Germany

Generalist Product Management

Back-end

Project Management

Development Operations

Alumna

Monica Giambitto

Engineering Manager, Global Market Access

Mastodon

Product strategy

Communication

Collaboration

Time management

Critical-thinking

Empathy

Team player

Organisation skills

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Project management

Product roadmap

Postman

Ruby

Asana

Figma

GitHub

Jira

Miro

REST API

Linear

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

How to maintain trust, commitment, accountability deliver results while handling conflict

Avoiding common dysfunctions

How to determine what is a good balance of skill sets for your organization's needs

Building balanced teams

How to identify star candidates, evaluate technical ability, and close hires

Hiring software engineers

Decision making as a software engineer or lead - how to become better at making the right choices

Making better tech choices

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Learn essential burnout prevention techniques and replenish physical and emotional energy.

Managing burnout

Talk to people who have learned to manage their imposter syndrome.

Dealing with imposter syndrome

Navigating micro-aggression, getting paid what you are worth and finding a community.

Being a woman in tech

Strategies for maximizing your design internship or co-op program.

Getting the most out of my internship

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

How to ask for a promotion and negotiate for salary raise?

Negotiating a job offer

Get actionable feedback on your resume or portfolio.

Resume and portfolio review

Practice HR, technical and behavioural interviews with mentors.

Practice mock interviews

Talk to people who've broken into the tech industry and learn their stories.

Breaking into tech

Learn the best ways to answer technical interview questions with frameworks

Acing technical interview questions

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

Lead the Product Engineering cross functional squad to bring Kaia Health products - Kaia COPD and Kaia Back Pain - to more than 70M German, with an impact on the company bottom line of 9M€ in 2022. The team grew from 2 engineers to 7 engineers.
Both applications passed the technical vetting of BfARM, the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices under the German Healthcare Ministry, within the strict deadlines provided, thanks to team work, creative solutions, and harsh prioritization.
Acting also as interim Product Manager for the approval project between June and November 2021.

People Management
- Supervised careers of 10 engineers of multiple disciplines in 3 teams (Monetization, Training Modalities, Engineering Productivity) with high retention and high promotion rate (90%+)
- Lead and aligned team members in execution of tasks, focusing on individual engineer growth, team resilience, and positive outcomes

Engineering Leadership
- Collaborated with Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing to deliver successful product roadmap, with increased release frequency of experiments from 1 to 6 per 6 months over 1 year
- Seek out and implemented process and collaboration improvements within team and team leadership, reducing overcommitment of team by 60%
- Promoted leadership development with initiatives like EMs Fireside Chats

Technical Leadership
- Drove backend and iOS/Android app engineering strategy for cross-functional teams
- Owned company-wide scalability initiative, further decoupling SOA backend architecture, lowering endpoints response duration by 10% on average

People Management
- Supervised career growth of 10 backend engineers in 4 teams, with promotion rate of 100% and retention rate of 90%

Technical Leadership
- Evangelized further separation of backend domain in services, allowing for growth in active user base from 10k to 100k users/day
- Founded Backend Hack Days, held once a quarter, to promote creativity and exposure to foundational engineering work
- Reformed processes and communication to keep backend engineers informed of company business initiatives and to increase alignment across squads

Senior Backend Developer, I worked extensively - during the migration from a monolithic application to an SOA approach - on the Payment Service that takes care of activating our product for people purchasing through different payment providers. After the 3 months we had dedicated fulltime to this, I made sure the migration was completed while working regularly on new product development features.

During my time working on the Payment System, I established a close working relationship with the Customer Support to ensure we could have a smoother experience for their team members too, opening a permanent communication channel to share experience and knowledge on issues and the process to solve the most common user problems so that Customer Support Agent didn't have necessarily to wait for an engineer to answer their questions. We build a small "user manual" for them and a sort of news page where they could get notified about changes to the system that might affect their work.

On the side, as personal project I had a couple of rounds of an internal beginner course for learning how to program for non-engineers, both to spread knowledge but also to allow non-technical people to empathize with Engineers and their work.

Among other responsibilities, I was supporting hiring for the team I was in and for the Backend team at large.

Team Lead for the community application
Main developer for the overdraft feature of the banking application, released on Februrary 2014

In outsourcing, I was working for a local firm, studiozeropixel, since January 2012, handling maintenance for websites already online, using a range of PHP open source platforms and CMS (Joomla, Wordpress and Magento), with some system administration chores.

Most of the time, we realize both the design and the programming of dynamic web applications and websites.
I work both in collaboration with other trusted freelancers. Among our clients there are Digital Natives, Softwebdesign and a local section of Partito Democratico. Our newest projects are developed using BDD, Ruby on Rails and mongodb (among other technologies).

I worked in outsourcing for Innoteam, too. The projects I worked on revolved around the customization and extension of the PHP based CMF called eZ Publish. I took care of the customers, since May 2011, managing a little team who had to help them with technical issues and ex- tension of various websites currently online. Most of these tasks had to be carefully managed, since the websites had lots of page views.
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Some of the projects I worked on in Innoteam are: Alphatest.it and Hearst Magazine Italia websites for Elle, MarieClaire and GenteMotori magazines.

As for the web development, I am in charge for the design and the implementation, for the technology to use, the timing. As for the web design, I follow the directions given by the CEO, using my skills to achieve the wanted result.

Same as before, but without the safety net!

The internship goal was creating a prototype application in SharePoint to duplicate the characteristics of a proprietary web application in Java.

Monica Giambitto🇩🇪