American University in Bulgaria

First English Language School, Sofia

Working on something new 👨‍🍳

MyPass Global

Director of Product

UntilNow Ventures

Advisor

Shopify Apps et al.

Co-Founder

UntilNow

Head of Product

Airtasker

Director of Product Management

VP Product

Product Lead

Senior Product Manager

At SiteMinder the customer sits at the center of everything we do, and I had the pleasure to work on the cross-functional team that introduced our process for collecting, triaging and prioritising feedback from tens of thousands of customers, which is used across our product family.

Collaborating with the CEO, and CTO to devise the strategy and roadmap themes for two of our products, I then work on the solution definition and delivery with two feature teams consisting of product owners, developers, QAs, and product designers. We aim to ship fast, iterate, and improve. We fail fast, but not often.

Product managers at SM are responsible for sharing and evangelising product strategy and a feature's value proposition with Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. We aim to educate and empower Support to not only answer questions, but own the product, manage customer expectations, and evangelise it.

While we're all excited about cool tech we use to solve problems (Node, Vue, Kubernetes, and Elasticsearch among others), we're in love with the problem itself. Some of the exciting development challenges we've tackled recently were the introduction of seamless payment processing in our web application via Stripe Connect, as well as rich hotel guest profiles, powered by swift hotel guest search and segmentation tool.

SiteMinder

As a Product Owner, I was responsible for turning product roadmap themes into tactical plans and deliverables, taking features from inception through to production.

Collaborated with UX and Engineering to define and deliver the MVP for SiteMinder’s first ever mobile application. Our user research and usability testing paid off, with over 50% user adoption among our iOS users in the first two months, and thousands of monthly active users.

When given the opportunity, I'm quite excited to use Sketch, InVision, and pen and paper to create wireframes, then work with our product designer to polish these and turn them into high-fidelity prototypes.

We measure user engagement, and gather behavioural insights using Google Analytics,
Heap and Hotjar.

Our team piloted Intercom for in-app announcements for releases and feedback gathering.

Product Manager

Reporting to the CEO, I look after the Datalicious product portfolio, which consists of a Tag Management System (SuperTag), and a cross-channel predictive analytics and segmentation platform (OptimaHub). I am responsible for turning vision into strategy and a clear roadmap. A big fan of the lean startup methodology, I try and use lean canvas as often as possible to define the product and major features to be built.

I work with a distributed team of front-end, back-end, and mobile developers based in Sydney, the Philippines, Poland, Greece and Germany. Keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging, and we use lots of tools to help us with that, such as Trello, Confluence, GitHub and Slack. Agile is the company's DNA, but we've made some steps towards formalizing it, introducing bi-weekly planning and sprints, morning stand-ups (I admit "morning"​ is a bit arbitrary with that many time zones) and user stories as requirements. Our products are SaaS, so naturally we make use of some of the more popular cloud and big data stacks out there (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud Services).

I work closely with the Marketing and Sales teams, writing blog posts for new features, providing training, and recording educational videos. I do product demos for prospects, and help with the solution design as required throughout the sales cycle. Product pricing is part of my responsibilities, and I've been working with the Sales team on introducing a simple and transparent model to easily on-board prospects.

While staying focused on our product and customers, I keep competitors on our radar by conducting on-going research, and identifying key challengers early on.

Datalicious Pty Ltd

Product Manager (first product hire)

Perform Market Analysis - Identify competitive and alternative offerings. Assess strengths 
and weaknesses and develop a strategy for winning. 

Maintain Product Roadmap - Illustrate the vision, key releases, deliverables and themes for the
product. 

Develop Product Strategy - Through the creation and maintenance of lean canvases, define the product and major features to be built.

Facilitate Product Planning - Collaborate with engineering to spike potential features and ideas. Push the boundaries of existing products through active use. Iterate on prototypes with Interaction Designers and engineering. Create feature and user stories to illustrate customer problems and needs in story form to put problems in context.

Telerik

Did business analysis in the team responsible for the design, implementation and ongoing improvement of internal (CRM, Licensing, and Provisioning systems) and client-facing systems (Online Shopping Cart, Client Profile/My Account, Purchase Management). 
My work involved gathering requirements from stakeholders (Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers) to define scope and design of requested features, as well as estimation and team effort planning together with the team lead and product manager. 
I was involved in the research, evaluation and integration with various third-party services (external payment services, marketing automation software, public databases).

Business System Analyst

Junior Business System Analyst

I was part of the team responsible for the implementation of the Application Processing System for 'Dell Financial Services' Europe. Work included design and implementation of segmentation rules and decision trees for stored procedures, system integration with a number of European credit bureaux (Dun and Bradstreet, CRIF, Banque de France), unit, integration and end-to-end testing of the solution, as well as release management i.e. promotion of new features to Development -> Testing -> UAT -> Production environments.

Experian

Solutions Analyst

Work on design, implementation and validation of Application Processing Systems and Decision Making solutions across the EMEAI region. 

- Analysis of client data
- Design and build client specific solutions to meet agreed requirements
- Work on-site & remotely with client’s team to implement and configure customer-specific solutions
- Test built solutions against specification to ensure they meet requirements & quality standards

Business Analyst

Deloitte

Tax Consultant Trainee

Nico Alexiev