_ WHO AM I
About me
Personal
I’m the youngest of two children and grew up in the Rotterdam area, the Netherlands. I used to be that kid in class always with my nose hovering over a piece of paper, drawing doodles, and characters. When I was 13 I started playing around with Paint Shop Pro and quickly transitioned to Photoshop. At the age of 14, I created my first ever website via GeoCities and my digital interest peaked from there.
Fast forward, I studied IT / Network management, worked a year at Samsung as a Network Administrator. I figured, this isn’t what I was meant to be doing, so I continued to hone my digital skills by studying Communication & Multimedia Design.
During my studies, I created a business with two peers. We had a lot of fun and experience working on several different projects. As happens so often with startups, we went our separate ways after finishing uni and eventually closed the business.
I’ve played around a lot of different digital topics, each as interesting as the next! It’s no surprise I’ve found my partner through the internet as well. We were dating for 2 years until we both decided to migrate to the most neutral country in the world, Switzerland.
I’ve now been living together with my partner for almost 2 years, and we are proud parents of two beautiful boys.
Life is good, and the calm mindset that comes from being where you’re supposed to be, helps me function better in my day to day activities.
Professional
From very young I’ve been interested in computers and anything digitally related. It started with developing/altering chat bots for hotmail chat boxes back in 2002. In that same year I created my first ever website on GeoCities, and I haven’t lost interest in the web since.
Wanting to become more technical, I started studying IT Management and Network Management. My first full-time position was as a Network Administrator for Samsung, which taught me I need something more digital, web-based instead of network management. After a little over a year I left Samsung to pursue a new career and started studying BAsc Communication & Multimedia Design.
During my studies I’ve held my own company with two partners, and functioned as UX/UI designer mostly. After finishing university, our paths grew apart and we ended up shutting down our company. I continued in the path of UX/UI for some time.
In March 2016 I applied for a job as a designer at O-Products. Even though the original job posting said designer, I found myself more leaning towards the maintenance and upkeep of the b2b&b2c e-Commerce platforms than any design. The world of e-Commerce quickly grabbed my attention.
After some nice projects, guiding some interns to their graduations and the migration of our main b2b platform to a Magento 2.x platform, including an ERP integration, I was asked to work as a consultant for a Romanian development agency.
Having some previous sales experience as a sales promotor during my student time, I figured it would be the next challenge I'd like to tackle.
I’ve managed to grow the brand awareness a lot and generated a database with over 500 good leads / potential customers for the business.
I’ve held over 24 keynote presentations across the country by aligning ourselves with be-united business meetings as a partner. We also reached out to the UK market by attending and speaking on savant events, broadening the international outreach of the brand even more.
After this, I went back into e-Commerce / online marketing(SEO) at Fortune Factory. It was a lovely bunch of people and I love working in teams, but my time got cut short there because I migrated to Switzerland.
In December 2018, I was hired by wtv. and given the Product Owner title. However, I had little to no experience with Scrum nor anything that came along with the title of Product Owner. The first six months I worked mainly on educating myself. I followed an Atlassian Udemy course to become a Jira/Confluence power user and I followed the PSPO I and PSM I courses.
I did find my previous job experience to be beneficial in the role of Product Owner, where I could combine all my previous digital knowledge into one job. Managing projects, off-shore developers, QA teams and designers. There is a certain sense of satisfaction when you collaborate closely with a team of people and reach your goals.
Not surprisingly, my next role has been a Product Owner role as well at a digital agency in Zürich, called Crafft. I've always wanted to work at the agency side to get my hands on as many different projects as possible.
During my time at Crafft I've been able to build a scrum team from the ground up as a dedicated team for our biggest client, Sensirion. During this time we've worked on a complex system where we migrated a DjangoCMS platform to a headless Django Framework + Custom pagebuilder frontend situation.
With this project coming to a close, I am now looking forward to the next challenge to tackle.
I'm an eternal student
I am a curious person by nature. To better help me in my understanding and communication with the teams I collaborate with, I am currently following courses about the following subjects on Udemy.
- HTML5/CSS (refreshing knowledge)
- JavaScript
- Node.JS
- Python
Hobbies
Shall we talk?
Just looking for a chat? Business opportunities? Wanting to catch a coffee in downtown Zürich? I'm in! Let me hear from you.