CV

The title changed because the job did. I own the Business Framework: decomposing the back-end monolith into functional services able to carry several products across several markets without a rewrite each time. Messaging went first and proved the extraction pattern, card management is queued behind it, platforms are being rebuilt rather than patched again, onboarding is being harmonised across every type of customer and none of it moves until we agree what a product actually is, which turned out to deserve an initiative of its own.

Less shipping, more deciding what shipping ought to cost. The hardest part of architecture turns out to be the arguments, not the diagrams.

Took over the global social vouchers business unit, with 3 Product Owners reporting in and 4 user types to satisfy at once: the company that buys the vouchers, the social secretariat who administers them, the employee who spends them and the merchant who gets paid. Serving all four is the entire trick of the job.

Two years spent owning the roadmap rather than executing someone else’s. Which mostly means saying no in writing, frequently, to people with rather grander titles than mine.

Came to Monizze as a freelance Product Owner and spent the first months learning the ropes of employee benefits, a domain where half the rules are written by a legislator rather than a product team, and where a bug doesn’t irritate a user so much as it stops them paying for their groceries.

The work itself was internal: wiring Salesforce into the rest of the estate so sales and product would stop maintaining two versions of the truth, and rebuilding the landing pages, so that signing up took rather less patience than before, were the 2 mostly visible actions undertaken. What time was left went to coaching the other Product Owners, the quickest way to learn a company is to help someone else find their way around it.

Joined bpost to land two time-critical projects for the Sender Experience Truck, one of their trains (SAFe’s corpo-word for a long-lived group of teams shipping against one shared roadmap). The deadline was already set when I arrived; the definition wasn’t. I picked up two teams and 15 external developers, rebuilt the scope alongside the Feature Manager, and doubled the delivery velocity against where it stood before I walked in.

The other half of the job was the company itself. I sat on the Agile Transformation Squad while bpost migrated to SAFe, and helped run the Product Owners’ Community of Practice. Writing a process on a slide takes an afternoon; making it survive contact with thirty different team realities is the actual work.

My involvement in the many systems of Qwant’s infrastructure enabled me to prove myself as the Business Intelligence Product Manager. Together with 2 data engineers, we automated all financial reports, implemented a KPI follow-up dashboard for the directing committee and created an infrastructure able to withstand the To of data generated weekly by our users.

I take it this went pretty well, as I ended up owning Qwant Search itself: 6 developers, 9 products, and a full rebuild of the search engine in React from the ground up. Search, Junior, Boards, Causes, Games, Ads, the back-office and the browser extensions all landed on my plate, along with hiring, a seat at the COMEX to argue over company KPIs, and the CNIL audit — France’s data protection authority, which for a privacy-first search engine is less a formality than a final exam.

Qwant Causes is the one I’m still fond of. A slice of the ad revenue routed to charities through HelloAsso, so looking up a washing machine paid for something rather better than a washing machine.

My landry smells good and I have no personal issue with washing machines.

Found my 1st “real” job while finishing my studies. I joined Qwant, a european privacy first search engine as fullstack developer, directly working on a platform that had over 6 millions users per day over the world.

From the creation of our own Single Page App framework to browsers extensions, I got to work on and shape not only our different platforms, but also our way of working. Since I was amongst the first employees of the start up, I got to act as an Agile coach to help structure our work, administer our Atlassian instance while keeping an eye on technology improvements and leading our antibot system.

The last 2 years at Epitech are mosty dedicated to the Epitech Innovative Project (EIP), an end of studies project. Our team built one of the 1st prototypes of an autonomous cargo drone, able to deliver a package the size a can to over 40kms. We aimed to enable delivery of medicine or 1st aid kits in hard to reach destinations.

Epitech’s 4th year is always abroad and I got lucky enough to land on a beautiful place. St Laurent is supposed to be the only place in the world where river, sea and ocean meet. Despite the -20°C and the 3 hours of sunlight during the dead of winter, meeting with seals and watching aurora borealis made this experience quite surreal.

Apart from that, I got to spend a full year as an university student, managing the canadian classes along with progressing on the Epitech end of studies project. I took this year as an opportunity to gain knowledge on topics that went beyond my previous years of studies. My main classes were:

• Marketing
• Organizations Management
• Quality assurance and IT project management
• Analysis of e-commerce applications
• Computer systems architecture

From the basics of shell, reimplementation of the C library, scripting in ASM to cybersecurity, 3D games and simple AI stock investor. Those years were spent as anyone can assume. Lots of caffeine, white screens, dark rooms and segfaults. What attracted me to this school was its hands-on methodology: got a project, a group, a deadline and the toolset to make it happen.

I thought this would be when I’ll spend the most time in front of a terminal, boy was I wrong.

Started my engineering studies there, along with electronic classes. I joined the Role Playing Games and Robotics clubs, even though I couldn’t keep a character alive in the former, we won a regional robotics championship and landed in the national competition.

I also managed to get my Baccalauréat with mention.

Founded L’Aile Verte in December 2022, a Belgian SRL and the vehicle for everything I do that doesn’t arrive with a payslip. Product management is the headline service, with sustainability running through it rather than bolted on the side: a product built to last costs less over its life, and that arithmetic holds for the planet as readily as for a balance sheet.

Twelve years after the autoentreprise, the same instinct with rather better paperwork.

Alongside of my studies, I created an autoentreprise building websites for associations or small companies, repairing computers, restoring hard drives and providing assistance to people that needed tutoring on computer usage.

This actually was an on and off thing for over 10 years and my first foray into entrepreneurship, building relations through computer cases.