Lukas D.

I step into unclear, stalled or complex product and delivery work, get to the real problem quickly and turn it into something a team can execute. Clients often keep me on longer because I get productive quickly, build trust across business / engineering and can take on broader ownership without adding unnecessary overhead. 10+ years across Product Management, Project / Programme Management and Business Analysis - working with Fortune 100 companies, Tier-1 banks, global enterprises and SaaS businesses. Clients typically hire me as a Product Manager / Product Owner, Project or Programme Manager, or Business Analyst. My experience across all three means I understand what happens either side of the role I'm hired for - and I can get productive quickly without weeks of onboarding. 🎯 PRODUCT MANAGEMENT I work best where a product, feature or backlog is unclear, poorly prioritised or stuck. Typical work includes: • Discovery, problem framing and MVP / feature scoping • Roadmap, backlog and prioritisation • PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria and backlog refinement • Customer / stakeholder workshops, product-engineering alignment and interim Product Management I am comfortable challenging the original request when the evidence points elsewhere. My deepest product domain is financial services but also includes hospitality/social care and pharma - with extensive exposure to regulated businesses, legacy platforms and third-party integrations. 📋 PROJECT / PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT I step in where the main problem is execution rather than product direction. Typical work includes: • Delivery plans, milestones, dependencies, risks and scope • Agile / Scrum / hybrid delivery and stakeholder reporting • Project recovery, PMO improvement, vendor coordination and distributed-team leadership I've managed distributed environments of 40+ people and programmes spanning SaaS delivery, enterprise migration and transformation. 🔍 BUSINESS ANALYSIS Business Analysis is where much of my consulting background started and remains one of my strongest skill sets. Typical work includes: • Requirements, functional specifications, user stories and UAT preparation • Current-state / future-state, BPMN, gap and impact analysis • System, API, integration and data-flow mapping • Process optimisation, business cases and options analysis I'm particularly strong where business, technology, data and regulatory requirements overlap. 🤖 PRACTICAL AI USE I use AI extensively in day-to-day Product, Project and BA work to reduce manual effort and analyse information faster. Typical use: • Turning messy meeting notes, tickets and stakeholder input into clear actions, requirements and backlog items • Using AI to challenge scope, surface gaps and stress-test user stories before they reach engineering • Producing stakeholder updates, decision logs and project documentation in a fraction of the usual time • Combining AI with Jira, Confluence, Miro, Figma and analytics tools to speed up discovery, documentation and delivery • Rapidly exploring AI-enabled product ideas, use cases and constraints before committing engineering effort I understand the failure modes too - hallucinated detail, poor source material, false confidence, security concerns and confidential-data risk. I can also help teams identify useful AI use cases, design practical workflows and support discovery and requirements for AI-enabled product features. 📈 SELECTED RESULTS • B2B analytics SaaS - took a data product from concept to MVP in 8 months; reached 20% month-on-month user growth for the first 6 months post-launch. • Global trade reporting - modelled 25+ workflows and data interfaces across seven trading desks; reduced manual effort by 15%. • Digital operations review - mapped fragmented workflows, identified duplication and hand-off issues, and built a case for $1m+ in annual savings. • ERP-to-cloud migration - managed an 18-month programme for a $2bn manufacturer; go-live within 2% of budget. • Agile delivery transformation - improved planning and team coordination, cutting the average release cycle from 12 weeks to 8. 🛠 TOOLS & METHODS Product / delivery: Jira, Confluence, Miro, Asana, MS Project, Microsoft 365, Figma Analysis / data: Signavio, Lucidchart, Visio, SQL (beginner), Grafana, Google Analytics, Looker Studio AI: ChatGPT, Claude / Claude Artifacts, GitHub Copilot, Figma AI, Miro AI, Microsoft Copilot Methods: Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, hybrid delivery, BPMN 🎓 CERTIFICATIONS & TRAINING Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) Professional Scrum Master (PSM I) PRINCE2 Practitioner Product Management & Applied Generative AI professional training