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Product Owner & Business Analyst

Maria Philippova

15+ years in fintech, banking, insurance and iGaming

I turn business needs into clear requirements, from discovery through UAT, and deliver products that move the numbers.

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  • 15+years in product & analysis
  • +10%ARPU from gamification features
  • 2.5xcall-center product offering
  • +60%more A/B experiments run

About

I'm a Product Owner and Business Analyst with over 15 years of experience in fintech and insurance, and most recently iGaming. I translate business needs into clear functional requirements (use cases and user stories with acceptance criteria), manage product backlogs in Agile teams, and coordinate cross-functional teams.

My work covers the full product lifecycle, from discovery and stakeholder workshops to BPMN and sequence diagrams, API specifications and user acceptance testing. I care about outcomes. My requirements have helped increase ARPU by 10%, raise cross-sell rates by 10% and run 60% more product experiments.

Experience

  1. Product Owner / Business Analyst

    BrainRocket Ltd · iGaming

    Dec 2025 – Aug 2026

    • Authored the Product Requirements Document for an online gaming platform spanning 4 games and a back-office system for configuration management and real-time statistics.
    • Gathered and formalized functional and non-functional requirements for seasonal initiatives and gamification features, driving a 10% increase in ARPU and a 17% increase in user engagement.
    • Managed the product backlog in Jira, creating and prioritizing stories and reallocating ~25% of team capacity toward higher-revenue initiatives.
    • Led estimation and requirement refinement sessions, reducing initial estimates by 20–30%.
    • PRD
    • Jira
    • Backlog
    • Gamification
    • Agile

  2. Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner

    Sberbank Russia · Banking

    Apr 2016 – Jan 2026

    • Ran stakeholder interviews and requirements workshops across 10+ business and IT teams, resolving conflicting priorities in support of bank-wide strategic goals and enabling the call-center sales desk to offer 2.5x more products.
    • Led development of a flexible A/B testing tool that removed the need for a deployment per experiment, increasing the number of experiments by 60%.
    • Designed from scratch the migration to a new call-center platform (UI design, front-end/back-end API) to enable live sales during incoming calls, increasing the cross-sell rate by 10%.
    • Defined requirements for Grafana dashboards and reports on system performance and business sales metrics, sourced from the reporting database.
    • Wrote and reviewed specifications (business and functional requirements, sequence diagrams, BPMN) for development and QA teams.
    • Planned and executed user acceptance testing before release.
    • Stakeholder workshops
    • A/B testing
    • API design
    • BPMN
    • Sequence diagrams
    • Grafana
    • UAT

  3. Senior System Analyst

    Raiffeisenbank · Banking

    Dec 2014 – Apr 2016

    • Defined the complete functional scope (use cases and edge cases) for a rules-driven credit decision engine on IBM BPM.
    • Defined integration requirements (APIs, data mapping, error handling) for the credit decision engine.
    • Estimated and decomposed tasks with the development team.
    • Planned and managed user acceptance testing.
    • IBM BPM
    • Use cases
    • Integration
    • Data mapping
    • UAT

  4. Team Lead of System Analysis

    Sberbank Technology · Banking

    Oct 2011 – Jul 2014

    • Managed a team of 5 analysts: planning, reviewing and reporting.
    • Managed software development contractors.
    • Developed technical specifications for a back-office paper-processing system on PEGA BPM.
    • Owned UAT strategy and execution.
    • Team leadership
    • PEGA BPM
    • Technical specifications
    • UAT
  5. Earlier experience

    Business Analyst

    Allianz Insurance Company · Insurance

    Nov 2010 – Oct 2011

    • Performed business requirements analysis for a claim settlement system on Lombardi BPM.
    • Created prototypes.

    System Analyst

    Rosgosstrakh Insurance Company · Insurance

    Dec 2007 – Jul 2010

    • Analyzed business requirements and provided user support.
    • Developed a technical proposal for the "ClaimCenter" claim settlement system.

    Project Manager

    Hotel management system · Tourism

    Apr 2004 – Jun 2007

    • Analyzed business requirements.
    • Developed technical specifications, interface requirements and user scenarios.

Skills

Product & backlog

  • Product backlog management
  • Prioritization
  • Agile / Scrum
  • Estimation & refinement
  • Change management

Stakeholders & leadership

  • Stakeholder management
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Requirements workshops
  • Reporting
  • Team leadership

Analysis & requirements

  • Functional & non-functional requirements
  • PRDs
  • Use cases
  • User stories & acceptance criteria
  • Edge cases
  • Prototyping

Modeling & integration

  • BPMN
  • Sequence diagrams
  • OpenAPI
  • JSON
  • API & data mapping
  • Integration requirements

Testing & quality

  • UAT planning & execution

Tools & platforms

  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Grafana
  • PEGA BPM
  • Guidewire ClaimCenter

Portfolio

Selected test assignments: process diagrams, API specifications and requirements documents.

Education & languages

Education

  • Master of Management in EducationMSESS (Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences), validated by the University of Manchester2001 – 2002
  • BA in PhilologyIrkutsk State Linguistic University1996 – 2001

Certifications

  • Product Owner courseCertificate of attendance, Sberbank Corporate University
  • Scrum Master courseCertificate of attendance, Sberbank Corporate University

Languages

  • RussianNative
  • EnglishAdvanced (C1)
  • SpanishPre-intermediate (A2)

Contact

Open to opportunities. Get in touch.

Colmillo@yandex.ruLinkedIn