About — Vol. 02 Lead PM & PO

Lead Product Manager & Owner.

Twelve years across fintech, AI, and enterprise ITSM — strategy, agile delivery, stakeholder alignment, regulated platforms. Based in Budapest, Hungary; remote across Europe with working hours overlapping Copenhagen, London, and Berlin.

I redirect messy briefs into outcomes that hold up.

For twelve years I've done the same job under different titles — Product Manager, Product Owner, Lead Product Designer. Redirect messy briefs, study how people actually behave, ship measurable outcomes faster. I push back on stakeholders when the brief doesn't match the evidence — and I bring the evidence.

That sounds tidier than it is. The work is mostly the unglamorous middle: rewriting a story until acceptance criteria stop being arguable, sitting with twenty interview transcripts before anyone agrees what the problem is, telling a stakeholder their roadmap item won't ship this quarter and explaining why.

Let's talk My CV

Selected employers & clients across twelve years

02 / The work

How I work.

Four verbs do most of the work. Each one cost me an argument with a stakeholder somewhere — and each one shows up in the case studies.

  1. i.

    Redirect

    When a brief lands, my first question is whether it's the right brief. At T-Systems, an enterprise integration program arrived as integrate this AI platform end-to-end across ITSM. Six weeks of discovery turned that into three nested redirects: severity-to-urgency remap before integration could touch production, full rollout phased to one process family first, single-route integration expanded to multi-route.

    The original brief would have shipped on time and broken in week two. The redirected one shipped slower and held.

    3× redirects from a single brief
  2. ii.

    Ground in evidence

    The reason I push back is that I've usually done the work to be sure. At Bankmonitor, a stakeholder wanted to A/B test a new mortgage CTA against the existing one. 24 interviews and 6 usability tests in, the CTA wasn't the problem — the listing layout above it was burying the comparison logic.

    We tested the layout instead. The CTA lifted from 15 to 28 actions per thousand sessions and held a 14% lift over eight weeks.

    +14% CTA lift, sustained 8 weeks
  3. iii.

    Push back

    Pushing back is the part of the job most people skip because it's uncomfortable. At Canua, the founders wanted to ship financial-data import working through a small list of supported banks first. Research showed the actual user base spanned banks far outside that list — most users would hit a dead end on day one.

    I argued for a CSV fallback as a first-class path, not a workaround. It shipped alongside the API import and carried a meaningful share of early activation.

    2× import paths, not one
  4. iv.

    Ship

    The work is only real once it's in production and someone is using it. I care about cycle time, story readiness, escaped defects, and the small number of metrics that prove the thing actually changed for users. At T-Systems I introduced BDD and Three Amigos in Incident and Change — average cycle time on complex items dropped from 14 days to 11. At TradieDigital, sprint discipline cut escaped defects per release by ~25% and doubled release cadence.

    14→11 days cycle time on complex items

03 / Background

How I got here.

The trajectory most product people don't take. Design, then research, then product, then enterprise. The titles changed. The work compounded.

For twelve years I've led products end-to-end across enterprise IT, fintech, SaaS, and AI — strategy, agile delivery, stakeholder alignment, people leadership, vendor work, regulated platforms.

Most of the deeper work happens in the first two weeks of a brief. Figuring out whether the brief on day one is the actual problem. Earning the right to push back when it isn't.

The metric attached at scoping is what makes the pushback possible — not aesthetic improvements, not delivery milestones. Measurable outcomes that map back to the business problem the brief was trying to solve.

01 2014 → present

Design, then product, then enterprise

I started in UI/UX design and worked through the trajectory most product people don't take. Twelve years ago I was building interfaces for Hungarian web agencies. Six years in, I was leading product design and product ownership for a US-expat fintech and a CRM SaaS at the same time. By 2024 I was running ServiceNow ITSM at T-Systems — incident, change, problem, knowledge, notifications — across three Scrum squads and a Business Analyst practice I built from scratch.

02 2017 → 2023

An evidence habit, learned earlier

I came up through a research culture that doesn't trust intuition without evidence — an MS in Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience and a PhD (ABD) in Multidisciplinary Engineering Sciences. When I argue with a stakeholder about user behaviour, I've usually run the interviews, watched the session recordings, and read the funnel. The instinct to ground product decisions in actual user data was trained into me before I had the job.

03 2018 → 2024

Six years of teaching, on the side

For six years I taught IT fundamentals and product design at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics — about 800 students cycled through. Teaching forces clarity in a way nothing else does. If you can't explain why a workflow needs three states instead of two to a roomful of nineteen-year-olds with no context, you don't understand it well enough to ship it. The teaching ended in 2024 when T-Systems got serious. The habit didn't.

I’ve worked with a lot of product people in AI and R&D. What set Fanni apart was that she treated the brief as a hypothesis, not an instruction — she found out how people actually behaved, came back with evidence, and argued for a different scope than the one we’d asked for. And she was right.

Csaba Molnár Project Manager · AI Robotix
LinkedIn recommendation

She didn’t just execute what we asked for — she questioned it, tied every decision back to conversion and user behaviour, and delivered on time each time.

Janis Brix Founder · PPC Magic
LinkedIn recommendation

Fanni consistently delivered above expectations, on time and within budget. Her user-centric approach resulted in a product that our customers love to use.

Victoria Luu Copy.ai
Client review

The product you delivered exceeded our expectations and demonstrated a high level of expertise. Innovative approach, dedicated work.

András Zollai Novo Nordisk
Client review

04 / On paper

Recognition & credentials.

The paper trail. Useful for recruiters who need it, less useful than the case studies for the rest.

Years in product 12+ Across product, design, and delivery — same job, different titles.
Institutions 6 Universities and postgraduate programmes — BUTE, Széchenyi, MOME.
Languages spoken 4 English, Hungarian, German, Danish.
Students taught 800+ Six years of IT and product design teaching at BUTE.
  1. 2024
    Top 1% ADPList Mentor in Product
    Mentorship recognition · product strategy and discovery.
  2. 2019–23
    PhD (ABD), Multidisciplinary Engineering Sciences
    Széchenyi István University · All coursework and research complete; dissertation not submitted.
  3. 2018–24
    IT Fundamentals & Product Design Instructor
    Budapest University of Technology and Economics · 800+ students across six years.
  4. 2017–19
    MS, Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience (HCI)
    Budapest University of Technology and Economics · Cognitive science applied to interaction design.
  5. 2017
    MOME ID — Industrial & Product Design
    Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design · Postgraduate programme.
  6. 2013–16
    BA, Communication and Media Studies
    Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

05 / What's next

Open to the right brief.

  • Lead PM
  • Senior PO
  • Head of Product
  • Full-time
  • Contract
  • Advisory

Or if you prefer voice: +36 70 405 3569

CV Fanni Csincsák.pdf