Marius Lobontiu Email & Phone Number

London, England, Gb

Product Vision: Leading a multi-product strategy and roadmaps, setting goals and KPIs, both internally and jointly with bank partners. Always working back from the ideal customer experience, supported by data. Team Development and Leadership: Building out the Product Management, BA, CX, Data and Product Marketing teams in line with company growth, going from under 20 to 100+ employees. Direct ongoing management of these teams, implementing and adapting industry-standard Agile processes. Execution: Delivering multiple successful bank grade PCI DSS compliant products: B2C (Consumer app and web dashboard), B2B (APIs, data streams, analytics and management portals, loyalty rewards engine), B2B2C (customer-facing card linked loyalty). B2B customers (retailers) saw an uplift in retail sales of £4M incremental revenues in 12 months. Extensive experience with product and technical integrations into complex environments (retailers, banks, payment schemes, acquirers, POS and PED providers, loyalty and CRM providers).Product Culture: Successfully shaping Bink into a product-led business focused on cross-functional collaboration. Working closely with the CTO, VP of Engineering, Finance and Sales. Navigating and maintaining a uniquely delicate balance of stakeholder management imperatives, between client retailers, bank partners and internal product objectives.Held primary responsibility for creating and leading exec-level pitches for key clients, partners and investors, due to extensive experience in an agency environment. Successful client pitches include ASDA, Costa, Superdrug, ASOS, TGI Fridays, Itsu, Leon, Stonegate Pub Group. Successful bank pitches include Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Emirates NBD.

Direct responsibility over 3 product teams, building 5 products including the core payment linking engine with its transaction matching component, a multi-platform mobile app, client management and analytics dashboards, B2B integration APIs and loyalty management software.Managing the full product life cycle from ideation to research, market fit, development, delivery and ongoing maintenance and expansion.Leading R&D exploratory innitiatives alongside CTO and a dedicated cross-functional team. Creating working POCs for payments innovations and new at-till experiences in close collaboration with leading retailers and payment rails partners.

London, England, Gb

Responsible for the restaurant-facing bookings dashboard for 13,000 restaurants across 12 countries.- Working with the Head of Product on discovery, prototyping, testing and releases.- CX Research - reviewing analytics data, conducting interviews with stakeholders and customers.- UX Design - wireframing, interactive prototypes, information architecture, user journey mapping- UI Design - delivering final designs that are consistent with the product's UI kit.- User testing - on and off-site testing with customers and key stakeholders. - Documentation - creating a clear and structured Confluence space for the use of the wider product team, designers and developers, acting as a single repository for all Product decisions, research, CX patterns etc.

Ascot, Berkshire, Gb

Hybrid Design and Product role in a small startup building an SME loyalty platform with customer and retailer facing mobile and tablet apps. After rapid growth through a local market saturation strategy, MyGravity was acquired in 2016 by Loyalty Angels.• Conducted UX research via stakeholder workshops, on-site observation, user interviews, competition research, guerrilla testing, data analysis and A/B testing.• Created and tested information architecture, wireframes and interactive prototypes.• Created user personas for both business clients and end-users and set up a group of alpha testers.• Managed the implementation of my designs by a development team based in China.• Defined and prioritized multi-platform roadmaps and MVP releases.• Worked closely with the CTO to define and manage feature development sprints in an agile environment.• Created and maintained a product documentation living wiki, linked to Jira epics and stories.• Created an SEO-driven public website, with custom SEM landing pages across different audience segments.

Canary Wharf, London, Gb

Product and Customer Experience mentor for the fintech cohort of the Level 39 startup accelerator in Canary Wharf, led by EY.

London, Gb

Enternships is a job platform used by over 5000 companies in 20+ countries. As part of the acquisition of Youny, I joined Enternships as a UX Designer, and transitioned into a product management role. Within two months of the launch, the new platform saw a 40% increase in active users and was highlighted as a tech innovation success story at the World Economic Forum in Davos.• Led the complete overhaul of the platform (new features, new backend, new design) in a hybrid UX – Product Management role.• Researched the new features and implemented a beta testing program with end-users and business customers.• Created and tested the new information architecture, user journeys and wireframes.• Created an applicant tracking system for employers with features that included: candidate tagging and grouping, comment-based collaboration on reviewing applications, direct communication with applicants and an automated ranking system based on an algorithm that quantifies skills and previous experience (IP from Youny).• Had an active role in partnership negotiations with the Mozilla Foundation and government agencies HEFCE and UCAS to integrate their data streams into the Enternships algorithm.• Worked closely with an SEO agency to optimize the platform, from Information Architecture and key user journeys to individual page layouts, content structure and semantic markup.

Co-founder, product lead and designer of Youny, a start-up digital learning platform aimed at connecting students around data-driven, course-based academic tutoring and collaboration.With 3k+ active users in the closed beta and signed partnerships with UCL, LSE and Imperial College, Youny was folded into Enternships.com as an acquihire in September 2012.

Ro

UX and UI design for web, as part of a small Agile team. Clients included major real estate developers, industrial manufacturers and national retail chains.

InfinityArt Studio is a boutique design agency focused on creative projects. As part of a design team of five, I worked for international clients based in the US, Canada, Switzerland and the EU. Our team won three Favorite Website Awards.

Agency / contract work on over 100 projects (apps, websites, digital products), Progressed from UI to UX to Product Design. Clients include the Mayor of London, British Council, Manchester Review, Polistas.

Ma, Digital Culture And Society

Master Of Arts (Ma), Literary Studies

Ba, English