Umar Ali

I trained C-level team members on the Agile mindset, methodologies, and practices and coached and facilitated story refinement meetings between the product and engineering teams.

Introduced product management best practices and championed hiring a dedicated product manager.

Additionally, I facilitated user story mapping sessions to map out features and identify missing use cases for new features and successfully implemented Scrum for two self-managing teams.

Americana is a marketplace for high-end collectibles paired with digital NFT tokens. Collectors can send their collectibles to the Americana vault and receive an NFT for the duration the item is vaulted.

Americana is also an active part of the collector and art community, hosting events and collaborating with artists to create unique works of art that will be exhibited and vaulted with Americana.

My role with Americana was project manager, scrum master, and product manager. I worked across multiple domains to develop an MVP marketplace.

I managed a development team of six, which also included developers and QA, to deliver an MVP for a gamified video streaming platform.

I also worked as an agile coach to educate the team and the client on how to prioritize and deliver high value in regular increments. Stakeholder and expectation management were also part of my responsibilities.

BitMovio had over 1,000 web and mobile users. For this project, we developed a web app using React and a mobile app using React Native and AWS services.

I led a team of eight, including developers and QAs, to deliver a drone-as-a-service application for a US-based organization. It provides drone service, topological details, and inspection information for energy providers.

We adopted an Agile Scrum approach to regularly refine our product backlog to deliver features for internal testing every two weeks. I led the development and delivery of the application from its discovery phase to completion.

I guided individual teams and the organizational training and guided the transformation from Waterfall to Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. I also effectively developed and implemented strategies to improve the organization’s development processes and increase organizational agility.

I championed the effort to convert numerous projects at NETSOL from Waterfall to Agile Scrum and Disciplined Agile—this led to a 50% increase in productivity, 68% increase in profitability, a significant reduction in time to market (up to 3-4 months) as well as a drastic increase in overall quality (30 UAT bugs vs. 500 UAT bugs).

I managed a team of eight individuals across multiple time zones (including PST, CST, EST, GMT, PKT, IST, AEDT) and coordinated with individuals from the broader global organization.

I worked as a scrum master and agile coach to improve the adoption of Agile and coordination across a geographically dispersed team.

The adoption of Agile best practices led to increased quality, reduced production bugs, and more efficient team coordination.

I managed a team of eight developers to set up a modern DevOps infrastructure using AWS services. We also used Python to build the back-end APIs for their next-generation enterprise application, established automated code deployment pipelines, and migrated their current processes to a modern AWS infrastructure.

The project was successfully delivered after an eight-month period.

I managed a team of eight engineers (two front end, six back end) using React and Python to develop a QA automation framework for an enterprise data lake application.

The MVP was successfully delivered within four months and was then deployed to production.