Adrian Van Nierop
Engineering Products
Adrian Van Nierop
Engineering Products
Hello!
I am an impact-driven engineering and product leader with a passion for software and product development. With a career at the intersection of engineering and product management, I've developed a knack for leading teams toward innovative solutions that drive significant business growth. With a strong technical background, I enjoy uncovering and developing innovative solutions for unmet customer needs. I'm an applied problem solver focusing on tangible solutions to real problems.
Experience
Juggling Software Engineering and Product Management, I work with stakeholders using React, Typescript, Javascript, Python, Django, PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud to create a platform that allows facilities to understand, manage and optimise their maintenance plans.
Responsibilities:
- Understand our customers across a range of industries.
- Work with our customers, business stakeholders and technical team to identify product opportunities.
- Create product roadmaps that unify technical vision, customer needs and business goals.
- Scope solutions to their smallest coherent state to ship to customers as early as possible.
- Work in an Agile framework using Test Driven Development.
- Continuously identify and work down technical debt.
- Onboard and mentor new engineerins, product and data analysts.
- Set and maintain high technical standard in security, scalability and reliability.
- Write and release code.
Achievements so far:
- Increased performance and reliability by spearheading the identification, prioritisation, and improvement of system performance bottlenecks. This resulted in a 10x performance increase and allowed us to expand confidently to larger customers.
- Development of a Product Strategy and Roadmap that was presented to and accepted by the board of investors, unlocking further funding.
- Mainted delivery momentum with a servant leadership approach and tight stakeholder management, allowing us to achieve our roadmap milestones.
- Doubled acquisition with API Integrations targeted to unlock new customer segments while complimenting our product goals. Increased sales by developing dashboards that delivered the right information to customers.
- Identified slow website loading times as a major cause of customer churn. Using analytics, identified the lowest performing parts of the product and dramatically improved them with database query optimisations and intelligent data fetching, decreasing customer churn by 10%.
- Identified maintenance costs range as a major pain point for facilities. Added customer value by creating dashboards allowing facilities to compare maintenance costs with partner properties, giving competitive spending insights. This increased the sign-up of new organisations by 20%.
- Unlocking new customer opportunities by identifying software used by the most prominent players in the industry and integrating it into our system. This led to the sign-up of high-value customers.
- Built team culture through ownership, cross-collaboration and celebrating wins.
As the Engineering Manager at Colenso, I reported directly to the Head of Innovation, overseeing the successful delivery of a $5M digital portfolio of SAAS products for Mars, a prominent American multinational. Spearheading this initiative involved introducing groundbreaking products such as the MyHooman animal shelter and adoption platform, Pedigree GoodPoints rewards program, and Zevia naturally sweetened drinks, all of which redefined their respective industries by leveraging AI, image recognition, and Web3 technologies, notably blockchain.
I achieved this by setting product goals and KPIs and galvanising our rapidly growing team of designers and engineers through a servant leadership mentality to reach them with collaboration and customer empathy. I have been utilising agile tools and principles to help ensure the business focuses on the correct problems at the right time and works towards a common goal.
Key responsibilities:
- Led two multidisciplinary teams comprising frontend developers, backend developers, solution architects, product owners, UI/UX/CX designers and QA testers that designed, built, tested, and deployed digital products
- Manage the direction and plan for products, exploring opportunities with customers worldwide.
- Collaborate with teams in thinking big, unifying the technical vision, customer needs and business goals to find solutions to these opportunities.
- Scoped these solutions to their smallest coherent state to ship to customers as early as possible.
- Balancing user needs with business impact and technical feasibility by working closely with product managers, product designers, engineers, quality assurance, DevOps and product marketers.
- Setting Product and Delivery Roadmaps and clearly articulating product vision, business goals and customer drivers to the wider team, including engineering, quality assurance, design, marketing and business.
- Ensured the quality of output is high and technical debt is low.
- Setting technical standards, delivery and testing processes across teams, improving project uptake speed, maintenance and reducing bugs.
- Solutioning of technical architecture and data flows hosted in AWS and Azure.
- Writing and reviewing code in ReactJS, NextJS, Node.js, Express, and ASP.NET.
- Mentored and upskilled junior product owners and engineers.
Key achievements:
- Successfully advocated for and introduced Agile and Product thinking into the digital department, hugely improving output and impact.
- Successfully led both teams to deliver product features on time, meeting individual product KPIs.
- Solutioning of technical architecture and data flows that adhered to Mars technical standards.
- Proved the use of blockchain for recording customer transactions and balances, driving innovation and trust.
- Set technical standards across teams, improving project uptake speed and maintenance and reducing bugs.
- The creation of a UI design process that worked fluidly between design and development, improving solution turnaround.
- Using a data-centric approach and a better understanding of customers as individuals achieved the following.
- Increased our on-site conversion by over 400%.
- Proved linking of off-site customer conversion using on-site promotions.
- Optimised our ad approach doubling conversion.
- Empowered customers to use their data to decrease business costs, saving thousands of dollars for businesses.
- Identified veterinary clinics as high-value customers and acquired them through discounted check-ups for newly adopted animals, driving conversion.
- Leveraged existing solutions to deliver a multi-regional B2C and B2B online store in 3 months while delivering a bespoke user experience that talked to our client's brand and vision and met KPIs.
- Implemented an A/B testing approach across teams to rapidly experiment and drive continuous improvements
This experience reflects my adeptness in steering complex product portfolios, fostering innovation, and driving cross-functional collaboration, resulting in tangible business growth and market-leading solutions.
As an Engineering Manager for MyHooman, an online animal shelter and adoption platform for Mars, I was tasked with improving the development team and process so it would no longer be a loss-leading product. At the time of joining MyHooman, user acquisition and retention were low and dropping, and features came in over time and budget.
MyHoomans vision is to help every animal find their forever home, and it aims to be viable by reducing the acquisition cost of gaining new customers to below that of traditional marketing methods.
Responsibilities:
- Leading eight-plus individuals comprising frontend developers, backend developers, solution architects, product owners, UI/UX/CX designers and QA testers that designed, built, tested, and deployed MyHooman.
- Progress MyHooman to be profitable by reducing the cost of acquisition to below target.
- Make sure features are developed on time and within budget.
- Reduce bugs in production.
- Reduce team churn.
- Allocating work to team members and ensuring the quality of output is high and technical debt is low.
- Writing and reviewing code in ReactJS and ASP.NET.
- Solutioning of technical architecture and data flows hosted in Azure.
- Performance reviews and peer reviews of team members.
Working with the development team, I identified the following areas for improvement:
- Lack of trust between the development team and management.
- No product roadmap or prioritised backlog.
- The development team did not understand the product vision or goals.
- Lack of a design process and empowered UX role.
- Lack of a defined test process and QA role.
- Incomplete features, bugs and poor site performance.
- A fragmented team split between frontend, backend, UI/UX design and CX design.
- Poor team morale.
Over the next few months, I implemented the following solutions in order:
- Practised a servant leadership philosophy with team members, with openness and transparency, where anyone could ask any question.
- Setting a product roadmap, making it highly visible to all stakeholders, thus building trust through transparency, and ensuring everyone was working on the right problem.
- Turning the development team into a solution team by empowering them to find solutions that were measured by how they moved our KPIs, increasing the viability of what we delivered.
- Set code quality standards, branching strategies, and architecture patterns.
- Quantified technical debt and put time aside each sprint to tackle it.
- Implemented an Agile way of working with a clear definition of Done and Ready, allowing the team to have a say in what they delivered, increasing their morale.
- Combined the frontend, backend and UX/UI design teams into one combined team working off a single prioritised backlog, allowing faster creation of more desirable and feasible solutions.
- Created a dedicated QA role, testing process, and release pipeline, reducing bugs and customer churn.
- Created a true UX role within the team, allowing us to distinguish and optimise our UX and UI to meet the different needs of shelter managers and adopters.
- Worked to integrate MyHooman with Pet stores using cross-platform offers, driving acquisition and conversion.
- Leveraged AI to automate the writing of animal adoption profiles, saving shelters time and increasing the quality and accuracy of animal profiles.
- Leveraged Image recognition to automatically detect animal breeds, saving shelters time.
A key feature we developed was allowing customers to change their physical addresses online, reducing a large portion of physical branch visits and lowering operational costs. Furthermore, with COVID disrupting branch availability, this feature was considered a high priority.
Often a seemingly simple feature, as above, would touch multiple business areas such as credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, and managed funds, each with its subsets of business rules. Adding to this complexity was ASB's digital infrastructure, which was vast and loosely coupled technically and data-wise. It had been built layer upon layer over decades, often without touching the underlying systems to meet current business requirements causing quirks and exceptions. Many times these subtle limitations were lost to institutional churn.
Working on the above feature, I performed the following duties:
- Set feature KPIs that fed into business KPIs.
- Identified all business areas that were touched and their business rules.
- Understood the technical ability of each of the identified systems.
- Working with an Agile cross-functional team, designed, developed and tested the feature.
- Working with the larger digital ecosystem of many product teams, we successfully released our feature alongside many other updates, ultimately meeting our KPIs.
I predominately focused on the Sharetank, a groundbreaking Z-Energy product that allowed customers to pre-purchase fuel and draw down on it later. This product was a first for fuel companies and, as such, presented unique challenges, such as confidentiality requiring development to be separated from other products, identifying and mitigating fraud risks and the potential revenue loss to Z-Energy.
Below are some of the many tasks I performed:
- Ran multiple multidisciplinary product teams of six-plus individuals following Agile principles.
- Developed and reviewed code written in React Native and ASP.NET and hosted on Azure.
- Sized, costed and created roadmaps for Z Energy products.
- Technical Architecture and dataflow mapping for Z Energy products.
- Used computer vision to recognise vehicle number plates at an accuracy to be trusted by consumers nationwide.
- Balanced technical feasibility with business viability and user desirability to meet budget and timeline requirements.
- Followed a build, measure, learn philosophy.
- Set up analytics and data tracking to monitor product usage and transactions to identify fraud and mitigate risk.
Outcomes:
- Delivered Sharetank with zero overtime on time.
- Met Pay-by-Plate's and Sharetank's KPIs, proving its business worth.
- With the delivery of Sharetank, user engagement with the Z-Energy App increased 10-fold, and the app rating increased to over four stars.
- Won multiple Product design awards.
During this time, I progressed from a Junior Developer to a Tech Lead, also supporting as a Sales Engineer. Often my work was done without oversight, and being self-motivated and tightly aligned with the company's goals was crucial to its economic success.
Through these growth phases, I was responsible for scoping, developing, and delivering work across the full stack of the web, mobile and experiential applications with a strong focus on the user presentation layer.
As a startup, most of our products had tight timelines and budgets, no room for errors, and an extremely low appetite for risk. I always had to balance user desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability, giving me a foundation in product ownership and delivery as a developer.
Key Responsibilities:
- Frontend development in Typescript, Java, Kotlin, Object-C and Swift with Android Native, iOS Native, React Native and React.
- Backend development in Typescript with NodeJS and Express and C# with ASP.NET.
- Augmented Reality Development in Unity.
- DevOps with Jenkins and AWS.
- Technical Architecture and dataflow mapping for solutions to new products and features.
- Cost estimating, timeline creation and team composition for new projects across frontend development, backend development, QA testing, and design.
Key Achievements:
- Promoted from Software Developer to Tech Lead.
- Worked with Google to build a digital swear jar using NLP.
- Worked with Google to create a mobility assistance app.
- Worked on an AR app, Monteith’s Beer Hunter, where users could hunt for their best beer match.
- Won multiple Product design awards.
Hobbies
I enjoy swimming at new beaches and mountain biking when the weather is good. When it is gloomy outside, I read historical & science fiction and catch up on tech and product blogs. I like experimenting with new programming languages & frameworks and occasionally designing spaceships in my head.