I'm an open-minded, highly engaged, innovative, motivating, communicative, and creative person that likes to envision new products, services, and ways of interacting with people.
I like to think outside the box, challenge the old ways, and discuss optimizations for every single person, no matter if she's an internal colleague or customer.
I like to spin a web between the people I work with to make them as productive as possible and reach fantastic results.
I'm looking for positions in product companies that have a clear product vision and strategy. I love being the evangelist of the product vision both internally and externally. I love building products that have a scalable business model and are appealing to a clearly defined market.
I love making good people better by providing them room for experiments and failure. I lead by example and consider myself a colleague not a boss. I wrote down the principles of my leadership style further down on this page.
I helped creating several new products, some as greenfield, others as brownfield approach. Some of the products I helped creating served small focussed communities of practice whereas others are general purpose platforms with thousands of daily users.
Since my very first projects, I educated my teams about the benefits of being agile. I successfully changed the development and project organization of companies for the better and do seriously embrace agile. I am also Certified Scrum Product Owner and Scrum Master.
I acted as portfolio manager for several teams for which a common portfolio strategy and alignment was needed. Taking care that the puzzle pieces of various development teams come together in one awesome result is what motivates me.
I always try to keep my users in mind when brainstorming about UI changes with my UX leads. Awesome UX is key to the adoption of products, so I involve myself in UX labs, POCs and listen to the feedback of users of my products.
I've successfully led various projects. From small to large, from local to international, from non-profit to international groups of companies. I've led rollout projects and had the chance to define golden master blueprints for my customers.
I generally let my team members decide how they want to complete tasks. I would rather ask for their opinion than explain how I want problems to be solved. I rather provide guidance instead of orders.
I believe in having a strong social bond with the people on my teams because I think a friendly relationship creates an open, trusting, and secure working environment.
I am open and transparent about my decisions as it makes them more comprehensible for my teams.
I aim to be predictable for my teams to build trust and work in an anxiety-free atmosphere.
I encourage my employees to cooperate and collaborate instead of competing.
I educate my teams to develop high ambitions for working, results, and presentation of their outcome.
I prefer not to constrain my teams to a fixed set of rules. As situations and problems change, they must make their own decisions and help improve and adapt practices. Instead, I prefer developing a common set of values on which we as a team operate and base our decisions.
I keep external pressure (project timelines, for example) away from the developers. More pressure will not help them perform "better", so forwarding pressure will counteract the intended result.
I protect the team's chemistry even if that means extra time and energy must be invested.
I listen to my teams' feedback to improve my leadership style, decisions I've made, and guidance I've given.
My focus was on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work; especially on how distributed teams can align their work using Social Media tools.Thesis title: Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks.
My focus was on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and software development methodologies.
Thesis title: Impact of Agile Software Development Methodologies on Competence Development in Computer Science Education - Analysis and Evaluation of Empirical Studies on Pair Programming.
My focus was on computer science, software development, media production, e-learning, and mobile learning.
Thesis title: Integration of External Application Features in CSCW Systems Using Web Services.
In 2016, we won the prestigious BME Innovation Award with our customer Robert Bosch GmbH (using wescale.com as integration platform for B2B Procuremnt). Read more.
In 2016, we won the prestigious BME Award "Excellence in e-Solutions" with our customer ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE. Read more.
In 2014, we won the prestigious BME Award "Excellence in e-Solutions" with our customer Alfred Kärcher GmbH & Co. KG. Read more.
In 2013, I won the Teaching award for the rising generation of educators of the University of Paderborn (German: Lehrpreis für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs) for a series of seminars fostering the collaboration between students of different universities and disciplies.
In 2011, we won the Award for innovation and quality in teaching of the University of Paderborn (German: Förderpreis für Innovation und Qualität in der Lehre) for our work on PINGO.
In 2010, we won the Best Paper Award at the DeLFI Conference 2010.
In 2010, we won the Best Paper Award at the the 14. Conference on Information Quality.
In 2001, I won the 1st place in the Viktor Klemperer competition for tolerance and democracy.