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Summary

Senior professional with 20 years of experience across fintech products, IT governance and leadership. Passionate, rooted in lean-agile values, focused on organizational structure and culture, based in Prague, CZ.

FAST CV FACTS
• first decade: TECHNOLOGY, developer, scrum master, project manager
• second decade: PRODUCT & IT GOVERNANCE, product leadership roles, agility
• third decade: EMERGING - AI ORG. DESIGN, product-led governance

I lead with a systems view rather than a functional one, optimizing the whole instead of individual parts. My path in fintech has taught me to build consensus across disciplines, organize around customer value, and create simpler, adaptable organizations where people are valued beyond their roles.

Above all, I believe in multi-learning: developing depth across several disciplines while continuously learning from others. Both successes and failures have taught me to grow capability, seek sustainable alternatives under pressure, and protect teams and stakeholders from the cost of short-term local optimizations.

PAST FIVE YEARS
• Managed a Czech IT site with 30 direct and 50+ indirect reports across product, development and office management
• Rebuilt the site: rehired staff, reshaped 10+ teams, redesigned ways of working, established governance, and led discovery and delivery of key initiatives
• Implemented Group IT governance based on lean/agile values and progressive org design
• Hands-on leadership of €10M+ strategic initiatives involving 100+ people

RECENTLY
• Built AI prototypes and solutions for product-management automation, product prototyping and HR
• Ensured the DORA compliance package for the Czech National Bank

ROLES PERFORMED
• Head of IT • Head of Software Development / Site Leader • Agile coach • Product manager • Product Owner
• Project manager • Development lead & scrum master • Software developer • Business Analyst • QA / tester

INTERESTED IN
AI products and technology; agentic workflows; organizational design; 10X organizations; Org.Topologies; LeSS; Beyond Budgeting; Management 3.0.

BEYOND WORK
Sports organizer and innovator; board member of a national billiards body; national league athlete.

HOBBIES
AI; science (Krauss, Dawkins, Tyson); secular/atheist debate; ice hockey; billiards; and stand-up comedy (George Carlin). CIO-conference keynote speaker, planning more.

recommendations and references

Qualifications

IT Management Product Management

Site management
Governance & Strategy Discovery & Delivery

Cross-functional leadership

Capacity & Performance 

 Budgeting and control Procurement & Negotiation
IT Compliance, Audits, DORA  Vendor management

Executive relations

Organizational Design

 Lean-Agile leadership Beyond Budgeting, Management 3.0, LeSS
(Multi) Team level coaching People management, Recruitment, HR

IT Operations & continuous improvement

HONORS & AWARDS

  • 4finance People Awards 2024 - Guiding Star, 2nd place
  • 4finance People Awards 2023 - We put people first, 1st place
  • 4finance People Awards 2022 - We are entrepreneurial, 1st place
  • 4finance People Awards 2021 - We are entrepreneurial, 1st place
  • 4finance People Awards 2018 - Striving for excellence, 4th place

RECENT LICENSES & Certifications

  • Certified LeSS Practitioner, Craig Larman - LeSS co-creator (2023)
  • Professional Agile Leadership (PAL), scrum.org (2023)
  • Professional Scrum Product Owner Advanced (PSPO II),  scrum.org (2023)
  • Collaboration superpowers with Nikoletta Tatar (2022)
  • Professional Scrum Product Owner Advanced (PSPO I),  scrum.org (2022)
  • Business Agility foundations with Jurgen Appelo (2019)
  • Business Agility and Innovation leader, ShiftUp (2019)
  • various business analyses / project / product management courses

Work experience

Head of Information Technology

iLedgends
2026-012026-03

Summary

  • Owning all IT operations, cybersecurity, and operational resilience.
  • Leading the end-to-end DORA compliance program across the company.
  • Managing ICT risk, incident management, and business continuity/disaster recovery.
  • Ensuring the stability and scalability of our payments platform and digital-asset components.
  • Leading, mentoring, and growing the engineering and IT operations teams.
  • Defining and executing our IT & Security roadmap.

Key achievements
→ Ensured the DORA compliance package for the Czech National Bank
→ Validated integrations for crypto payment rails

Head of Software Development SITE

4finance, Prague, CZ
2021-072025-07

Summary

  • Led a software development organization with approximately 30 direct and 50+ indirect reports.
  • Established product-led organizational design and product management practices across the IT organization..
  • Managed strategic initiatives exceeding €10 million and involving more than 100 professionals.
  • Led product owners and multiple development teams across locations and disciplines.
  • Coordinated executives, architects, developers, product owners and business stakeholders to deliver transformation initiatives.
  • Directed roadmap planning, delivery prioritization and capacity alignment across global teams
  • Ensured resource planning, delivery capability, recruitment, onboarding and workforce development.
  • Envisioned and drove discovery and delivery of a new lending platform for 4finance group
  • Championed the 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧, driving cultural transformation through intrapreneurship, mentoring and coaching activities.
  • 𝐂𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐧-𝐀𝐠𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐬 & 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 to support learning & human-centric environment within the IT function

Key achievements
→ restructured IT function across 3 IT centers
→ introduced learning organization culture
→ improved development cycle time from weeks to 4-6 days
→ lowered onboarding time from several months to ~4 weeks
→ enabled co-funding for platform development
→ established new HR processes for hiring, onboarding, goal setting and rewarding mechanisms
→ introduced performance benchmarking of recruitment vendors
→ successfully passed external audits focused on development processes

Coach: Mika Rekkilä (CTO)
References on demand: executives, vendors, heads of departments, agile coaches, product managers, product owners,  architects, developers, business analysts

Product Manager

4finance, Prague, CZ
2016-112021-06

Summary

  • Creation of a global IT platform for 13 countries and 25+ products on 3 continents and 5+ time zones
  • Rollout / migrations of countries to a new platform, launches of new countries/brands
  • Evolution and new features / strategic vision, goals and initiatives definition (OKR based), product discovery, stakeholder alignment, prioritization, negotiation, product delivery
  • Support and maintenance / process implementation over multiple time zones, countries, continents
  • Responsible for a product initiatives with budget over 10 million EUR

      Key achievements

      → built and launched a new collections group wide solution improving collections roll-rates, introducing risk-based configurable strategies, custom workflows for collection agents
      → efficiently managed vendor relations and lowered licensing costs by 600k EUR across 3 years
      → defined and executed a controlled process for product launches enabling to launch 5 countries within a single year
      → built robust integration with regulatory bodies reducing cost of change and reducing regulatory risks
      → pivoted product vision and re-formed product teams to support it
      → established standardized strategic and tactical roadmaps (OKR-based + feature delivery based)
      → established a single backlog management in a multi-team context

      Involved in

      • C-level executive enquiries (CIO/CTO, CFO)
      • Envisioning of and driving a product community across IT sites
      • line management focus on coaching and/or mentoring for roles: product owner, business analyst
      • Sourcing & hiring processes and related vendor management

      Domain Expertise

      • collections, credit bureaus, regulatory integrations, 3rd party vendors
      • product management practices
      • leadership and managerial skills
      • facilitation of workshops
      • lean-agile values

      Coach and mentor: Mika Rekkilä
      Coaches: Peter Fisher, Magdalena Marczak, Iain Blunden
      Additional references: on-demand roles: CTO, CIO, CFO, product managers, owners, scrum masters, agile coaches, dev leads, QA engineers, project
      managers, business managers, heads of product and portfolio, Heads of HR, vendor account managers

      Product Owner

      4finance, Prague, CZ
      2014-112016-11

      Scrum Product Owner

      • responsibility over IT deliveries for 4finance businesses in Finland, Denmark, and Lithuania
      • migration of core IT platform for debt collection, a pilot project for Czech Republic (technical integration, business processes implementation)
      • additional accountability taken on as acting Scrum master for a period of few months

      Coaches: Xavier Gras, Tamas Hajdu
      Mentor: Mika Rekkilä

      Project Manager

      Baud spol. s r.o, Prague, CZ
      2013-032014-10

      Hands-on project management of multiple projects

      • MS SharePoint migration project for the Czech Accreditation Institute
      • complex solution for one of the biggest casino in Czech Republic for operations involving web application, integration with 3rd party systems and physical devices (cameras, card readers)
      • web presentations of a major international petrol company with gas stations * peripheral management of various database related development projects

      General

      • consulting the management team of the company
      • creation and ownership of MS Project document designed to capture all company projects
      • management of project related invoices, procurement related tasks & customer relationship
      • management of a customer support
      • development process management in highlighted projects (planning, execution, closure) using MS Team Foundation Server
      • project branding of company's documentation
      • collaboration on proprietary tools configuration (deployments, ticketing, ..)

      Reporting to executive management: Pavel Vašek, Jiří Moravec

      Project manager & Development Team Lead

      Baud spol. s r.o, Prague, CZ
      2008-102013-03

      Responsibility over relationship and software development for BNP Paribas
      Cardif Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria.

      • differently sized projects in context of international utilization and vendors (<1 million EUR)
      • responsible for enterprise platform in Czech, Slovak and Austrian business of the customer
      • managing enterprise platform migration projects & creation/execution of migration strategies (data, systems, business processes)
      • managerial consulting (project team affairs, customer communication) * implementing own version of scrum-but framework with customer
      • leading a development team on daily basis * complete application life-cycle management
      • business requirements elicitation, analyses, solution proposal and negotiation with customer
      • implementing deployment strategies and technical processes
      • implementation of automated database testing, TDD * additional accountability of a Scrum master in the team

      Coach: Radek Sečka

      Software Engineer

      Baud spol. s r.o
      2006-102008-10

      Member of a team implementing a primary insurance platform for BNP Paribas
      Cardif (Cardif pro Vita) using technologies:

      • .NET platform, C# development, thick client
      • MS SQL Server development
      • MS SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
      • Crystal reports and reporting in general
      • Integration with 3rd parties (Accounting - CODA, Documents EDM - Filenet)
      • Proprietary solutions for entity framework generation and proprietary import bridge (ETL)
      • Migrations of platform to Slovakia and Austria
      • Deployments of clients and databases via MS Visual studio

      Mentor: Radek Sečka

      External Software Developer

      Baud spol. s r.o
      2005-012006-10

      On-boarded into a beginning of new project for insurance company Cardif Pro
      Vita (later BNP Paribas Cardif)

      • gaining experience with OOP and algoritmization (VB / C# .NET), SQL querying, optimization via understanding execution plans, database

      architecture, ETL technology application via BizTalk, MS SQL Server
      Integration Services

      • modelling processes in UML and documenting the platform from business to technical layers via Enterprise Architect
      • end to end quality assurance (mostly manual)

      Mentor: Radek Sečka

      Administrator

      Ferokov s.r.o
      2001-012003-12

      intranet administration (Novell)

      Education & Trainings

      MANAGEMENT 3.0

      Jurgen APPELO
      2021

      Success and Failure. Learning from experiments

      Rewards and Incentives

      Delegation and Empowerment

      Leadership competencies

      zbyněk rozbořil - dev elopment atelier
      2018

      10-day leadership academy spread into 1 year, training -> application

      LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES

      petr špatenka
      2018

      Conflict resolution in multicultural environment

      business analysis

      petr Špatenka
      2018

      BABOK - foundation review

      BABOK - building business cases

      management competencies

      Aguarra / Knut fahlén
      2017

      "Beyond Budgeting", Unlocking the performance potential

      BUSINESS ANALYSIS

      GOODEA.EU
      2015

      Business process modelling (BPMN 2.0)

      Czech Technical University in Prague

      no degree / studies put on hold
      20042008

      Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering

      Software engineering, Math, Physics