Rieks Visser

Skill Tree

I'm skilled and experienced in a variety of disciplines regarding agile, software development and the web. To navigate my varied areas of expertise, I've created this skill tree for you:

Agile Product Management

Product Management

At Slimmer AI I fulfilled the role of product manager of our own internal products, as well as initial product manager for our fledgling start-ups. All while coaching fresh start-up founders into taking up the product role themselves. Many years of agile coaching and interim product work enable me to see the big picture, keep calm, and teach others. My total career from UX, to software engineering, to Agile coaching, gives me an edge by having lived many of the product challenges and struggles a team can experience.

Agile Coach

I’ve always had a knack for seeing the bigger picture, delivering what users need and being pragmatic. This first led to my interest in Agile and Scrum. I’ve coached many teams and individuals in growing and delivering higher value while having more fun. At MediaCT, I was the driving force in moving from year long projects to releasing an MVP in 2 weeks. I've coached the organization and it's clients in becoming value driven. Techniques from Lean (Startup), Xtreme Programming and other Agile approaches were used in these initiatives.

Scrum Master

I am a PSM I, II, PAL (Agile Leadership) and SPS (Nexus Scaled) certified Scrum Master. I have trained many team and organizations in the use of Scrum. I believe many organizations can benefit from first doing Professional Scrum right, before taking on all the other stuff. Less distractions, more focus on valuable software, regular inspection-adaptation and embracing the Scrum Values of Courage, Commitment, Focus, Respect and Openness.

MVP & Lean Startup

When I started at MediaCT, new projects would take from 6 months to over a year to launch. In that time, risk increases and nothing is validated. By coaching and advocating for change, applying lessons from Lean Startup, Scrum and Agile, a project can now be launched in 10 days. An MVP that delivers value from the beginning and gets the feedback loop started. Software can be shipped at nearly any time. Probably my greatest professional accomplishment.

Kanban

Once you have a reliable delivery process and infrastructure, and you drive business by value and impact, Kanban becomes an interesting tool. Sprints become more of a nuisance than helpful. Value can be delivered continuously, instead of each sprint. The focus shifts towards removing bottlenecks that block ‘the work’. Agility of the business improves, pressure is reduced. Advanced stuff for sure, but I can help you out.

Coaching & team facilitation

As a seasoned Scrum Master and Agile Coach, I’ve coached teams, management and clients in Agile and Scrum principles. Self-organization, empirical process control, Lean product development, et cetera. I’ve facilitated workshops and retrospectives using a multitude of related principles, such as Liberating Structures and Impact Mapping.

Teal & Sociocracy 3.0

I am a big believer in Teal organizations. By this I mean, no traditional hierarchy and positions. Instead, a flat organization with roles, goals, and accountabilities. Management is baked into each role, no-one is a traditional manager just for the sake of it. Minimal tooling is in place for everyone to resolve the impediments that block them from getting work done. My passion for open source makes me mainly a Sociocracy 3.0 enthusiast.

Agile Meetups

I both participated and helped organize the AgileHubNoord Meetup. We bring together Agile professionals from the three northern provinces in the Netherlands (Drenthe, Friesland, Groningen). It provides me personally with refreshing workshops, great conversations with my peers and help thinking outside my box. And of course, a handy network of other Agile enthusiasts and forerunners. With the world events of '19-'22 this has winded down, but I'm staying connected.

Software development

Software Engineering - Symfony, Magento, JavaScript, Node.js, ReactJS, Perl, Ruby, Elixir

In years of software development, I’ve worked with a multitude of languages and frameworks. Foremost, modern OO MVC development with Symfony, Magento and custom frameworks. For the judgemental: modern PHP done right, with decent standards and patterns, applied by an experienced programmer, can be quite pretty and offers a reliable ecosystem. At Cleafs I worked on Perl applications, with high availability and speed being the most important cornerstones. In all my work, JavaScript has been present. From jQuery and ES6 to ReactJS components and small Node.js applications with websockets. In my spare time I explored the Ruby language, as it’s a language that brings you joy. In that same vein, I’ve explored Elixir. I’m familiar with it’s core concepts and syntax. Together with some of ReactJS concepts (immutability, reducers), this gives me a modest basis in functional programming. Bottom line: if it's based on C, I can work with it.

Testing - Unit, Functional, Automated

Testing is essential. It's one of the best weapons against technical debt and uncertainty creep. I have set up end-to-end testing suites with Playwright. I’ve written unit tests for Symfony applications and Magento. I’ve created and worked with functional testing scripts, used in Selenium test runs. I’ve contributed to the automated testing pipeline that’s part of MediaCT’s continuous integration flow.

Data storage - Relational, NoSQL

For data storage and application persistence I’ve worked with a number of technologies. Relational databases such as MySQL and Postgresql, key value NoSQL storage such as MongoDB and Redis. I’ve had days filled to the brim with JSON, XML and YAML.

Frontend development

I started my career as a frontend developer and UX designer. Though focus slowly shifted to other areas, I’m still keeping up with modern standards in frontend. I’m competent in using HTML5, CSS, SASS and Less. I have built several interfaces both from scratch and with Twitter Bootstrap. I can work with vanilla JS, jQuery and have built several ReactJS components. Semantic web, accessibility and modern standards are important to me, I like to keep things simple and RESTful.

Servers & CI

At Cleafs I was in charge of managing the RedHat virtual data center. Configuring and maintaining clustered web- and database servers, load balancers, staging environments and other services. These were running on CentOS or Debian. Here I’ve learned a huge deal about maintaining production high availability web servers, prone to receive spikes in traffic. Regarding CI, I’ve contributed to setting up continuous integration and deployment to staging and production using Bitbucket Pipelines at MediaCT. This included automated testing (unit tests and static code analysis) as part of the deployment process.

UX & Design

UX & Usability testing

As said, I started out as a front-end developer and UX designer. I focused on quickly iterating design versions, using hallway testing and usability test with eye trackers to validate assumptions before releasing designs. This ties in well with Agile related concepts as measuring impact and evidence based management.

Atomic & Agile emergent design

A challenge in Agile development are big designs (BDUF), both in architecture and interfaces. Atomic design offers a way to iteratively build designs in continuously higher fidelity. Consistency and core values of the design are granularly built up. The design emerges with the rest of the application.

A/B testing & CRO

For validating assumptions in UX design, the first step is hallway testing. Once released to production, CRO tracking with Google Analytics and A/B testing with Visual Website Optimizer or custom created tools are my preferred methods of evaluating the assumptions made earlier. Qualitative and quantative can't live without eachother.

Brand design

As one of my specializations at university I completed a minor in Brand Design. To this day, I regularly apply what I learned during those courses. The bigger ‘why’ behind things, the translation of identity to image, how a corporate vision and mission should trickle down into all the small details of nearly everything a company does. This is where I learned much of applying a holistic view to challenges.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign

You can’t have a design background and not know the tools. I’ve used Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign in the past. Nowadays, it’s mostly Inkscape and Gimp (Ubuntu and all that) when necessary, and more often designing briefly on paper and then straight on to CSS. Much more nimble than picture perfect Photoshop designs that will never translate to the reality of millions of different devices.

Marketing

Inbound marketing & SEO

At Belsimpel I was the main front-end developer. Therefore, I was also responsible for the SEO implications of how pages were built. Correct semantics and hierarchy, rich snippets, accessible html5, link flow, canonicals and redirects, text and title optimization, meta tags, et cetera. The works. I still closely follow the field and am up to date with the important factors search engines take into account these days (incoming links + engagement + user friendliness). Don’t tell me to hide links with JavaScript or some other advice from 2004, I’ll lose my shit. Debunking SEO myths is one of my passions.

Copywriting

I'm quite the decent copywriter in both Dutch and English. I really enjoy writing and the many nuances one can express using language. My talent lies in wrangling language to say precisely the right thing. Experience in brand design and always thinking about the larger 'why' and purpose of a text, enables me to write what best suits the goal.

Affiliate marketing

Being the lead developer for the Cleafs affiliate network platform, I needed to know the ins and outs of the business. I still do. I know why and how banners are chasing you, even after you bought the fridge. I also know smart marketing people can do a call upon order confirmation to stop it. Even smarter ones know repeated exposure to the store brand pays off more, so they don't bother.

Paid advertising

As a side effect of being in the affiliate marketing and e-commerce business for a long time, I know the basics of running Adwords and Facebook campaigns. Nothing fancy, just the 20% that fulfills 80% of the needs.

Brand design

As mentioned under ‘Design’, my specialization in college was Brand Design. I still regularly apply the principles learned there. Specifically: being coherent in all communication and translating the broader company vision and mission into every day marketing.