KRISHNASAI BANDARUPALLI
Chicago
Summary
Results-driven Principal Product Owner with 8 years of experience leading Agile teams to deliver high-impact enhancements across enterprise loan origination platforms. Proven track record of launching customer and agent-facing features that increased process efficiency by 25%+, reduced support tickets by 40%, and improved platform uptime to 99.99%. Skilled in translating complex business needs into actionable backlogs, prioritizing roadmaps aligned with business OKRs, and ensuring regulatory compliance (FDIC, FFIEC, HMDA). Trusted leader in cross-functional collaboration, vendor management (>$1M annual budgets), and stakeholder engagement, with a strong focus on data-driven decision-making and continuous delivery.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
Work History
Principal Product Owner
Discover Financial Services
02.2022 - Current
- Owned the end-to-end delivery of customer-facing loan origination portals/ websites, enabling over 100,000+ borrowers annually to upload documents, manage tasks, track loan status, and complete self-service closings—resulting in a 25% reduction in loan processing time.
- Delivered 20+ production enhancements to the NetOxygen SaaS Loan Origination System, including borrower verification, new closing portal screens and performance improvements, achieving operations team satisfaction by reducing their effort and time in processing loans.
- Defined product requirements, prioritized features in the backlog, and collaborated with vendor teams, UI/UX, API, dev, and QA teams to release new borrower and agent-facing tools, accelerating time-to-market by 20%.
- Engineered and prioritized development of new UI components and backend integrations across 10+ APIs and data services.
- Developed comprehensive roadmaps outlining the product vision, goals, and milestones leading to successful execution
- Spearheaded infrastructure optimization projects to enable blue-green deployments, reducing server downtime by 30%, enhancing network security through MPLS/VPN, and maintaining 99.99% platform availability.
- Led cross-functional agile teams (internal and vendor) through sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily stand-ups, and reviews using Jira and GitHub—delivering features on average 2 weeks sprint schedules.
- Led the design and implementation of agent-facing dialer applications, including IVR enhancements and workstation optimizations, to support increased call volumes supporting 500+ call center agents.
- Successfully executed a full-scale backend data center migration impacting 1000+ users with zero downtime or data loss, meeting all compliance SLAs.
- Managed contract negotiations, budgeting, renewals, and relationships for technology vendors, identifying savings opportunities of over $150K annually.
- Owned stakeholder engagement, facilitating weekly business reviews, roadmap alignment meetings, and sprint demos ensuring transparency and alignment with business OKRs.
- Led internal and regulatory audits (HMDA, FDIC, etc.), closing all findings ahead of SLA
- Utilized tools like AppDynamics, Datadog, and Grafana to monitor web services and proactively reduce response times by 15% for 5+ web services, directly improving user experience.
- Managed backlog prioritization, ensuring alignment with business goals and stakeholder expectations.
- Managed the lifecycle of operational, regulatory, and technical issues using ServiceNow and Archer.
- Troubleshot production-impacting issues in loan origination and dialer systems, delivering immediate mitigations and long-term solutions.
- Defined UAT strategy, reviewed regression and performance testing results, and approved system releases, maintaining >99% defect-free delivery in production.
- Developed and presented product roadmaps, business cases, impact assessments, and design documentation to senior leadership, influencing funding for 5+ major initiatives.
Product Owner
Discover Financial Solutions
11.2019 - 01.2022
- Served as Product Owner and Scrum Master for multiple teams supporting the core banking platform.
- Led an Agile team in developing unified Grafana monitoring dashboards, integrating data from InfluxDB for performance metrics, AppDynamics for application health, and Moogsoft for incident and alert metrics.
- Directed an Agile team in creating data extracts for payments, general ledger, and business support activities.
- Collaborated with the incident management team to review and resolve production issues.
- Coordinated with cross-functional finance and data warehouse teams to develop Finacle functionalities, including business events and office accounts, as well as supporting testing and defect resolution.
- Facilitated backlog refinement sessions to break down features into user stories, establish acceptance criteria, estimate story points, assign release milestones, and designate business ownership.
- Communicated and negotiated release milestones with business and incident management teams.
- Led team-level and program-level Agile events, including backlog refinements, PI planning, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, feature demos, and retrospectives.
Scrum Master
Truist Bank
08.2019 - 10.2019
- Conducted interview sessions with business sponsors, SMEs, and the strategy team to understand business goals and identify source systems contributing data to the FDIC QFC rule.
- Performed stakeholder analysis to identify SMEs for various source systems.
- Conducted feasibility analysis and business process modeling to evaluate the as-is & to-be systems, gap analysis.
- Planned and facilitated requirements elicitation meetings with SMEs, business stakeholders, system architects, and ETL development leads to gather functional and non-functional requirements.
- Developed a Business Requirements Document outlining high-level requirements.
Project Engineer
Metcoat tech solutions
10.2016 - 05.2017
- Collaborated with internal and external teams on the implementation of powder coating projects.
- Trained internal design teams on software applications such as SAP, SolidWorks, and AutoCAD.
- Supported the purchasing process by negotiating with vendors and evaluating contracts.
- Conducted site visits to vendor locations to inspect manufacturing facilities and reported findings.
- Prepared design requirement documents and testing documentation for vendors.
- Created Bills of Materials (BOM) and coordinated with vendors and manufacturers for sheet metal panels, beam structures, conveyors, and burners.
- Supervised a team of 10 technicians in assembling pre-treatment plants, conveyor belts, and dry-off ovens.
- Resolved assembly issues cost-effectively by facilitating communication between customers and vendors.
Graduate Apprentice
Wheels India Ltd
08.2015 - 08.2016
- Worked as a graduate intern, supporting SAP modules for purchasing, warehouse inventory management, and data extraction.
- Maintained purchasing and warehouse reports generated from the Oracle database.
- Provided ad hoc reporting from the database based on user requests.
- Delivered IT support by installing and troubleshooting software on user systems, including AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and other design and evaluation tools.
Education
Master’s - Engineering Management
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN12.2018
Skills
- NetOxygen LOS (SAAS applocations)
- Dialer and IVR
- Agile and Scrum tools (Jira, Rally, SharePoint)
- Monitoring Tools (AppDynamics, Datadog)
- Process Flow Diagrams (Blueworks Live, Visio)
- UI/UX mockups (Lucidchart, Figma)
- Oracle SQL Developer, Microsoft MySQL
- Snowflake
- Tableau
- Regulatory compliance and vendor management
- Software development lifecycle (SDLC)
- Troubleshooting and issue resolution
- Finance and manufacturing
- Product ownership
- Business analysis
- Agile methodologies (Scrum and SAFe)
- Project management
- Software testing (UAT, regression, performance)
- Regulatory analysis
- Financial benefit analysis and gap analysis
Discover Financial Services - Presidents Award recipient for 2024
Awarded Presidents award for the year 2024 for my work in minimizing regulatory risk through record retention management and improving work efficiency of our operations team
Timeline
Principal Product Owner
Discover Financial Services
02.2022 - Current
Product Owner
Discover Financial Solutions
11.2019 - 01.2022
Scrum Master
Truist Bank
08.2019 - 10.2019
Project Engineer
Metcoat tech solutions
10.2016 - 05.2017
Graduate Apprentice
Wheels India Ltd
08.2015 - 08.2016
Master’s - Engineering Management
Purdue University
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