Natalie Mandriko

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NATALIE MANDRIKO
Product Manager, Remote

I manage products B2B/B2C using data and collaborating
across departments to discover and deliver UX that are:
valuable and usable for your customers,
that are viable for your business.

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Review my resume

"I have engaged in many design sessions with Natalie on technical tradeoffs and engineering best practices during which we made complex tradeoff decisions between product requirements, delivery timelines, and engineering capabilities."
General Manager - WeatherBug at GroundTruth
Eddie Dingels
"Natalie has mastered the creative startup approach and combined it with her deep experience in agile processes to deliver outcomes clients are excited to see."
Chairman of the Board at EastBanc Technologies
Wolf Ruzicka
"Natalie was instrumental in helping us organize and conduct roadmap and strategy workshops, align senior leadership, gather and incorporate critical feedback from stakeholders.

Natalie's excellent facilitation skills and techniques as well as her ability to tease out and refine desired outcomes was instrumental."
Engineering Manager at Kroger Technology
John Heckler
"Natalie Mandriko is blessed with a strategic mind and the talent of helping others sort through the clutter of ideas to design solutions and design a roadmap to success...
and she does it all with the greatest ease.

Natalie has admirable field-related talent and skills. Working with her is a true pleasure!"
Founder & CEO at Ealai, inc
Zina Mahayni

DISCOVERY
is a design process that defines MVP:
Why business needs it
Who will use it
What we will build

API DevEx: Designing API management and API products at Fortune 50

Fortune 50 is undergoing a digital transformation from a retail company into a tech company that is happened to be in retail.
With over 400 000 employees, this behemoth is challenged by Amazon to innovate quicker.
The company is getting ready to unlock innovation through Open API initiative.

In 2018, over six months period I had ran four Open API initiatives to prepare a customer for API product offering:

API management platform selection: Kong vs Apigee
Defining API management MVP (delivered in 4 months)
PIloting Dr. Amancio Bouza's API product management approach
Facilitating API Governance

Lessons learned:
Leading innovative projects at Fortune 50 requires a different type of skills.
It's more about persuasion and leadership than knowing technology and design process.

Play with Open API

MVP definition: Simplifying B2B SaaS startup product

SociallyDetermined platform helps healthcare organizations to implement efficient public health campaigns by providing hyper-local comprehensive social determinants of health landscape.

Getting a first enterprise customer for a VC funded startup is #1 priority for MVP.
I have joined the team as UX/BA to help them to simplify MVP UI requirements for a first target customer to deliver a valuable and usable product faster.

In six weeks - a usual timeframe for my discoveries - I have reduced complexity of the screens by cutting down a functional scope by:

Defining key customer's decision makers priorities
Focusing only on one user persona who will interact with the product
Outlining a "happy path" userflow

Lessons learned:
You don't speed your delivery up by throwing more "bodies" into a development sprint. You can make it faster to the market, if you increase your focus and reduce MVP scope.

Check the product out

Product concept creation: From Design Thinking into Lean Startup

MommyHelper - Two awards winner: OpenIDEO, TechStars Startup Weekend. The project had started as a design thinking initiative, after been recognized by healthcare champions - UCB, SutterHealth - got transformed into a social venture.
A product is incubated inside a social enterprise that I co-founded - Motherhood.Design - an incubator that leverages a community of designers, strategists and product makers to build a marketplace for maternal services.

I led the design community through:

Product discovery - to ensure customer and business value in the product concept
Partnership strategy - to secure distribution channels and build unfair advantage based on brand and strategic partnerships
Distributed cross-functional team building- to define lean processes for effective collaboration

Lessons learned:
UX Research and UX Design processes don't have to go by the book.
Small dedicated cross-functional team is able to speed the discovery process up to hit the delivery phase faster.

Get to know this startup

DELIVERY
Engineers - are extraordinary performers when they have:
Scope that is clearly defined
Agile (Scrum/Kanban) process that is adapted to their context
DevOps pipeline automated (whenever possible)

Identity Management System

Earth Networks has over 10 B2B products that serve real-time weather data, including in-cloud lightning detection.
Following one of the greatest engineering principle - "do not over-engineer" - the company was building each product with its own users database to get started with.

As the company's products had matured, it became clear it's time to unify identity management across the product lines to:

streamline user management
provide self-serve subscription management to the customers
promote cross-sale

I led a hybrid (remote and on-site) team from discovery to successful implementation of:

Identity management system
Customer portal
API management platform integration

Technologies used: AWS, Azure, .Net, Javascript

Try this product

WMATA: Enterprise-grade Safety Management System

In June 2009 Washington Metro had faced a safety crisis after a deadly crash on the red line.

The National Transportation Safety Board had ordered to implement organization wide safety management system to:

monitor train and bus safety incidents
analyze safety issues
implement measurements to improve safety

I have joined an implementation team as a back-end software engineer and later got promoted to lead the team from the first production release to organization-wide migration of the system that includes:

Enterprise portal
APIs
BI portal
High Availability SQL

Technologies: Sharepoint 2007, 2010, MS SQL, BI.

Understand my migration approach

NASDAQ OMX: Proof of concept for Directors Desk

NASDAQ OMX had acquired Directors Desk in 2007- a board meeting management tool that improves communication between board members.

Microsoft and NASDAQ OMX had developed a partnership to improve Directors Desk UX.
In 2012 Microsoft was getting ready to introduce a new paradigm of SharePoint development - SharePoint Add-in Model and NASDAQ OMX Directors Desk was a perfect candidate tho showcase new technology.

I led a team to deliver a POC (proof of concept) in 3 months to showcase the technology at SharePoint 2012 Conference in Las Vegas.
After the showcase, our team had continued to work on the new product to release it to the customers of NASDAQ OMX Directors Desk.

Technologies: SharePoint Online, SharePoint Add-in (Apps) 2013

View NASDAQ SharePoint Showcase

ABOUT MY IT CAREER

Strong software engineering background with ever-evolving
design, management, and analytics skills

Review my resume

PRODUCT SCALE EXPERIENCE

Acquisition, Conversion, LTV, Retention, Revenue - this is what I care about.

Learning and Practicing:

Analytics
Data-Driven decision making
Advertising

Managing partnership programs to build effective distribution channels with partners in Media, Entertainment, Mobile carrier.

Within the first 3 months enabled attribution flow to unlock a distribution channel to reach 70 M people a year.

Company: WeatherBug owned by GroundTruth

Startup Customer Discovery Experience

Co-Founding startups to gain experience in Lean Startup.
Lessons learned:

The product should solve the problem in the top 3 in the customers' list
The company exists to solve customers' problems. Are we solving problems that customers are willing to pay for?
The biggest company's asset is people

Awards: OpenIDEO, TechStars Startup Weekend

Companies: Distributed Success, Motherhood.Design

Enterprise B2B Consulting experience

Executed Enterprise Discovery and Delivery projects for clients: from tiny startups to Fortune 50.

Delivered greenfield enterprise-grade multi-cloud solutions:

Portals
Identity
API Management

Discoveries brought over $1M revenue for delivery scope.
Average client retention over past 10 years: ~2 years.

Company: EastBanc Technologies
Clients: Kroger Technology, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Earth Networks, NASDAQ, WMATA, Advisory Board

Natalie Mandriko