ALBERT VASILE SERBAN

As a Product Owner for the Digital Access solution at a Tier 1 OEM, I lead a platform team in delivering MCAL, CDDs, and sensor and actuator functionalities, contributing to the product roadmap to meet both business and customer needs in the automotive sector

My key tasks and responsibilities include:

• Defining and refining Stories, Enablers, and Features;
• Prioritizing Stories, Enablers, and Bugs in the Agile Team's backlog;
• Ensuring the Team Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to the Development Team;
• Leading and approving the iteration plan by collaborating with the team to define delivery scope, estimates, iteration goals, and securing team commitment;
• Developing and driving the product vision and strategy;
• Coordinating content dependencies with other Value Responsible stakeholders and Agile Teams;
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams to develop high-quality products that met customer needs;

• Define Product Roadmap: Develop and maintain a strategic product roadmap for Logging & Development Support, FOTA, Remote Diagnostics, and Intrusion Detection systems, ensuring alignment with both customer needs and business goals.
• Set Clear Objectives: Define clear and measurable product objectives and success criteria that address current and future market demands within the automotive industry.
• Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams: Work closely with engineering, development, security, quality assurance, and other key stakeholders to ensure seamless execution of product features across the entire lifecycle.
• Stakeholder Communication: Provide regular updates and reports to senior leadership, addressing product performance, milestones, and any challenges related to product development and deployment.
• Develop Logging Solutions: Oversee the design and implementation of logging systems that capture, store, and analyze critical data from automotive systems to support development, debugging, and compliance.
  - Support Development Lifecycle: Provide tools and resources to aid the development team in monitoring, debugging, and troubleshooting vehicle systems.
• Manage FOTA Solutions: Lead the product development of FOTA capabilities to enable secure and reliable remote software updates for ECUs in vehicles.
• Ensure Security and Compliance: Work with security teams to ensure FOTA systems are highly secure, ensuring data integrity and preventing unauthorized access during the update process.
• Lead Remote Diagnostics Development: Develop and refine features that enable remote diagnosis of vehicle health, faults, and performance, reducing the need for manual troubleshooting and improving the speed of issue resolution.
• Implement Diagnostic Tools: Integrate UDS (Unified Diagnostic Services) and other diagnostic protocols to facilitate real-time remote diagnostic capabilities.
• Lead Intrusion Detection Initiatives: Develop and manage intrusion detection systems to ensure the security of automotive networks and data. This involves detecting and responding to cybersecurity threats or breaches in real-time.

• Ensure alignment of performance goals with overall product objectives and customer expectations.
• Work closely with engineering teams across multiple domains (e.g., hardware, software, vehicle systems) to identify performance bottlenecks and propose solutions.
• Collaborate with global teams to ensure consistency and alignment in performance standards across different regions and platforms.
• Lead the identification of performance KPIs and ensure systems meet or exceed these targets.
• Lead efforts in optimizing hardware and software to improve overall system performance, ensuring minimal latency, fast response times, and reduced resource consumption.
• Oversee performance tuning of real-time operating systems (RTOS), communication protocols (CAN, Ethernet, etc.), and multi-core/multi-CPU systems.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams and junior engineers within the performance domain.
• Promote best practices for performance-related tasks across teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Communicate complex performance data and insights to internal and external stakeholders, including executives, partners, and customers.
• Report on performance progress, risks, and mitigation plans to senior management.
• Balance multiple priorities and ensure that performance objectives are achieved within specified project constraints.

• Create and maintain CM product structures and strategies
• Analyze Customer Specifications related to the SW Project;
• Develop and maintain the SW Project Plan, in line with the overall Project Milestones and KPIs (close collaboration with System Engineering and HW Teams);
• Coordinate and monitor the activities of the SW Project Team;
• Ensure the fulfillment of the development process and optional tailoring of the activities;
• Ensure regular reporting on SW project status and implement corrective measures when necessary;
• Manage and optimize the use of resources within the SW Project (human, material and time);
• Close interdisciplinary collaboration: System Engineering, HW, Testing;
• Provide technical support for colleagues and mentoring for new employees;

On top of current set of responsibilities I also did:

• Integration of SFD2 module (PVD - protected vehicle diagnosis) in a non-autosar environment (hybrid architecture containing AUTOSAR stack modules like DCM, CAN, CANTp, NVRam, DEM), configuration of E2E protected DIDs, support for testing and validation using ODIS, debug activities for cryptographic material;

Product owner for three teams and Product Manager Lifecycle, Development support, Time manager applications in Mercedes-Benz Telematics service project

Responsibilities:

• Understand customer requirements and expose the customer vision and needs to the team;
• Ensure Product completeness from customer perspective
• Develop and communicate the program vision and roadmap of the product, in close collaboration with System Engineers and Architects;
• Manage and prioritize backlog of the teams and program backlog for the product;
• Participate in PI Planning;
• Plan delivery dates (E-Releases) for the features and share it in Feature Roll out Plan;
• Continuous collaboration with System Architects and Engineers to understand the current & upcoming work, to quote CRs;
• Participate in Demos and assess the feedback from customer for further improvements;
• Drive topics across projects and disciplines;
• Perform review and inspect the code using Git Gerrit;

Outsourcing company that provides expertise for automotive products, with high knowledge in embedded systems

Function owner for Diagnostic stack in ADAS department

• Organize meetings to establish a healthy communication with customer and maintain a good track of their needs
• Micromanagement activities
• Organize team assigned for Diagnostic issues and tasks and tracking status of their work
• Provide support for System and Software teams
• Provide support to Product Owner for planning releases
• Provide estimations for amount of work needed to fulfill tasks
• Perform review and inspect the code using GitLab;
• Outsourcing company that provides expertise for automotive products, with high knowledge in embedded systems

• Taking the full responsibility for entire toolset developed internal (in my office area) using Java and C#, offer support(in using them or to other people who try to develop tools) and maintenance of them, management activities and development for embedded systems
• Taking full responsibility of CAN - monitoring frames - define new signals and messages according to client specification - create, edit, delete configurations for nodes in Config Tool (COM STACK) - mentoring for new software function responsible on CAN - analyze issues from customer, provide feedback and reviews the current implementation of other software function responsible - analyze CAN conformity tests reports - from Elektrobit testing reports - testing CAN according to client requirements, conformity tests based on specification
• Analyze and implement customer requirements which implied: - diagnosis services (read and write), code, automated tests in CAPL - exterior lights module for Nissan project - VFB configurations for different software components - Tresos Elektrobit configurations for MemStack modules (NvM, FEE, FaFEE) - define, review and rework documents such as design documents, tests documents, tests report documents which resulted from my work packages or other software function responsible
• Matlab experience and activities: Generate code based on client models, integrate the code, test the code using module tests and integration tests according to V-Cycle - Review module tests report (automated tests with SWATT tool - Continental internal tool) and provide feedback based on failed tests and model analysis - Review other software function responsible work packages (Matlab generated code, tests) - Mentoring of new comers in order to be able to generate, integrate and test Matlab software components
• C# experience: Develop new tools for different activities or add new features to existing ones, such as: - checking diagnosis requirement specification based on client files (Excel sheets with data which can be analyzed in order to find out if services - read and write - have the proper data type, size and default values) - CAPL automated tests for Diagnosis based on specification file from client
• I minimized the amount of time required to test entire list of read services by generating automated tests in CAPL
• I minimized the amount of time required to check the Diagnosis specification file from customer in order to see if data type, size and default values are good

• Develop new tools and improve those which were developed by internal team, using programming languages such as Java, C# and implement requirements from client using C embedded
• Java: Improving internal Diagnosis code generator (UDS standard), for read and write services, by redesigning the code of C modules
• Files generated by Java Code generator were C files which were integrated in project
• C#: Developed a tool which parse through entire sandbox directory to find dependencies between files with their working version, using Integrity Client for version management of files and put them in an Excel report (The target was to see which files were included in C modules and which files were included in header files from C modules and also their version)
• This was necessary in order to have a historical traceability between the files used in SWATT (Internal module test tool developed by Continental team)
• C: First steps in CAN development, monitoring frames, define messages and signals based on customer requirements
• The redesigned code of Diagnosis (Read and Write service functions) helped to improve the consumption of ROM memory by 72% overall