Product Management enables me to follow my passion of building products, learn a lot and work on new problems every day. I am a generalist, and I love the broad scope of being a product manager.
Already when I was 14 I build several products, just for fun. When I studied at CODE I learned more about frameworks, soft skills and best practices, and led the first teams. During my studies, I led 4 very different teams for different projects. The biggest challenge was leading a team consisting out of 9 software engineers.
During my studies, I did two internships. One at Metro AG, where I was mainly focused on product discovery for blockchain based products. For 4 months, I spent most of my time speaking with key stakeholders from finance, supply-chain, CSR, and different product teams and exploring if blockchain technology could improve their processes or solve pain points. I also spend time educating technical employees about the technology behind bitcoin and Ethereum. From a technical standpoint, I was really hyped about blockchain, but quickly realized that there aren’t many real world applications.
A bit later, I worked at CIRC for 4 months (acquired by Bird), where I got ownership quickly about tracking and the map. I worked with data scientist every day, partly creating my own data analysis of certain issues, and created and prioritized new features, that potentially saved CIRC several million euros. Madeeha, one of the product managers I worked with, summarizes the collaboration like that: „Nick worked with us in Consumer tech team as a Product Manager intern. It was a delight to work with him. I was amazed at his speed of learning new things and then managing them with the rest of the stakeholders. He was not only interested in product management, he worked with data science and launch team as well. He is hands-on and very smart. He will be amazing at whatever he does next“.
Later, after my studies, I started the company „climateers“ that was trying to help its users to cope with climate anxiety, by providing inspiration about positive climate actions. During the first 6 months, we were only focussed on product discovery, launching new products every second week to users, and trying to learn where they see the most value. During this time I learned a lot on how to build low-code experiments, or WhatsApp concierge tests. I also learned a lot about user interviews, value propositions and finding product/market fit. We scaled our engineering team to 3 engineers and one UX/UI Designer and soon onboarded a new product manager, to give me more focus on fundraising and other strategic topics.
I prefer to be a product manager, that is focussed on user value, launching frequent experiments to launch the right features, and building long term strategies. I am familiar with project management and requirements engineering, but wouldn’t like to spend my time only building (features without value).
