Food truck platform

In 2012 the food truck scene in Germany was quite small. As I am a food enthusiast I used my online magazine and podcast “Nürnberg and so” to support the hype around mobile cuisine on wheels. With this I had a big stake in letting the customers’ interest explode in 2013 so I started a new joint project: "Foodtrucks Germany". As we were close to our customers we quickly realized that both food trucks and their customers needed a bigger platform so we started the first international digital platform for food trucks and street food vendors: Craftplaces. During the COVID-19 pandemic the whole industry struggled a lot but we kept our focus straight which helped us to still be able to provide our customers with up to date food truck schedules. and with that we had the answer to the question: I am hungry, where can I find the next food truck?

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Working as a tech consultant and UX Design expert in the Silicon Valley area meant endless opportunities. My goal was to get as many insights as possible from different start-ups and to get in touch with many people to learn from different mindsets. In the beginning I struggled with my perfectionism that held me back from getting in touch with people in a forgein language that I thought I am not good enough in. I left my comfort zone and overcame this by participating in many events. This ended up that I even started to co-host events and mastered another hurdle in my life to now be able to speak freely and fearfree in english. I did jobs for bigger and smaller tech companies, started a podcast and have been "the German guy" for a German home goods brand in the Bay Area. Whether for Google Launchpad, Trello or Slack, these experiences enormously improved my skills in the areas of UX design and reviews, User testing and front-end development, as well as the ability to read between the lines.

Lectures at UC Berkeley

Co-hosting events in the Bay Area gave me some attention and thanks to some connections I had the chance to give lectures at UC Berkeley. And what can I say: I loved it so much. It was and still is a great pleasure for me to see people learning and improving by things I can share with them. The major topic of all of my lectures was “How to address and solve the biggest challenges of start-ups”. I guess I used the phrase “lean & test” very often, as this is something that I focus very much on, and at the end it became their mantra when students thought about problem solving. By combining my user centered design experiences with lean-startup methods and treating my students as my customers I was able to get closely connected with their working projects.

Customer-centered solutions

While working for several German companies I developed a lot of innovative digital solutions. All solutions have in common that they were successful as I always had the customer in mind and even co-created them with my customers. I collaborated with stakeholders, combined their wishes with customer needs, involved marketing, double checked it with IT and sold it to the management. As a result I created an award-winning energy performance certificate and the corresponding platform which entered the market as first of its kind. I got an innovation award for connecting customers to various publishing products that I integrated in a single platform. To sum this up, innovation projects and user centered design always needs a deep understanding of customer needs.