Nice to meet you!

Curious about me? Apart from a strong interest in snacks and red hair there are also other things about me worth knowing.

Scroll down for more details on me – on the private side and professionally!

Why red and hungry?

“Red” due to my hair color – “Hungry” due to my absolute passion for (tasty) food and the hunger for new things to see and learn. Best combination to get me to do something or show up somewhere: it involves free food and something creative which challenges me to use what I know, or let me learn something new.

This website is ment to gather and share knowledge and memories, to reflect on my learning process and have a base of discussion with people from all over the world on various topics.

My professional journey

From now to the early beginning – with a little more spice than you would find on my linkedin profile.

The following is focusing less on the content of my work, but my personal journey.

Trisor
Product Management

Trisor turned out to be the most exiting place to work for me so far – not necessarily due to the product itself (which is pretty cool though: automated high security safety deposit boxes) – but because I joined when it started to be built and only a pitchdeck existed. We were just a handful of people and as the Product Manager I was in full control of shaping and building the product with my development team. The energy flow within these phase is quite addicting – especially since every day also gives me new brain snacks not only topic wise, but on how things need to be handled differently in the early stage startup with a completely new product compared to an “established” product in a 50 people + company. Within only 7 months we successfully launched three web applications and opened our first location in Berlin on 18.05.2021. Additionally to Product I am responsible for IT, Service and Operations, which gave me a lot of room to grow.

Elinvar
Product Management

The two years at Elinvar was very emotional and very educating for me. Being part of a fast growing company throws you into a boiling pot of all kind of topics related to quick scaling, pressure and growing politics. Nevertheless I loved coming to the office and work with my team to develop our SaaS web applications. Long evenings with production releases but also beers and board games with a group of wonderful people from all over the world will probably stick to my memory most, as well as being stuck in a 2 sqm bathroom for two hours due to a broken lock.

I found my passion for product management here and realised it most, when in the last two weeks before I left the company, a colleague said after I made a presentation about the suitability statement for Advisory Trading Services in a very surprised voice “Neele, how can you be so passionate about a 13 page PDF document”?

Seerene
IT Consulting & Project Management

When I joined Seerene I was a Junior IT Consultant. When I left, I was responsible for customer projects of whole central Europe as Project Executive EMEA-C. I learned that mostly within a small team it opens up so many possibilities when showing that you are capable. After one year I was living in Hong Kong to consult and conduct Software Integration and Data Analysis for pilot projects of major chinese banks. I left Seerene when I realised I am not satisfied with stagnating personal growth and low impact on product development which was crucial for my customers satisfaction.

Link-ProjeX
Project/Product Management

The contrast could not have been bigger: from a giant american corporate to a social startup with only three people. I joined a team of two developers and one former IBM student colleague. 8 months of experimenting, failures and learnings later, I ran out of savings and decided to drop out, as we could not scale fast enough. It was my first touchpoint with startups and the culture of agile and lean development. It had major impact on my further decisions and priorities for early stage startups to enable scaling and cashflow.

Ernst & Young
IT Consulting for Transaction Advisory

After 3 months of travelling through Japan, Australia and Indonesia I returned to Germany to start my new job at EY in January 2016. The office was only 10 minutes from my Berlin apartment and I was excited to be back home. Big was my surprise, that I was staffed already after 4 days in a project on the other side of Germany and would only spend Fridays and weekends in Berlin. It was not what it was promised during my interview and I was pretty bummed about sitting 10 hours a day in a room with now windows and spending lone evenings in the hotel. I left EY after only 5 months as I could not imagine myself proceeding with this lifestyle and the carbon footprint of flying every week with a plane. Working in transaction advisory services confronts you additionally with a lot of negativ aspects, people losing their jobs and externals being hired not only to support the split off process but also to have a party to channel the negativ mood too

IBM Germany study programm

I worked hard in my last years in school to be able to get one of 20 seats for the IBM Germany corporate study program of Economical Computer Science in Berlin. 2012 I said goodbye to the countryside life and moved to Berlin. Three years later I finished successfully my Bachelor of Science and worked in full time periods in 6 different projects within IBM Germany. This program gave me the chance to gather experience in different fields like Project Management of Software Development projects, Technical Sales, Public Relations and Merger and Aquisitions. When the end of the 3 years at IBM and my Bachelor Thesis came in reach, I decided to move to other opportunities as I wanted to stay in Berlin and most of the interesting topics were handled within the main branch of IBM in south Germany.

And what was happening before?

I grew up on the country side, close to Bremen in north Germany. My early years were significantly influenced by nature, books, animals and thanks to my brother, video games and computers.

Most of my time was spend on training starting by the age of 4 on a horse back – and after many years of hard work I became a professional rider in the german national team for eventing as one of 6 Teenagers within Germany. As a person with an unregistered horse with no breeding line, which I trained myself starting by the age of 3 years, I needed to prove myself within a group of other teenagers with wealthy background and bought and pre-trained horses. At the age of 16 I decided that I will not proceed the professional sports path after school as a sports soldier, as it would require a more backed up financial situation and network. Instead I was lucky to listen to an IBM presentation and decided that at that day, that his will be my goal and I want to study information technology within the IBM study program. The years of dedicated training and organising starting at age 4 set the foundation for my skills today and I am really grateful that my parents enabled me to have these experiences during my early years of life.