Even though many of our graduates will have progressed in their careers since completing a case study, they are still of interest to students who wish to gain an understanding of the world of work.

My main role is to help drive the team to create an out of the box product. I enable communication between the team, users and stakeholders to prioritise, plan and execute the tasks needed to achieve our goals.

This also includes making crucial decisions on what goes in or not, give estimates of release given the time or the scope of the project. Also empowering the team to build the right things in the product to reduce the cost of change.

For the team I present the short and long term vision of the product. I also research the domain of the product. This helps me make decisions if there are multiple ways to complete a task. Prepare the user stories that will be started in the next week.

For the stakeholders I demonstrate the last installment of work to enable feedback. Capture new user stories for the future. Report the potential release date if given a fixed scope or what features can be completed if given a fixed date.

For the product I try to break the boundaries of user, stakeholders and the team. Enabling one style of communication when talking about our product. This also includes shared resources such as user experience, technical documentation and support.

Leaving the comfort zone of programming to a of communication, user focus and business focus is very challenging. To continuously improve my softer skills will help me influence the product to reach it's potential and further.

Bring the focus of the team from the technical implementation and architecture back to the original problem. The question they need to answer is "Why are we doing this?"

Globalising a brand or product could be easy if you have the money. However, trying to make a product and all of it's supported documentation fit the culture of your target audience is harder. This is localisation.

As a person who is bilingual and have experiences in two different cultures. Making documentation to break the barriers is interesting.

My technical skills helped me progress in the company. But my soft skills progressed me further.

Communication
Teamwork
Leadership
Organisation

Certified Scrum Product Owner

Symology (2006) - Worked as a COBOL and .Net programmer in an asset management system.

STN (2007) - Worked as a .Net Developer on a data-driven mobile applications.

SDL plc Sheffield (2008) - Worked as a .Net developer on a multilingual dictionary and a tool to help authors create quality content.

SDL plc Amsterdam (2012) - Moved to the Netherlands to work as the Product Owner for a service in providing information to improve the quality of documents in an organisation.

I plan to stay in the Netherlands and hope to be in a position to always improve our processes and coach people how to use Scrum and Agile effectively.

Apply for anything as a programmer. The experience you gain after you graduate is very crucial. Most of the practices can be applied to any language. I would learn a new technology twice a year and the basics of a new language every year or two.

Also, always find out why we are creating the product. Forgetting the original problem or the user's need could lead to the wrong decisions being made.