Delivering top educational experience to 172k students and teachers each day

Client & Team

  • Sanoma Learning provides digital platforms in Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy and Sweden.
  • Malmberg, the largest educational publisher in the Netherlands
  • International agile SCRUM team (SAFe) (5 FE, 4 BE, 2 UX, 1BA, 3 QA)
  • 2017 – 2024

Project

MaxOnline is Malmberg’s digital learning environment in the browser that gives teachers full control while providing personalized learning experiences. Every day, over 150k students and 12k teachers use the platform and are dependent on the service being available and up to date.

Scope

Sanoma/Malmberg works in Product Increments (PI) of 3 months. Each PI has new goals and deliverables that need to be prepared and managed. For 26 PI’s (6.5 years), I was responsible for this.

Challenges

  • Changes in features and design have an immediate impact on thousands of users (6,500+ active users at any moment).
  • Different levels of education use the platform, from vocational (MBO) to secondary levels (Havo/VWO).
  • Years of legacy content and features that need to stay available.
  • MaxOnline platform is part of a larger Sanoma Learning ecosystem, resulting in code and stakeholder dependencies that need to be managed.

Impact

Through the years, I worked on several big projects and features – see the list below. In addition, I created significant impact by analyzing and resolving bugs. My ability to quickly comprehend problems and distill solutions by analyzing complex data and systems was highly appreciated.

  • Successful migration of thousands of vocational users to MaxOnline
  • As a rapid response to COVID, all Malmberg books were made available as e-books within 2 weeks
  • Design and integration of the test and assessment features in MaxOnline
  • Teacher-added materials
  • Improved accessibility
  • Migrations to Angular and Spring

Role

As Senior Business Analyst & Product Owner at Malmberg/Sanoma, managed complex stakeholder relationships and led development of their digital learning environment MAX Online.

  • Managed international agile SCRUM team (SAFe) (FE, BE, UX, BA, QA)
  • Managed stakeholder alignment and cross-team dependencies
  • Co-responsible for team roadmap and PI planning
  • Conducting user research
  • Transforming ideas into solutions
  • Defining functional requirements
  • Creating user flows
  • Creating Risk- and impact analysis for team and upper management
  • Presenting bi-weekly demo to internal stakeholders

Project Management Excellence

“His ability to manage multiple initiatives while keeping a strong focus on detail and timelines was impressive”

Gavin Esajas
Group Product Manager at Sanoma Learning

Data & Analysis Skills

“He consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of complex data and could break it down into clear, actionable insights”

Virginie Wagenaar
Product Manager at Malmberg

Product Innovation Skills

“Capable of transforming ideas into solutions, always with a customer centric approach”

Mariëtte Bosch
Product Manager

Versatility & Expertise

“He’s been working as a Business Analyst, but on top of this he has acted as PO, Scrum Master, Tester, UX Designer and UX Researcher when needed”

Katariina Mäkelä
Competence Lead, Sanoma Learning

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