The interview series with employees of the dataglobal Group
Tell us a bit about your career. How did you get into Product Management?
During the Corona period, I started working at windream – first as a developer. In the beginning, I was alone, but soon two other developers joined the team. Over time, my focus shifted more and more from pure technical implementation to organizational tasks: Coordination, communication with various stakeholders and, above all, close collaboration with our customers. I realized how much I enjoy this part of the job – defining goals together, developing solutions and ensuring that everyone involved works well together. At the beginning of 2024, I officially took the step into Product Management.
What do you find particularly exciting about your role?
What I particularly enjoy about my role is its versatility. I not only work with development teams, but also across departments – this means I am regularly in contact with very different areas and people in the company. This gives me a much better understanding of the challenges and stress that others have to deal with and I develop more empathy for their perspectives. I also find the discussions with customers particularly exciting: Their feedback is incredibly valuable and shows what really matters in practice. I also simply enjoy my work – whether it’s on new, exciting projects or when I give presentations and realize that my counterpart is really interested.
What inspired you to develop the new Customer Portal? What challenges did you want to solve with it?
The Customer Portal was assigned to me as part of my role as Product Owner – together with our very dedicated development team from Romania. It was a great opportunity for me to get to know even more about the company and to better understand the different needs of our customers. The portal is aimed at eXpurgate customers, among others, and aims to create more self-service options. Customers should be able to make adjustments themselves and obtain information about the products they use – without always needing direct support. In the long term, the Customer Portal is intended as a central gateway to the Data City: a platform that gives customers access to many different solutions and products from the entire Group.
How did you organize the development process of the portal? Which phases were particularly exciting or challenging?
At the beginning, the development process was still quite unstructured – there were many parallel topics and no clear priorities. The first phase therefore consisted primarily of getting to know the team and the project environment better, understanding where support was needed and developing a common way of working. We introduced meeting structures and gradually shifted the focus to the really relevant topics. The close, flexible collaboration within the team was particularly exciting – we deliberately didn’t want to act too rigidly, but rather decide together what was important next. One of the biggest challenges was to organize the multitude of tasks: To do this, we structured a large pool of topics – by area such as frontend/backend, by brand or by current development status – and regularly communicated where we stood. This not only provided clarity, but also strengthened the team spirit.
What are the most important features of the new portal that you would recommend to customers?
Of course, our Customer Portal is an admin tool. It offers customers the opportunity to control many settings and processes themselves – which not only saves time, but also gives them more control over their applications. Particularly exciting is the planned integration of our vysoft solution – the next big highlight, which offers additional potential for cross-selling and further increases the benefits of the portal. So it’s worth checking back regularly – new functions and improvements are being added all the time.
How do you ensure that the Customer Portal is continuously improved? Is there a kind of feedback loop?
We are currently in close contact with internal partners such as eleven and soon also vykon – this is already helping us to gather valuable feedback and make optimizations at an early stage. As soon as the first customers are actively working with the portal in the next phase, the focus will of course also be on user feedback. The aim is to continuously gather feedback from the field in order to tailor the portal even more specifically to actual needs. In this way, we ensure that the further development not only makes technical sense, but also creates real added value for users.
Thank you very much for the interview, Kevin!
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