David Lortal

Product Management

Project Management

David Lortal

David is a detail-driven and self-motivated Product Manager with nine years of experience developing sophisticated products, including awards entry administration, online video streaming, event ticketing and online voting platforms.

Organised and methodological, David adept at utilizing limited resources to maximum effect and delivering multiple projects simultaneously.

David has proven experience leading remote agile development teams by scoping requirements, writing user stories, creating product backlogs, and defining MVPs constantly delivering the required results.

David understands the importance of taking the time to develop good relationships with stakeholders and clients while tactfully managing peoples expectations.

David is genuinely excited about the opportunity to brighten someone’s day by solving a problem.

Systems: Jira, Confluence, Zoho, Slack, Zoom, Google Analytics, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Creately.

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My Expertise

Product Management

Utilises data driven research methods to interrogate customer usage of products alongside user feedback to drive feature development and to deliver improvements. Effective communicator who negotiates with stakeholders ensuring conflicting priorities and demands are translated into a single product vision.

Project Management

Product Owner who collaborates fully with stakeholders to transform product strategy into clear and detailed user stories, tasks and bugs for engineers. Manages large product backlogs and ensures that development milestones are met. Constantly works to identify, assess and manage risks.

Account Management | Customer Support

Skilled at building strong client and stakeholder relationships. Created on-boarding processes and training documentation to empower non-technical users. Providing training sessions, in person and Zoom, leading customer review meetings and answering support queries.

ZOHO CRM Administrator

Configuring Zoho Suite products including CRM, Books, Subscriptions, Flow and Forms. Migrating and importing existing contact and account records, creating custom functions, workflows and web hooks, creating web-forms, mapping data fields and automated flows between Zoho products.

About Me

I am a remote contract Product Manager who is lucky enough to be living in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina (GMT-3). Born and raised in the UK I took a career break in 2018, having worked in Media Industry in London for 16 years, and travelled from Argentina to Colombia. Since 2019 I have been working remotely as a contractor for a number of clients including The British Academy of Film and Television Arts and FOCAL International.

I am an enthusiastic amateur photographer and my passion is hiking in the Andes. You can see my work and read about my hikes on my blog.

I am currently learning to speak Spanish and my hobbies include Bouldering, Cooking, Cinema, Television and Video Games.

If you have any questions or are interested in working with me please get in touch: contact@davidlortal.com

Resume

Experience

January 2019 - Present

BAFTA Tech

Contract Product Manager, Remote

David is the Product Manager for BAFTA Events (ticketing platform), Nucleus Awards Management and Electron Online Video. Working closely with BAFTA's in-house teams and clients David defines the overall product vision by scoping, testing and scheduling development and provides on-boarding and ongoing support. David manages a small remote Agile development team in a fast-paced environment with rapidly developing priorities. Currently David is managing two new products, BAFTA View, a VOD platform which is a complex API driven product integrated with a CRM and several products and VPE, an online networking product designed to facilitate fully online and hybrid events at BAFTA’s HQ.

October 2019 - April 2021

FOCAL International

Contract Product Manager, Remote

Managed the procurement process and build of FOCAL International’s new website. Researched and recommended suppliers and providers. Migrated existing membership database and processes to Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho Subscriptions, Zoho Forms and Zoho Flow using workflows and custom functions to automate processes.

August 2019 - January 2020

Tractable

Contract Project Assistant, Remote

Assisted in the creation of a cloud controls security matrix ensuring the product fulfilled CSA requirements.

June 2016 - January 2018

British Academy of Film and Television Arts

Senior Product Manager

Product Manager of BAFTA's portfolio of Awards systems, including entry, viewing, judging, voting and ticket sales. Led the development of the launch strategy for the commercialisation of Nucleus and the awards entry system, including sales, marketing, onboarding, and the development processes.

October 2011 - June 2016

British Academy of Film and Television Arts

Product Manager, Awards

Project manager for all BAFTA awards team’s systems, including awards online voting, online entry, awards ticketing and jury voting system, managed budgets and allocated development resource.

October 2006 - October 2011

BBC - Radio 4 Extra

Technical Operations Assistant

Managed the online broadcast and audio storage system, devised processes which enabled multi-user access to assets, improving productivity. Established relationships with collectors who supplied missing archive programmes.

Education

Goldsmiths College, University of London

BA History - 2:1 (Hons)

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Skills

Product

Project planning

95%

Risk Management

89%

Resource Management

85%

Stakeholder Communication

96%

Personal

Organization

91%

Leadership

87%

Attention to Detail

93%

Flexibility

88%

Technical

Agile | Scrum

85%

Jira | Confluence

90%

Slack | Zoom

93%

Google Analytics

87%

Projects

Project History

2021 - Present

BAFTA Tech

BAFTA View

BAFTA View is a VOD platform that showcases video content entered into the Awards. Previously a limited number of assets were available via BAFTA's Voting Website but with the onset of COVID-19 it has been possible for BAFTA to ensure all entered content is available online. The VOD platform brings together video content from a range of preferred VOD suppliers, including BAFTA's inhouse VOD Electron, and connects via API to BAFTA Nucleus, BAFTA Voting and CRM. This is a complex project where the site needs to be secure and ensure that entered metadata and user rights are issued correctly.

2021 - Present

BAFTA Tech

Virtual Piccadilly Experiance

An online networking product designed to facilitate fully online and hybrid events at BAFTA’s HQ. VPE will supplement BAFTA's offering of commercial hires in the newly open state of the art conferencing space and members bar as well as support BAFTA's events team in reaching established and new audiences around the globe.

2021

BAFTA Tech

Nucleus Media Library and Instant Categories

Two major new pieces of functionality for BAFTA Nucleus are launching in 2021. Instant Categories - admin users can now select a group of entries and instantly issue them to a group of judges to review. This has significantly reduced work for admin users. Media Library - a new way for all media assets to be stored within the system and to associate them with entries. This will reduce a pain point of video association and simplify the workflows for both entrants and admin users.

2021

BAFTA Tech

Introducing New Workflows in BAFTA Events for Awards Ticketing

The Awards team approached with a problem - they needed to run a COVID safe event and also introduce additional security. Instead of upgrading their current system new workflows were introduced into the BAFTA Events system, including full invoicing, new ticket purchasing workflows, secure QR codes, new ticket design, online tickets and online check-in, a new security ticket scanning web app and an upgraded guestlist which collects more detailed guest information. This will be tested for the 2021 British Academy Television Awards and then rolled out for future events.

2020 - Present

BAFTA Tech

BAFTA Cloud Studio

After the realisation that COVID-19 is here for a long period of time BAFTA is looking to develop a solution to deliver for a number of different business critical areas. With few realistic products on the market BAFTA Tech is prototyped a solution which enabled full HD live streaming of video content into Zoom Webinars and on VOD partners platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.

2020 - Present

BAFTA Tech

Nucleus Code Upgrade and Re-Design

Launched a project to update the front end and administration design of Nucleus. Beginning with updating and aligning all the administration CSS style sheets, followed by a refresh of the front end design which will enable the admin users to control the design elements and logos. The underlying code was upgraded to PHP 7.4, UBUNTU and MYSQL 8. Currently the front end is in the design stages and a fully responsive reskinned site will be launched in Q3 2021.

2020 - 2021

BAFTA Tech

Bespoke Nucleus Development for the Earthshot Prize

The Royal Foundation selected Nucleus to administrate the application and judging processes of the high-profile prize. Entry to the prize is invitation only which resulted in a reconfiguring of Nucleus's workflows and the creation of new functionality. In 2021 Earthshot requested more bespoke functionality to support the transferring of the ownership of a form from the nominator to the nominee enabling the nominee to log into the platform and enter more data. A challenging workflow was put together which resulted in a new account created by the system and an invitation to claim the account sent to the nominee.

2019 - 2020

FOCAL International

Website Redesign and Zoho CRM Integration

2020

BAFTA Tech

Remote Jury Voting

In response to the onset of COVID-19 BAFTA required a reworking of their jury voting product and voting workflows to ensure that the BAFTA Awards could be delivered during the lockdown.

2020

BAFTA Tech

Membership Survey

In 2020 BAFTA launched an enquiry into Diversity and Inclusion as a response to a lack of diversity in recent awards nominations. One of the key results of the report was that BAFTA had little understanding of the makeup of its membership. I managed a project to collect information about the membership, where the key challenge was the implementation of the security and encryption of this important and sensitive data.

2020

BAFTA Tech

Parallel Transcoding

To solve the awards deadline bottleneck of processing files that is caused by entrants submitting their entries at the end of the entry period BAFTA Tech introduced a new encoding technique. Parallel Transcoding uses AWS's Lambda servers to chuck video files into short segments and transcode in parallel. The product was so successful that it was immediately rolled out to all Nucleus customers.

2020

BAFTA Tech

BAFTA Events and Nucleus COVID-19 Rapid Devlopment

COVID-19 introduced a number of challenges for BAFTA which the company was well placed to meet. The Awards management process required updating and BAFTA's programme of events moved online. Rapid rethinking of workflows and quick win development updates were implemented to support changes, while a wider strategy was developed. This resulted in managing the disruption to the core business and enabling BAFTA to continue serving its members and audiences during this unprecedented period.

2019 - 2020

BAFTA Tech

BAFTA Events MVP

Gathered requirements from stakeholders across four countries for a complex bespoke events ticketing system designed to facilitate BAFTA's events. From creating the initial backlog, managing the remote development team, and delivering an MVP and successful product launch. Replaced the core functionality of three separate systems and persuaded admin users to unify five different events' workflows. The system has unified BAFTA's approach to its event, moving from local to international and fully integrated into the BAFTA website. The success of this has been evident in responding to COVID-19 where events are now broadcast via video streaming and are available internationally as opposed to locally. At the time of system launch, the MVP was updated to incorporate the new requirements enabling these events to take place. A structured roll-out was necessitated as the existing systems were decommissioned. Users were provided with training, system setup assistance, and support in messaging their users. The result is an efficient, customizable system with a vast range of features that enables BAFTA to support its unique international membership and to react to rapidly changing scenarios.

2016 - 2017

BAFTA

Voting Site Relaunch

Two-year project management of systematic relaunch of awards voting system, introducing new UX design, 2FA, live voting metrics and back-end code redevelopment.

2016

BAFTA

Membership Applications

Led on full technical and project rollout of restructuring core design and workflow processes of Nucleus to facilitate application management across five branches located in different time zones.

2016

BAFTA

Support Ticketing

Devised new support work flow processes and standards supported by a new custom support ticketing system designed to respond to growing client base.

2015

BAFTA

Nucleus Commercialisation

After positive feedback from users and their criticism of other awards systems, I reached out to two other awards bodies in the industry to talk about processes and share information. The meetings produced the desired results in generating interest in the system. I put together a proposal in consultation with the CTO, which I presented to the CEO. Two clients were successfully onboarded, leading to the development of a wider strategy for the commercialization of the system. It eventually became the centerpiece of the BAFTA Techs business plan. Today Nucleus can boast multiple customers and is still being adopted by new organisations.

2015

BAFTA

Jury Tablet Voting System

Development of bespoke tablet voting system for juries on limited budget.

2015

BAFTA

Online Awards Ticketing

Devised ticketing system introducing new workflow and custom development of features to facilitate awards ticket sales resulting in increased revenue and faster payment.

2014

BAFTA

Young Games Designers

Re-purposed Nucleus visually and worked to simplify processes for young children, along with their teachers, to enter into YGD initiative.

2014

BAFTA

Initiative Applications

Execution of product transformation, including new workflows and development of custom features, to deliver initiative application system.

2013

BAFTA

Awards Management System Development (Nucleus)

BAFTA Nucleus simplifies events management, grant, membership, and intuitive applications with secure, intuitive application forms, video integration, and automated online payments. Designed as an internal solution for complex awards management and judging processes, it is now used by the leading broadcasting and media awards across the UK and has become a central pillar of BAFTA’s operations. Engaging heavily with internal stakeholders and customers, I scoped system requirements and developed a fully developed MVP. Video integration was at the heart of the design as BAFTA’s main pain point was the successful delivery and secure playback of feature-length video assets. I oversaw the development utilizing remote developers and successfully launched a system that incorporated all the feedback and requirements. Providing ongoing support for the system, there is now a continual development cycle. After a successful launch, I executed product transformation, including new workflows and the development of features, to incorporate the system into other business areas, including ticketing for awards, membership applications, and initiative/bursary applications. This successful application enabled BAFTA to launch the product commercially

Project Links

FOCAL International Website

During 2020 FOCAL International launched a bran new website, designed using CRAFT CMS. The membership database was migrated to Zoho CRM and and new automated workflows were introduced.

https://focalint.org/

BAFTA Events

A custom designed events ticketing site, designed to support BAFTA's International programme of events across the US, UK and Asia. In response to COVID-19 the system was updated to provide access to remote online events.

https://events.bafta.org/

Nucleus Customers

The Nucleus (Awards Entry System) has been used by the following customers to support their awards and bursary application, administration, judging and voting processes:

BAFTA's Nucleus Sites

Nucleus was developed as an awards administration system but when it became clear that the powerful system could be utilised for other processes it was adopted across the organisation.

BAFTA Online Voting

BAFTA's Online Voting