles, and practices while serving as a scrum master selected through team voting.
- Received company reward as a high-performance team for delivering significant new development while continuously improving code quality.
- Coached the team and stimulated it to find its own agile flavor according to its unique context and membership.
- Initiated the scrum masters' community of practice.
- Removed impediments and aggressively supported improvement initiatives, completing a total of 103 improvements.
- Supported the collaboration with other teams by initiating the scrum of scrums.
Technical Team Leader | Lead Software Developer
NAPA Romania
- Led the automated migration from Java to C# of two NAPA projects, using the open-source project 2 CSharp Translator for Eclipse.
- Initiated and facilitated the cross-teams implementation of NAPA Bus, the communication tool between all NAPA products implemented with ActiveMQ.
- Developed NAPA Real-Time Monitoring, an application for monitoring the sensors onboard the ships using the .NET platform.
- Contributed to the development of a web business intelligence tool for fleet management implemented in JAVA, Microsoft database, and Pentaho platforms.
- 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.
- Maintained and improved the Joint Bulkcarrier Project software used by the American Bureau of Shipping.
Senior Software Developer and Backup Component Leader
SIVECO Romania
- Implemented a component for the Romanian health integrated system in Java with Oracle databases following the Waterfall methodology and practices.
- Developed overrides for the source code automatically generated by the MDA framework (Java sources, JSP sources, and Oracle scripts).
- Documented specific software requirements based on the legal constraints regarding contracts made between the National Health Insurance Found and the private providers of medical services.
- Verified the test cases elaborated by the testing team.
- Tested the integrated version of the software and discovered more than 100 bugs that were fixed until the scheduled release date.
Software Developer
Pentalog iNet
- Maintained a proactive communication between the clients located in France and the local outsourced team.
- Developed the evolution of a generic synchronization engine used for synchronizing XML files, CSV files, and Oracle databases.
- Developed a module for the automatic scheduling of the synchronization processes with an evolved system of processes dependency.
- Integrated Kettle as an open-source ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) in the Java client application.
- Delivered multiple PL/SQL scripts for the maintenance of the Oracle databases and solving fatal bugs.
- Analyzed and proposed different technical solutions based on open-source tools to the clients.
- Elaborated functional, installation, technical and user guides in French.
Project History
Leading a Company Transformation Initiative
The initiative raised the net promoter score from 16 to 25 (target 20) with a volunteered cross-functional involvement of the staff.
Agile Coach for an Aspiring Product Owner
The client felt competent and excited to continue in the new role, with few successes regarding the clients' engagement, product delivery, team collaboration, and stakeholders' management.
Her feedback stated that what she appreciated the most were concrete real-life examples from my own experience that opened her thinking into finding her own approach.
She has requested and received very positive feedback regarding her progress from her team members and manager while getting a new enthusiasm for the role.
Scrum Master of a High-performing Team
https://youtu.be/jVjb1Z37EUgAs the scrum master of the team, I coached the team to become high-performing and rewarded at the company level.
Agile Coach for a Growing Startup
As an agile coach, I supported the creation of a solid foundation for a growing startup by coaching, consulting, and facilitating.
Agile Coach for a Transitioning Project Manager
I coached the transitioning project manager to create a new career path and experiment with different agile practices.
Cross-teams Agreement on a New Communication Tool Between All Applications
As a technical leader, I facilitated the collaboration of 12 development teams on the adoption of a common communication tool.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) Awarded with Merit in Strategic Transformations
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick - Warwick, United Kingdom
Executive MBA Module in Cross-cultural Management
Mannheim Business School - Mannheim, Germany
Executive MBA Module in Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking
Mannheim Business School - Mannheim, Germany
Master of Science Degree in Algorithms and Software Products
Faculty of Mathematics and Computers Science, Transylvania University - Braşov, Romania
Erasmus Scholarship Recipient in Computer Science
Faculty of Sciences of Luminy - Marseille, France
Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science
Faculty of Mathematics and Computers Science, Transylvania University - Braşov, Romania
Certifications
ICAgile Certified Professional in Agility in the Enterprise (ICP-ENT)
ICAgile
ICAgile Certified Professional in Coaching Agile Transitions (ICP-CAT)
ICAgile
Professional Scrum Master Level II (PSM II)
Scrum.org
Professional Scrum with Kanban I (PSK I)
Scrum.org
ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)
ICAgile
Professional Agile Leadership I (PAL I)
Scrum.org
Design Strategy: Design Thinking for Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Coursera
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)
Scrum.org
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
TOEFL
ETS
Sun Certified Programmer for Java Platform
Sun Microsystems