About Petar
I help SaaS, AI, and IoT companies tighten operations, ship products customers actually use, and build business models that survive contact with the market.
I work across three engagement types:
- Fractional COO and Operations Leadership. I find what is slowing the business, whether it is people, process, or tools, and fix it. I stand up the operating backbone most scaling companies are missing: goal setting, reporting cadence, hiring pipelines, vendor reviews. I automate repetitive work with low-code tools so the team stops firefighting.
- Senior Product Management and Product Ownership. I turn fuzzy ideas or tangled roadmaps into prioritized, buildable plans. I own the product backlog, write clean requirements and user stories, and run agile delivery rituals. I bridge stakeholders and engineering so both sides move forward without friction.
- Business Model Validation and Growth Strategy. I pressure-test new business models and surface the assumptions most likely to break the plan. I turn leadership opinion debates into testable experiments settled by evidence. When growth has stalled, I rebuild the business model around what actually works now.
Recent engagements include interim COO at a UK headquartered IoT health-tech with smart watches, fall detection devices, emergency response systems, and connected pill dispensers across Europe, China, and the US. Generative AI platform launch with NexGenCloud / Hyperstack for LLM fine-tuning and deployment. Four cross-functional workstreams for a pharma digital launch with Galderma, covering Veeva CRM, Salesforce marketing automation, and Salesforce Data Cloud analytics. Three-year scale-up engagement with an EdTech and e-commerce platform serving over 150,000 community members.
Native German and Croatian speaker, fluent English, based in Zagreb (CET). 22 years total experience, 15+ years in senior product, operations, and strategy.
German
Native or bilingual
English
Fluent
Croatian
Native or bilingual
Remote only
Primarily works remotely
Experience
- Health Impact AllianceFractional COOHEALTH AND WELLNESSSeptember 2025 - April 2026 (7 months)London, United Kingdom
- Established the overall operational strategy and execution framework (EOS) for Health Impact Alliance, aligning day-to-day operations with long-term growth and impact objectives.
- Oversee company-wide OKR setting, performance management, and reporting routines for all team members to ensure alignment, accountability, and transparent progress tracking.
- Own financial and operational reporting to the CEO, including budgeting, forecasting, and KPI dashboards to support data-driven decision making.
- Develop and continuously improve standard operating procedures (SOPs), internal processes, and audits to increase efficiency, reduce operational risk, and support scalable growth.
- Lead vendor and partner management, ensuring that contracts, procurement, and commercial relationships support cost-effective, compliant, and resilient operations.
- NEXGENCLOUD - HYPERSTACK AI STUDIOProduct managerDIGITAL AND ITApril 2025 - September 2025 (5 months)London, UK
- Led the full lifecycle development and public launch of a generative AI platform, enabling developers, researchers, and enterprises to fine-tune and deploy custom LLMs.
- Defined and prioritized product features across key components: data ingestion, model training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines.
- Drove the product vision, go-to-market strategy, and user experience roadmap to accelerate platform adoption and reduce time-to model.
- Collaborated with engineering, design, and GTM teams (Marketing, Sales, Support) to ensure feature feasibility, alignment with business goals, and timely delivery.
- Established an agile product development framework, optimizing team velocity and stakeholder communication.
- GALDERMA LAUSANNEOperations manager, Team LeadPHARMACEUTICALS INDUSTRYJanuary 2024 - January 2025 (1 year)Switzerland
- Managed 4 workstream teams resulting with a custom-developed digital marketing and brand solution for a new pharma product launch.
- Coordinated the communication and implementation of activities related to website development, custom CRM integration (Veeva CRM), marketing automation (Salesforce), and analytics and reporting (Salesforce data cloud, Google Analytics) resulting with in-time and in-budget deliverables and product launch.
- Implemented an operational framework for streamlining activities between business and technical stakeholders which resulted with cross-functional activities and end-to-end user journey coverage.
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Education
- International Master of Business InformaticsEUROPEAN UNIVERSITY VIADRINA2013International Master of Business Informatics
- Bachelor of Business & EconomicsUNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB2006Bachelor of Business & Economics
Certifications
- Progressive Organizational DesignCorporate Rebels2025
- AIPMM Certified Product ManagerAssociation of International Product Marketing & Management (AIPMM)2021