Sungevity Inc.

  • During my tenure at Sungevity I’ve held multiple roles, both at Sungevity Europe as well as at Sungevity Inc. in beautiful Oakland California. As Director and General Manager I was responsible for the R&D department, focussing on the development of new solutions and applications. These solutions were used by our different departments in all stages of the customer journey with most of them having a focus on Geo-data processing.

    The R&D department had the main task of working on automating several key business processes, especially in the geo-information domain where a lot of the work was still manual. By taking into account both legal requirements, the requirements of our internal stakeholders like the sales and aftersales departments, and of course those of our customers, I helped develop a vision and strategy to develop our new products. When developing this vision and strategy techniques like design thinking were used, of course in close cooperation with the colleagues of the UX/UI and BI teams.

    As Director I was not only responsible for my products, I also had responsibilities towards my teams such as resource planning and budgeting, and was part of the larger product leadership team reporting directly to the CPO.

    Before I was promoted to the Director level I was acting as the Product Manager of this department. During my time in the United States I have also experienced what it is like to actually work in the software department as an engineer by joining the teams for some time.

  • My responsibilities as Director were, amongst others;

    • Developing and propagate the product vision and strategies for all products to the Board, C-suite and other stakeholders alike.

    • Leading the product team of the department, consisting of Product owners, UX/UI designers and analysts.

    • Developing the product roadmaps and execution of the plans.

    • Stakeholder mapping and management, for internal stakeholders, vendors, customers and potential partners.

    • Market analysis and research.

    • Budgeting and the creation of business cases for new product development.

    • Resource planning in close association with the VP of engineering and other managers.

  • Tech I have worked with;

    • Scala backend/API management, AngularJS frontend combined with SalesForce CRM.

    • MongoDB, PostgreSQL-PostGIS.

    • QGIS, ESRI-ARCGIS.

    • Docker, Apache Spark, AWS.

    • Jenkins - Selenium.

    • Legacy Stack; PHP, Drupal.

    Some tools I worked with;

    • Atlassian (Jira/Confluence), Assembla.

    • Power BI, Office.

    • Slack, G-Suite.

Testimonials

When I worked with him, Rik was passionate and singled minded about product function and quality, and often would be the only voice in the room that accurately represented our users, and push us to prioritise things that actually benefited the company as opposed to a lot of rabbit holes we might otherwise have wasted time on. He was also strong enough technically that he could earn the respect of the engineers on the team, which in my experience is rare among product managers. Not only was he invaluable professionally, but he was a pleasure to work with, and was often the first person I sought out for a coffee break or walk. He would be incredibly valuable to any team.

— Andy Vansickle-Ward, sr. Site Reliability Engineer

It was an honour to work with Rik as we tackled some of the most challenging frontiers of solar design over a number of years. He has a deep understanding of people, process and technology, which is a rare and valuable combination. He is dedicated, organised, humble, adaptable and insightful. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Rik!

— Adam Pryor, Lead R&D Engineer