Laurin's Page

My introduction to roadmapping at my first product management job was a painful one. I came into AIESEC’s global office as a new product manager with little experience and thus took “how it was done” at face value, not questioning it. Every six months, there was a major organization-wide conference, where all new product developments would be introduced and downscaled to the organization’s national offices. Buy-in and education to country managers would happen at this touchpoint. It was common knowledge that if you didn’t release your new features there, it would be very hard to downscale and implement them.

Continue reading “Why your product roadmap should not be a Gantt chart.”

Recently I went to a Product Manager Meetup and I couldn’t help but notice that throughout the conversations almost everyone present complained about how much Jira sucks at least once – including myself. Yet again, everyone is using it, including myself and it’s definitely not for a lack of alternatives available on the market. So I was reflecting on the tools that I work with on an everyday basis for my work at Educatly and noticed that Jira is invaluable to us – because we learned to use it for its strength which is allowing engineers to collaborate in an agile project – and for everything else we integrated Jira with Google Sheets!

Continue reading “Does Jira really suck?”

Have you ever stood in awe just how some companies, products or websites are able to time their messages just right over multiple channels, or how their customer service knew just about everything about you? Apps send you push-notifications when you quit the app with items in your shopping cart, websites send you recommendations based on what you consumed before, etc…

While this is something consumers nowadays expect, as someone building their own product this can be extremely hard to implement and is usually an after-thought.

Continue reading “How to build a low-cost high-performance marketing machine (Part 1)”

Recently I found myself hands deep in a very promising project. There’s a business process involving the food ordering products I am currently managing, which requires us to manually create digital menus. 

The products are called Fave Table Ordering and Fave Takeaway. They’re pretty cool. Check them out!

Continue reading “How to know when to kill a project”

Last week I shared about how I set out to create my own professional website at zero cost. If you followed that article, by now you should have a readily-installed WordPress website accessible under your own domain. Probably it looks ugly, but that’s okay. We will make it pretty, later.

However, first, we finish setting up your toolbox. Making pretty comes last. Why you ask? Well, WordPress is a fickle bitch anything you do, be it plugins (more functions) or themes (making it more pretty) can break your website. While setting this one up, I had to start all over again. So let’s make sure we build all the capabilities before you spend all the time making it look nice. What do we start with? 💰of course 🤑

Continue reading “How to own a professional website at zero costs! (Part 2)”

When I moved to South East Asia, I knew the money will work a little different. Coming from Germany I’m used to cash. We have a saying: “Nur Bares ist Wahres” meaning “Cash is King”. Wanna pay for your coffee with your card? Good luck This might come as a surprise to other people from Europe. Having lived in the Netherlands for 1 year, I got so used to paying with my card everywhere, that when I came back to Germany for the first time after a while, I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t let me pay for my coffee with my card. Minimum spend 10€. eWallet? What’s that? People usually use 1-2 cards and of course cash.

Continue reading “How to stay sane with your personal finances in South East Asia”