Mihaela Danila

HeyBlu is a startup company founded by eMAG, having the main purpose of offering clients the possibility to pay in installments for a selection of products from the marketplace.

In terms of strategy, the company set the goal of providing a highly performant solution which is able to sustain a large amount of clients during peaks (ex: Black Friday event) and, simultaneously, increase product adoption.

Given these objectives, my responsibilities in the role of Product Manager converged towards internalizing all the external services with an impact on performance and building a better experience for the clients.

The steps I followed for achieving the previously mentioned goals:

• Collect requirements from Legal & Compliance, Risk and Financial departments
• Redesign the old flow in order to build a smoother experience for the end user while covering all the regulatory aspects (consents to be collected, Know Your Customer flow, data archiving etc)
• Since the flow required the integration with external partners, I facilitated the communication with them and shared our technical needs. Among the integrations, I should mention Onfido, a top rated vendor for Know Your Customer process, Alfatrust - for qualified electronic signatures and Starbyte for the integration with financial insistutions like ANAF and BC.
• Once all the technical needs were collected, I draw the architectural diagram of the flow, describing the communication between the components & the APIs structure. The diagram served as a starting point for the application development.
• In my day to day work I combined both technical topics (refinements with the development team, write technical stories, helped the overcome impediments) and business topics (decisions for improving customer conversion rate, new initiatives, OKRs achievements etc).

As a result, all the efforts put in the application proven their success as the system's performance significantly improved while the overall customer conversion increased from 20% to 35%, a huge achievement for the company.

• Led a strategic team of Nike, one of Endava's clients and the world's largest athletic apparel company
• Involved in the adoption of an internal framework across all Nike's strategic products, which aimed to standardize their support and delivery processes
• Collaborated with cross functional teams to define and prioritize product features in order to comply with the internal framework's standards
• Communicated the roadmap to the teams, ensuring that everybody has the same understanding of the scope and desired outcome
• Utilized Agile methodologies, more specifically Scrum, in order to manage the product backlog, plan sprints and track progress.

• Product Owner for two teams handling the Authentication & Consent solutions. These products were a vital component of a global platform built by ING, aiming to serve clients all over the world.
• Actively involved in defining the Product Roadmap, together with the Product Area Lead and other Product owners from the platform.
• Considering the large number of stakeholders, quarterly alignment sessions were needed in order to share the delivery status of the features, present the product's enhancements and discuss future requirements.
• Organised and facilitated all the sessions needed for a feature cycle - elicit requirements from stakeholders, design, refinement, planning, development, technical walkthrough, release, maintenance.
• Closely discuss with the architect and the technical lead engineer in order to refine the solution and cover all the scenarios.
• Built a strong, collaborative way of working with the development team, always keeping them aligned with the product's priorities and business requirements.
• Used Scrum methodology in order to manage the product backlog. During the refinements, I was in charge of providing the development team with all the technical details for building a feature, such as the business context, proposed architectural solution, application's diagram flow.
• Maintained documentation pages designated to each feature - added event logs, meeting conclusions, action points, open questions.
• Prioritized the backlog, created user stories, defined the acceptance criteria for each of them.

• Voluntarily adopted the role of Scrum Master in the team
• Organized and facilitated ceremonies (daily, retrospective, sprint review, planning)
• Actively involved in the sprint planning by determining the capacity of the squad and creating stories for the upcoming sprint
• Synchronizing with the Product Owner and communicating the impediments
• Measuring the performance of the team using internal tools and defining action points based on the results

• Developed various APIs, in the Fraud & Cybersecurity area from ING Tech, which served as means of authentication and consent for Belgium and Netherlands clients.
• Lead engineer on two APIs - the first API served as an authentication and consent mean by using an external party (Itsme), the second one consisted in a solution for digital signature of the documents through an external party (Connective).
• Involved in the full cycle of the projects - alignment with business regarding requirements, design phase, planning, development, deployment, improvements and maintenance.
• Worked with Java as main programming language and developed microservices by using an ING internal framework based on Spring Boot.
• Actively involved in the migrations, first towards Ansible (write playbooks, perform deployments) and afterwards to Azure DevOps (migrate repositories, manage artifacts, define build and release pipelines, interact with Azure Key Vault, setup dashboards, semantic versioning).