Emma Dobrescu
Manager development and UX
Building happy teams since 2015
About me
I have 15 years experience in the IT industry, 4 years building and coaching development teams as manager and 11 years building user experiences as a UX designer.
As a development team manager with UX experience, I help teams become user focused and effective in achieving their goals through my empathy, my knowledge of Agile and DevOps, my ability to challenge the status quo and my passion for creating customer value.
My leadership style is coach/servant leader, focusing on helping people grow, removing obstacles, encouraging collaboration and creating autonomy.
Experience
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Development team leader - various teams, Booking.com, Amsterdam
November 2015 - November 2019
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- Built vision and collaboration in multiple development teams, taking them from forming and storming to the norming and performing stages
- Managed frequent change and kept the teams engaged
- Promoted collaboration and alignment between teams, removing impediments and managing stakeholders
- Supported the technical and cultural integration in 2 M&As
- Coached and provided feedback to team members in 1-on-1 conversations, set expectations, discussed career development and performed appraisals
- Facilitated teams discussions and agreements, planning and retrospectives
- Defined teams strategy, vision and objectives
- Created and implemented strategy for remote work
- Managed staffing needs, actively involved in hiring
- Mentored and managed new team leaders
Email marketing team
- Onboarded, mentored and managed other team leaders
- Successfully delivered email campaign programs for a new product integration resulting in 12% conversion increase on desktop and mobile platforms
- Created and launched an onboarding program for new team leads
Front-end team
- Led the research, development and launch of a new business segment for desktop and mobile
- Filled in the Product owner role for a month of vacancy, analysing data, shifting product direction, setting business objectives, backlog creation and A/B testing strategy
- Onboarded and supported 3 product owners that rotated in the team through the year
Hotel extranet team
- Launched the optimisation of the hotel extranet for small properties, reducing contact calls and increasing engagement on both desktop and mobile
- Led development of invoicing and prepayment options for small properties, reducing customer cancellations
- Overseen the optimisation of the property signup process, with a 60% time reduction for properties
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UX designer, Booking.com, Amsterdam
June 2012 - November 2015
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- Designed, coded and analysed A/B tests for the desktop, mobile and email campaigns
- Designed the messaging flow between properties and guests
- Designed and various pages on the hotel extranet (reviews, FAQ, accounts) and increased property engagement
- Redesigned the account creation flow for property management
- Overhauled the design and usability of the Two Factor Authentication for property accounts on web and mobile app
- User testing and user interviews, created user journey mappings
- UX designer roles, various companies, New York - US, Paris - France, Iasi - Romania
2005 - 2012
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- Worked in various startups and large companies around the world like Ariane Systems, Publishers Clearing House, Zootoo, RedCats, ECommerce Partners, Artinfo
- Designed and implemented e-commerce websites for desktop and mobile,marketing emails, promotional applications and rewards programs, web and kiosk check-in/check-out solutions for hotels, shopping carts, product search and filtering
- Organised user research and Google Analytics insights
- Collaborated with other designer, developers, copywriters and product owners
- Proficient in CSS, HTML and jQuery, template integration, Git, QA
- SKILLS
- Team Leadership
- Team building
- Career Development
- UX design & research
- A/B testing
- Coaching
- Remote teams
- Performance Management
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Conflict Management
- Agile Software Development
- Process Improvement
- CI/CD
- Data Driven Development
- EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS
- BA in English and Italian language and literature
- Professional Scrum Master Certification, Scrum.org
- LANGUAGES
- English
- French
- Italian
- Romanian
- REFERENCES
- Available upon request