Gaurav Nair

Translated high-level business needs into actionable user stories and product backlog items.

Managed product backlog with JIRA and Azure DevOps, ensuring prioritization aligns with business goals.

Facilitated collaborative sessions using Miro boards for sprint planning and workflow mapping.

Collaborated with cross-functional Scrum teams to deliver iterative product increments.

Led Agile ceremonies including Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, and Retrospectives.

Gathered requirements from stakeholders in underwriting, claims, IT, and operations to validate deliverables.

Prioritized features based on business value, technical feasibility, and strategic alignment.

Monitored delivery progress, removing impediments to ensure timely sprint completion.

· Collaborate with key business discipline leaders and build realistic and effective product strategy.

· Define product roadmap, create release plans, consolidate product ideas, build product backlog, prioritize to achieve Objectives and Key Results.

· Lead and support various strategic initiatives on License optimization and audit defense for customers.

· Standardize and optimize current processes to enable them for process automation, digital initiatives, system deployments, new products etc.

· Lead & Support business solutioning, planning and execution of large-scale product initiatives from ideation to implementation.

· Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive and lead North America re-engineering, process automation initiatives.

· Lead scrum cadence activities, to include ceremonies, story grooming, PI Planning, testing activities.

· Partner with change management leadership to ensure business process changes are effectively planned and executed due to technology updates.

· Instrumental in preparing customers for the SAP audit and save huge penalties.

· Participated in the advisory activities for clients with SAP, IBM and Cisco. Prepared the Effective license Position for different products with different vendors.

· Enabled the clients for setting up their business strategy for Digital access assessment.

Work Experience

Mapfre Insurance (May 2024-till date) , Location : Massachusetts ,USA

Role : Product Manager

· Acted as the voice of the customer and business, translating high-level business needs into clear, actionable user stories and product backlog items.

· Owned and managed the product backlog using tools like JIRA and Azure DevOps, ensuring stories are well-defined, prioritized, and aligned with business objectives.

· Used Miro boards for collaborative whiteboarding sessions, sprint planning, workflow mapping, and backlog grooming across distributed teams.

· Collaborated with cross-functional Scrum teams including developers, testers, and UX designers to deliver iterative product increments.

· Participated in and led Agile ceremonies including :Backlog Refinement/Grooming, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups,Sprint Reviews,Sprint Retrospectives

· Worked closely with stakeholders across underwriting, claims, IT, and operations to gather requirements and validate deliverables.

· Prioritized features and enhancements based on business value, technical feasibility, and strategic alignment.

· Collaborated with QA to define acceptance criteria and support UAT (User Acceptance Testing) to ensure features meet user expectations.

· Monitored delivery progress and removed impediments to support timely sprint completion.

· Provided regular demos to stakeholders and gathered feedback to continuously improve the product roadmap.

· Facilitated communication between business teams and development teams to ensure shared understanding and alignment.

· Supported the creation of release plans, tracked KPIs, and contributed to continuous improvement within the agile team.

Accenture (2021-2024) Location: Massachusetts, USA

Role: Lead SAP Product Specialist

· Collaborate with key business discipline leaders and build realistic and effective product strategy.

· Define product roadmap, create release plans, consolidate product ideas, build product backlog, prioritize to achieve Objectives and Key Results.

· Lead and support various strategic initiatives on License optimization and audit defense for customers.

· Standardize and optimize current processes to enable them for process automation, digital initiatives, system deployments, new products etc.

· Lead & Support business solutioning, planning and execution of large-scale product initiatives from ideation to implementation.

· Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive and lead North America re-engineering, process automation initiatives.

· Lead scrum cadence activities, to include ceremonies, story grooming, PI Planning, testing activities.

· Partner with change management leadership to ensure business process changes are effectively planned and executed due to technology updates.

· Instrumental in preparing customers for the SAP audit and save huge penalties.

· Participated in the advisory activities for clients with SAP, IBM and Cisco. Prepared the Effective license Position for different products with different vendors.

· Enabled the clients for setting up their business strategy for Digital access assessment.

Liberty Mutual (2018 – 2021), New Hampshire USA

Role: Product Owner

· Collaborated with Business users and marketing owners to define product strategy and device corresponding delivery through data analysis, discovery process, prioritization of features that align with the overall product vision.

· Formulated key priorities aligning with Business objectives, product vision and establish realistic roadmaps and backlogs.

· Owned and maintained product backlogs and support IT prioritization through sprint planning, prioritization and sprint review ceremonies.

· Responsible for creating user stories and enabled gherkins in JIRA.

· Ensured customer-driven design by meeting with customers to understand their challenges and objectives.

· Worked with the teams for driving innovation and process improvements, effectively facilitated PI planning events, user demos, scrum of scrums and other agile ceremonies.

· Defined, tracked, and derived critical thinking through metrics management and strategize transformation levers that enhances the health of the product.

· Created an iterative minimal viable product (MVP) mindset to product development to ensure work can be shipped to receive customer feedback early and often.

· Applied dual shift (Shift Left and Shift Right) techniques to the projects to ensure quick and sure results. Drove extensive Automation and mandate In-Sprint automation along with DevOps principles.

· Worked closely with the development teams and also the UX teams for the Underwriter Portal designs in creation of the visual mockups as per the requirements from the Business teams.

· Active participation with the Data integration team to bring data from legacy systems into SAP.

· Active interaction with the business teams to get the requirements and translate them in stories easily understood by the development team

· Led business discovery to do data exploration to enable better business decision making

· Analyzed information from large-scale data , performed detailed data-analysis , gave insights into customer pain-points and recommended potential solutions and improvements to business and product marketing team.

· Interacted with the business and marketing teams to get the requirements and translate them in work items understandable by the development teams.

· Administration of SAP BASIS application for the client landscape having ECC, CRM, BI, BPC, Solution Manager.

· Use analytics, user research to identify opportunities where IT services can be offered to improve user experience.

· Managed multiple projects with teams across geographies in Basis, Database and Web Sphere administrator.

· Established project tasks, timelines, budgets and ensuring that they are effectively managed, mapped out all the initiatives and status to show dependencies, risks, and potential improvements

· Managed resource planning, allocation, multi-project administration as per the requirements. Facilitated process improvement and documentation, with optimized resource utilization.

· Administration of SAP application for the client landscape having ECC, BI, SCM, CRM, Solution Manager, PI and Enterprise Portal

· Successfully executed Enhancement Pack Upgrade, Support pack upgrade, Kernel upgrades and regular System refreshes

· Collaborated with customer for sizing for ECC on HANA and the monitoring of HANA databases

· Collaborated with the business teams and IT teams to implement new product launches into ERP Systems.

· Create and present monthly steering reports to the business leadership. Review and highlight business and technical risks to key Business and IT stakeholders.

· Mentor and challenge the team to bring creative solutions to the project and apply continuous improvement techniques.

· Perform resource planning, tracking, hiring and forecast.

· Handle issues, evolving requirement changes by establishing ideas and innovative solutions to business with respect to budget, operational excellence and regulatory adherence.

· Performed important technical SAP Basis activities like Support Pack upgrade and Kernel Upgrade

· Queue management on the Clarify Ticketing tool and coordination between different teams like Batch scheduling team, Operations team, Security team and Application Management team

· SME level support for the Security incidents. Roles Creation and Modifications, User & Authorization Management.

· Participation in the GRC access control implementation for the client, Offshore setup for the client ensuring smooth transition and delivery consistency

Maintained full-proof framework by managing and reporting key performance indicators to senior management.