Porto Metropolitan Area
Angel (25+ startups) and Community-driven investor focused on early-stage Startups (AngelsWay) • Entrepreneur at heart (startup co-founder) • Software Engineer turned to Business Leadership with international Project and Product Management experience • INSEAD Executive education with the Product Management Executive Programme (PMEP) • Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering from FEUP (Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto) in Portugal • Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) + Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certified by Scrum.org • Track record of helping organizations improve their processes, systems and people with methods of Continuous Improvement, Agile, Lean and Kaizen. César Duarte is a seasoned tech product leader and executive with an engineering and startup background that helps organizations to embrace change and build great products via strong technical, business and strategic thinking skills in a responsible and direct way. Leading great people, projects and products is a passion that he has the pleasure of been doing since early in his career, always striving to learn new and better ways of making sure the product/service is delivered with quality, on time and within budget and scope. César is a software engineer turned to business and management with international experience, holds a Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering from FEUP (Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto) in Portugal. Specialties/Interests: Product Leadership, Product Thinking, Innovation, Business and Strategic Planning and Thinking, Business Management, Software Engineering, Process Improvement, Lean IT and Kaizen, ( Agile ) Project and Process Management, complemented with technical skills. If you want to know more feel free to reach out using the contacts presented on this page.
- Stepped up to a challenge in Tech Leadership to rebuild the Product vision and strategy, coming back to a place where I once was successful as a Senior Product Manager by delivering the last big product to go live worldwide in all markets. - Worked directly with all senior management and other stakeholders to reshape the overall business with a global and overarching business transformation using BPR (Business Process Re-engineering), fundamentally rethinking the way work happens with ESG considerations, leading to significant measurable cost reduction, business process improvement, and increased user satisfaction.
Took over the big challenge of moving forward our VARO Digital Innovation Center initiatives with ESG framework in mind, from the RPA team (Robotic Process Automation) and Data Science team to MVP/prototypes/experiments with new ideas and technologies (like Blockchain and Smart Contracts, Virtual/Augmented Reality Glasses, Time Series and others). - Established the RPA Center of Excellence, effectively introducing the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Governance model that guides our decisions and interaction with other teams and processes of VARO to ensure delivery of value to stakeholders. - Establishing Business Intelligence as a success case of Agile transformation within VARO: including setting up a new prioritization and approval process based on Quarterly Prioritization process (with stakeholders and upper management), making it clear how we will add value to the business in the coming quarters. Worked together with Engineering manager on a strategy to streamline DevOps practices thus reducing the lead times and aiming for production-deployed usable features in our two weeks sprints. - Actively coached our product owners into being more independent and really owners of their products and solutions, guiding them on their development in the craft of Product Management (and agile Product Ownership).
Learn the main achievements my team and I accomplished just below this quick intro of VARO. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year VARO Energy safely supplies fuels to our local and international customers where they are needed, and when they are needed - with locations across North Western Europe, we're working together to find new solutions that drive our business forward and empower us to challenge industry standards in today's downstream market. Achievements with our BI and Data Analytics team: - In less than 1 year, together with the improvements stated below, helped our team to increase by more than 30% the YOY active users (2x increase of 2019 numbers) and reach of Business Intelligence within the company, effectively bringing several million dollars (exact number is confidential) in benefits to VARO and our stakeholders. - Actively coached the product owners into being more independent and really owners of their solutions, guiding the POs on their development in the craft of Product Management (and agile Product Ownership). - Establishing BI Team as a success case of Agile transformation within VARO: including setting up a new prioritization and approval process based on Quarterly Prioritization process (with stakeholders and upper management), making it clear how we will add value to the business in the coming quarters. - Raising awareness of the organization to Agile with a session in the digital academy with JJ Sutherland (CEO of ScrumInc), several presentations on our agile processes to the CIO and the rest of the IT team and supporting other teams with platforms which can support agile processes – Confluence, Jira and Trello. - Worked together with BI Engineering manager on a strategy to streamline DevOps practices thus reducing the lead times and aiming for production-deployed usable features in our two weeks sprints. - Assisting Digitalization and Innovation efforts, managed one POC with ETH Zurich.