Alina C.

I help teams figure out what to build, why users need it, and how to get it delivered. A little less chaos. A little more clarity. I’m Alina, a Senior Project Manager and Product Owner with 10 years of experience across startups and enterprise projects, including work supporting Indeed, Unilever and Snap Inc. I’m also unusually fond of ClickUp. Well, we all have our quirks, don't we? You might have an idea that needs testing, a backlog where everything is somehow “high priority,” or a team doing good work without a clear picture of what happens next. That’s where I can help. My work connects product discovery with practical project management: understanding the problem, making informed decisions and helping the team turn them into something people can use. Here’s what we can work on together: • Product discovery and user research User interviews, market and competitor research, user personas and customer journey mapping to understand needs, challenge assumptions and shape product hypotheses. Then, focused user testing to learn what holds up and what needs another look. • Product planning and requirements Product roadmap planning, MVP scope and backlog prioritization. I translate business needs and user insights into user stories, acceptance criteria and functional requirements, giving the team a clear understanding of what to build and why. • Project management and delivery Milestones, dependencies, risk management and stakeholder communication across distributed teams. I use Agile approaches, including Scrum and Kanban, to keep work visible, surface decisions early and support delivery. • User feedback, UAT and adoption Usability testing, user acceptance testing, feedback synthesis and actionable recommendations. I also create documentation and deliver training to help users feel comfortable with a new product or process. • Workflows and team documentation Process improvement, useful dashboards, SOPs, onboarding guides and knowledge hubs. The goal is to make answers easier to find and reduce the number of times someone has to ask, “Where does this live?” At Indeed, I combined project management with product ownership for internal tools and workflow improvements. At Unilever, my focus was project delivery, UAT, documentation and handover for an enterprise R&D data product. On Upwork, I’ve earned $500K+ across 7,900+ hours, with a 100% Job Success Score and Expert-Vetted status. My client feedback reflects what matters to me: clear communication, thoughtful collaboration and bringing structure to complicated work. I work with Jira, ClickUp, Asana, Notion, Azure DevOps, Trello, Figma, Miro, Slack and Confluence. I’m comfortable adapting to your existing setup and helping improve it where needed. We can work together through ongoing project management and product ownership, or start with a focused discovery, requirements, backlog or workflow project. Send me a short note about what you’re building and where you’re getting stuck. You don’t need a perfectly written brief. Helping make sense of it is part of my job.