Experience

Internal Coach @ Coosto (May 2023 – Present)

Sometimes employees get stuck in their work-life balance, or feel they have lost their grip on their lives. As a result, employees may lose their job satisfaction, their productivity goes down and they have more difficulty performing their job properly. This, in turn, can affect their personal lives, which can compromise an employee’s overall well-being.

As an Internal coach I help employees to find a new balance and thus prevent worse complaints and absenteeism. This takes the form of counseling sessions and these sessions are confidential.

Employees can come to me when they are stuck at work or recognise one or more of the symptoms below:

  • Stress
  • Fatigue
  • Quickly irritated
  • Reduced job satisfaction
  • Unexplained physical complaints for which no medical cause has been found
  • Forgetful
  • Futility
  • Concentration problems

Software Development Manager @ Coosto (Jul 2022 – Present)

As a Software Development Manager I have a leadership role within Coosto’s Development department and am I part of the IT-management team.

In the role of people manager I support and facilitate the work of our multidisciplinary development teams. My key responsibilities are: coaching, hiring, guiding and growing the teams and individual employees. I also try to identify talent within my teams and with open and honest feedback I encourage personal growth.

Together with my teams I draw up the IT roadmap and the OKR’s for the Development department. Safeguarding the progress, detecting possible bottlenecks and impediments are key elements of my role.

Advising and mentoring colleagues proactively on technical and organisational aspects are part of my job as well. I prioritise, make choices and monitor the quality of the work of my teams and I will initiate projects and look for consensus and broad support to realise and implement these projects.

Last, but not least: maintaining an optimal collaboration between the Development department and the business and act as an Agile coach within the organisation.

Manager/Teamlead Product Owners @ Coosto (Jan 2019 – Jul 2022)

  • Manager of the Coosto Product Guild containing 4 Product Owners and 3 user experience designers at Coosto
  • Ad-interim HR manager of 2 senior developers
    Member of the Management Team @ Coosto (Jan 2019 – Present)
  • Determining vision of the Coosto product together with the Product Guild and Management team
  • Propagate the vision throughout the organization (by making use of the OKR framework)

Product Owner @ Coosto (June 2016 – Present)

  • Responsible for the Coosto Engage product, which results in:
  • Supporting 10 developers, 2 QA engineers and 3 user experience designers, divided over 3 development teams
  • Qualification of new backlog items and clearly expressing them
  • Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions, set by Product Management and Product Development policy
  • Optimising the value of the work the development team performs
  • Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the scrum team will work on next
  • Ensuring the development team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed
  • Ensuring the product meets quality standards to achieve and maintain customer satisfaction.
  • Giving demonstrations of the newly implemented features towards stakeholders

Product Owner @ Planon (November 2012 – June 2016)

  • Supporting a development team containing 7 developers & 4 testers.
  • Qualification of new backlog items
  • Clearly expressing Product Backlog items
  • Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions, set by Product Management and Product Development policy
  • Optimising the value of the work the development team performs
  • Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the scrum team will work on next
  • Ensuring the development team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed
  • Ensuring the product meets quality standards to achieve and maintain customer satisfaction.
  • Giving demonstrations of the newly implemented features towards stakeholdersResult:
  • A groomed product backlog
  • An optimal team velocity

Functional designer @ Planon (October 2007 – November 2012)

  • Understanding the different user roles targeted with the product features you design
  • Thinking about how different user roles may want the product features you design to behave
  • Regularly evaluate designs with Product Owner, team members, customers and other stakeholders.
  • Support Product Owners in defining Product Backlog items which are independent, testable and appropriately sized
  • Support testers in defining acceptance tests for features you design.
  • Support team in splitting Product Backlog items into sprint tasks
  • Understanding the impact of any decision you make on the team’s velocity
  • Maintain up-to-date knowledge level
  • Conduct the business according to applicable law and company rules
  • Initiate process optimization on all above mentioned areas

Results

  • Timely availability of functional designs
  • Correct translation of functional designs into working software and user documentation
  • Meeting project deadlines

Scrum master @ Planon (August 2009 – April 2012)

  •  Improving the software development processes and coaching colleagues both inside and outside the software development department
  • Understanding the impact on the team’s velocity of decisions made inside and outside the development team and making sure all stakeholders are aware of this

Software Tester @ Polderland L&S Technology (July 2002 – September 2003)

  • Polderland L&S Technology delivered the Dutch spelling checker for Microsoft
  • It was my responsibility to test the Dutch spelling checker for all available Microsoft Office versions

Education

  • Bachelor’s degree Bedrijfskundige Informatica @ Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (2002 – 2007)
  • Certified scrum master @ Scrum Alliance (2009)
  • Meditation Trainer @ School voor Intuïtieve Ontwikkeling (May 2017) ​
  • Psycho-energetic therapist @ School voor Intuïtieve Ontwikkeling (June 2019)
  • Currently in the 3​ and final year of Psycho-energetic therapist @ School voor Intuitieve Ontwikkeling (Sept 2019 – present)

Skills & Competencies

  • Agile methodologies like Kanban & Scrum
  • Specification by Example
  • Mastering the requirements process
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Axure Interactive Wireframe Software & Mockup
  • High level of emotional empathy towards other people which results in good communication skills
  • Fluent in Dutch & English

Interests

  • Sports (Basketball, Soccer)
  • IT trends
  • Social media
  • Coaching
  • Meditation
  • Reiki