About me

My name is Clemens - if you want to know more about my professional life, you can check my linked.in profile. What else do you need? Let’s try this here…

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. - Leo Tolstoy

In spirit of this, I will try to explain influential points or companies in my life, that made me rethink and pivot.

METRO Group

Beeing part of an international acting retailer shaped me in no small amount. To date the margin oriented business of METRO and the realities that generates make me ask questions like “How many yogurt cups do we need to sell to pay for this feature?” or “How will that benefit our customers?” more often than I ever would have thought.

viadee

Being a consultant. Trying hard to get to “trusted advisor”, while being trapped in the “he wants to sell himself and more of his kin” paradox. How do you convince a customer in that situation? How to make a customer see, what you’re seeing?

Microsoft

Joining a hyperscaler felt like boarding a rocket-ship. I started on the founding day of the “customer success unit” and in exactly this unit. The amount of technology I was responsible for as a cloud solution architect was overwhelming and my technologist heart was singing with joy. To a certain extent however, I was an alien - a Linux and Java guy in Windows and .NET land. I could have never dreamt of the amount of inspiration I got from controversial technology discussions in that time and also the feeling of belonging. “Customer success” and “retail mindset” were very close neighbours :)

Thank you for luring me into this lions den, you old and wise man! You know who you are!

pivotal

My own past cought up with me and promises you give yourself need to kept - pacta sunt servanda

I promised myself, that if ever the Spring guys’n’gals would come knocking on my door, I would listen. Little did I know, that this promise should come around about 18 years later to challenge my situation.

So off into the next adventure - from strictly cloud infrastructure to hybrid infrastructure I thought, while linking this to my customers software projects and architectures. Little did I know, that pivotal would make me completely re-think everything I thought I knew about things like agile - mind blown! The company values of pivotal also are something that left their mark on me (and I think basically any pivot out there - if you meet one, challenge them to give you their perception on these three for an interesting conversation)

  • be kind
  • do the right thing
  • do what works

Redis

I am only 2 months deep into this journey, so this chapter will have to be re-written… once… twice… we’ll see :)

What I can say already is, that Redis feels like a turning point as well, as I am embarking deeper into the world of data than I ever ventured before. My technologist heart is full of joy.