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Intensive and Broad Experience

Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker.

I possess more than two decades of experience in computer science, software engineering, and product development, amongst others. Below you can find short descriptions of my experience, supported with links to my relevant talks, articles, and other material.

Leading Leaders

I have been leading Engineering Managers, as well as team level leaders such as Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Tech Leads.

I have grown leaders from scratch, as well as helped seasoned leaders towards improving and honing their skills. In addition to leading and growing leaders, I also help them in getting experience beyond the borders of the company, by giving them opportunities to join me in different extracurricular activities such as guest lectures, meetups, and touch points with business leaders and frontrunners in IT.

Last but not least, I am proud and happy to be a preferred and wanted mentor for leaders outside my organization as well.

Growing Individuals and Teams

I have been spending years in growing individuals and teams, and making sure that this long term investment does not get downprioritized against short term wins.

I have had employees that I helped growing into new roles, or promoting in their current roles, as well as preparing them to take leadership positions.

In my opinion, it takes experience, courage, and optimizing for the greater good to help people move (or try) areas that they will perform better and be happier.

Agile

I have contributed to one of the largest and most successful agile transformations in Scandinavia, as a first generation Scrum Master in SimCorp. I also had the pleasure to collaborate with precious agile coaches and thought leaders.

Possessing both theoretical and practical knowledge and experience in Agile, as well having taken agile roles in practice is one of my superpowers as a senior leader.

I should also mention that I give guest lectures in agile at the top Scandinavian universities, speak at agile conferences, as well as organize and participate in professionals events.

Organizational Design

I have built teams from scratch, scaled up from a few software engineers to multiple team product areas (each of which had 3 to 5 teams), and collaborated leaders to restructure organizations in order to be more efficient and better serve the customers.

I employ data-driven decision making, focus on outcomes, avoid local optimization (and creating operational risks), and start with the end in mind when it comes to organizational design.

Recruitment

I recruited more than 40 professionals in roles spanning Engineering Managers, Software Engineers, Test Analysts, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, DevOps Engineers, Data Engineers, Financial Analysts, Technical Writers, and Student Assistants. I recruited full time employees, part-time employees, and contractors. I recruited in Denmark, India, Poland, Sweden, and Ukraine. I tried to innovate and refine my recruitment approach, and I have presented about this in conferences.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

DEI, and especially inclusion, is a focus area in my work life. Most recently, I have been an active member of the DEI council in SimCorp representing the largest part of the organization: the product development. In this role, I had the chance to work closely with Elizabeth Benedict Christensen, PhD and SimCorp CEO Christian Kromann. In addition, I have been actively contributing to both raising awareness, being an ally, as well using metrics to improve DEI.

Employer Branding

For more than 10 years, I have been actively helping with employer branding, attending career fairs representing my employers, organizing creative gatherings to build a solid talent pipeline, as well as being active on digital and in person channels regarding employer branding.

Coaching

Even in most sophisticated workplaces, one can encounter leaders that try to use Frederick Taylor's mindset from more than 100 years ago, in today's world. Knowledge workers of today, can be lead by better approaches, and coaching is one of the good methods that spans a different way of thinking and approaching to unlocking people's potential. I try to use coaching, when leading people while refraining from micromanagement, command&control, and carrot&stick motivation.

Mentoring

In my own career, I benefited vastly from being a mentee. Then, when I was ready and had a chance to give back, I also benefited from being a mentor. In particular, my mentorship in SimCorp's Women Leaders Mentoring Programme, and Nova's Mentoring Programme are my mentoring experience that I am most proud of.

Teaching

Between 2004 and 2012, I taught BSc and MSc level computer science and software engineering courses in Denmark and Turkey. Afterwards, I also did teaching for professionals such as Coded User Interface Testing in Danske Bank, and Agile courses in SimCorp both in person and virtually.

Software Development

For computer science research, I have developed software tools in different programming languages such as Java, C, C++, C#, MatLab, Perl, Visual Basic. As a professional software engineer, I mainly worked with C#, though I also worked with APL, PL/I, PL/B, and PowerShell. For personal use and out of curiosity I also used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP; as well as ML. Although I haven't been professionally coding since I moved to leadership roles, I keep myself up to date and acquired Azure, and Azure AI certifications.

Security

Majority of my academic work and scientific publications were on security. While I did not work in the industry on this topic (with a remarkable exception of working for Poul Otto Schousboe for a short time when he was heading the security department of Danske Bank) I kept my academic interest and I have been invited to security-related Master Thesis defenses and project works regularly.

Project Management

Although I am not advocating classical project management with iron triangle (of budget, scope, and time), I value and make use of project management skills. I have helped managing fairly large European research projects, as a postdoctoral researcher, including SENSORIA, SESAMO, MT-LAB, and IDEA4CPS projects (more information available on my LinkedIn profile). In the software industry, I used agile approaches to deliver value faster and more frequently in bpth projects and product development.

Board Membership

Apart from my service in European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (EuroDoc) as one of the two delegates of Denmark, my main experience as a board member comes from the PhD Association of the Technical University of Denmark for more than five years. On top of that, I was elected by the employees of SimCorp as a substitute for the Board of Directors between 2019 and 2022.