Zoya Brandes

Promoted to lead and scale a team of 12 Product Delivery Managers supporting Data & Analytics Platform (BQL), BQuant, Core Communications (MSG, IB, Integrations), and Compliance.

• Operate as a strategic connector across Product, Engineering, Data, and Sales, aligning product strategy, discovery, and delivery to customer and business outcomes.
• Expand organizational influence by uniting multiple product and platform groups under a shared delivery vision, integrating frameworks that balance innovation, execution discipline, and measurable impact.
• Partner with Product and Sales leadership to align go-to-market and product strategies, ensuring customer insights and commercial priorities shape delivery roadmaps.
• Introduce customer discovery and validation frameworks to inform product vision, user interviews, and early-stage experimentation - especially within emerging AI-enabled products like BQuant and BQL.
• Redefine delivery governance and team topology, clarifying ownership boundaries and improving communication flow between product lines and platform dependencies.
• Establish a strategic coaching model for Product Delivery Managers, strengthening their ability to operate as business partners and influence without authority across senior leadership levels.
• Foster an outcome-driven culture, embedding feedback loops that tie delivery metrics to customer value and organizational learning.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering and Data senior leadership to optimize prioritization practices and ensure alignment across complex product ecosystems.

Co-established and led Bloomberg’s first Product Delivery Office, creating a scalable delivery framework and growing a team of Product Delivery Managers to serve diverse Product, Engineering, and Data organizations. Partnered with senior leadership to connect delivery execution to strategy across 10+ business units, including FX, Commodities, Equities, Fixed Income, ESG, Emerging Markets, and News.

• Led and developed a team of Product Delivery Managers, empowering them to operate as strategic partners to senior Product, Engineering, and Data leaders.
• Defined and scaled Bloomberg’s product delivery framework, guiding PDMs in applying lean, agile, and value-driven approaches tailored to team context.
• Designed and implemented training and enablement programs that strengthened delivery discipline, discovery techniques, and outcome-based planning.
• Cultivated a culture of innovation, curiosity, and reflection, encouraging experimentation and continuous improvement within and across product and platform organizations.
• Partnered with business and technology leaders to align product and delivery strategies, driving execution of complex, high-impact initiatives such as Libor Migration and Croatia Euro Conversion.
• Oversaw a portfolio of 10+ delivery teams, ensuring business alignment, technical readiness, and customer-centric prioritization across multiple domains.
• Championed data-informed decision making, enabling teams to use frameworks like Jobs to Be Done, User Story Mapping, Lean Product Canvas, and OKRs to connect work directly to measurable outcomes.
• Strengthened cross-organizational alignment by influencing without authority, building trust and consensus across Product, Engineering, and Data leadership.

• Led delivery programs and organizational initiatives across the Equity Product and Engineering group, improving how Product, Engineering, and Design/UX collaborated to bring new functionality to market.
• Led the Bloomberg NEXT modernization - a multi-year effort that redefined the Bloomberg Terminal’s interface and user experience - by translating product vision into a coordinated roadmap and execution model.
• Introduced scalable delivery practices that standardized planning, dependency management, and release readiness across 40 + engineering teams.
• Built quantitative delivery metrics to monitor cycle times, throughput, and risk, giving leadership real-time visibility into progress and outcomes.
• Launched continuous-improvement forums that helped teams share learnings and remove systemic blockers, reducing time-to-release.
• Mentored emerging program and delivery managers, strengthening communication, prioritization, and stakeholder-management capabilities across the organization.

• Partnered across Product, Data, and Engineering to establish Bloomberg Law as a major product offering - aligning cross-functional teams to deliver the company’s first integrated legal research and analytics platform.
• Defined the early delivery framework and operational processes for the product’s technology organization, supporting a rapid expansion in scale and feature complexity.
• Led cross-organizational initiatives to align platform development, data acquisition, and product release schedules.
• Built and managed recruiting and onboarding programs that accelerated the growth of the Bloomberg Law Engineering team, improving ramp-up time and cultural cohesion.
• Served as the central delivery liaison ensuring technical readiness, data availability, and product stability for launch milestones.

• Managed a team of 6 engineers in the following key areas: career development, issue resolution, role definition and performance metrics, technical documentation of business processes
• Acted as a business liaison between multiple cross-functional areas. Interfaced extensively with customers, product managers and application developers both internally and externally to facilitate timely and quality project deliverables.
• Performed project planning, project cost and time budgeting, resource allocation, business requirements definition, development of functional and technical specifications utilizing UML design with Rational Rose, coordination of pre-release/QA & UAT application testing and capacity planning efforts, maintaining project status and managing production implementations across multiple initiatives.
• Led process re-engineering efforts for several critical value added applications resulting in large monetary savings for Citigroup in printing, faxing, and mailing expenses.
• Oversaw vendor-outsourcing decisions including vendor selection, activity management, and retention when appropriate.
• Pioneered and led technical design and development for a multitude of client driven web-based and client/server applications that handle over 6.68 million participants, average 500 thousand hits per page monthly and process 275 million net proceeds weekly for domestic and international clientele.
• Handled day-to-day production support and end-user support for several key revenue-driven client applications. Provided customer training pre and post launch of the applications, led root cause analysis to assure production issues are resolved in a timely fashion.