Simon Brink, Product Owner

Six years ago, I did an internship at Visymo as part of my higher-education IT studies. The goal of an internship is to discover what you like and value about your future job. I loved it here! When they asked me if I wanted to stay on during the summer, I immediately accepted. It was far better than my job at the local supermarket and would do wonders for my professional future as well. After the summer, I was offered a real contract. I wanted to accept, but I did not want to give up on my studies. I was given every opportunity to complete my studies and I have been with the company for six years already. To this day, I still get plenty of room to work on my personal and professional development.

I started out as a junior web developer. After a few years, I moved up to the position of medior developer and I now work as Product Owner, which makes me the linchpin between stakeholders and a team of developers. I am responsible for mapping out stakeholders’ wishes and translating these into SERP requirements and acceptance criteria for the team. Instead of prescribing solutions, I try to come up with functional descriptions of these wishes. The developers know more than I do about effectively translating a question into a solution.

At many companies, you're dealing with external stakeholders. Here, everything is internal. My clients are also my colleagues. They think of something and then come to me to coordinate their idea. I enrich their ideas and provide input about the risks and pitfalls involved. We have to avoid developing something that is too simple. It is crucial that our solutions are efficient, fast and effective. Given how many people visit our pages every single day, our solutions must not become cumbersome. Servers have to be able to handle all that traffic. Despite how simple it may look from the outside, the underlying technology is highly advanced. Another thing I love about in-house development is that everyone speaks the same language. That makes it so much easier to get things done and it stimulates innovation. We may be a small company, but we do great things.

We will soon be sending a team to the Google Summit, to which Google invited us. I am really looking forward to that! We will first spend a few days in New York before travelling on to San Francisco. At the Summit, we will be the first to hear about upcoming product launches and can ask any questions we have. What makes those new products interesting for us? What is the use case? We will also look at existing products. Why does something not work for us when it does work for others? Are we missing something? In any case, it will be a very educational experience and a great opportunity to strengthen our connections. Our ties to Google are already strong, but they will be even stronger after the Summit. If we have a question, we can reach out to them immediately.

Myriad opportunities for growth and development, working with fun colleagues in a growing team and going on interesting business trips. I am having a great time here. Perhaps the best thing about working at Visymo is the personal touch that is always there. The management knows your personal situation and genuinely cares about you as a person. To give you an example, Jan Willem (Tusveld, CEO, ed.) and Jeroen (van den Adel, COO, ed.) actually crashed my wedding. I looked up and there they were. That was amazing!