My work
Here's a brief summary of my work career so far. My full resume is available to download below.
Stuvia
Product Manager
I joined Stuvia as its first product hire at the beginning of 2023.
- In 2023, I worked to introduce foundational product management practices, including speaking to actual users regularly. I inherited a number of ongoing projects, one of which reduced costs of refunds for the business by 60% while maintaining our customer-friendly refund policy. I also led the hiring process of Stuvia's first internal user experience designer.
- In 2024, I established the first product vision and strategy. In it, I focused on first improving Stuvia's first impressions and reducing barriers to entry in order to drive acquisition (main company focus), and improving the overall user experience, especially on mobile devices, to drive user retention.
ProRail
Product Manager, 2016 — 2022
ProRail manages the Dutch railroads. Even though it does not operate any trains, it is still heavily involved in the daily operations. Joining as a parttime employee while I was still studying in 2016, I was involved in a number of projects, most notably taking on the role of Associate Product Manager for Btd-planner, software used to schedule maintainance to the Dutch railroads.
After finishing my Master's in Business Informatics, I joined ProRail fulltime as a Product Manager for Donna in 2018. Donna is software used for the capacity allocation of the Dutch railroad system, with its primary output being the timetable.
Over the course of four years, I revamped the engineering process, re-introducing foundational Scrum-practices and a focus on delivering working software. These efforts resulted in a 100% reduction in service interruptions directly following Donna's quarterly releases. I also set product vision and strategy for the first time since the launch of the product in 2005 and got stakeholder buy-in for a complete technical overhaul. Once the decision was made to scale up development of Donna, I established a hiring procedure for new product managers and led a team of six of them.
Finally, I launched an improved (80+% fewer false positives, unknown amount of fewer false negatives, 50% faster) conflict-detection module for Donna with accompanying visualisation, vastly improving the quality of the timetable and laying the foundation for important technological advancements for the Dutch rail sector such as Automatic Train Operation (ATO).