Professional
From 2005 until 2015 I ran my own development company. Since 2015 I have used that experience to help companies and development teams take ‘the next step’. The next step in delivering higher quality products, the next step in building high performing teams and the next step in creating a world class product company.
Personal
I’ve lived in several parts of the world and love to travel to all the other parts. In my free time my greatest passion is skydiving, and I try to travel as often as I can to the most exotic places to find a plane to jump from.
Back home, I love my city of Amsterdam, where I recently bought and completely renovated a house, and now I’m the happiest guy alive living there with my beautiful girlfriend and my hilarious and sweet two daughters.
Building a digital product is hard. Over the years I’ve built multiple products and learned that your product requirements will change… daily. The success of your team and the product depends on whether you are able to adapt to these changes quickly enough.
Over the years I’ve set up several teams and learned that a team’s success is determined by finding the balance between juniors and seniors, between specialists and generalists, between dreamers and soldiers and between optimists and realists.
I try to work for a team as a leader instead of as a boss. Standing next to your team, maximizing their potential, not being afraid to reveal your own vulnerability and always steering towards an ideal situation where your role is no longer needed.
Most projects have a (big) history and almost always some form of technical debt. Sometimes a solution for this technical debt is to migrate to a new framework/language/backend etc. My experience with complex migration projects has demonstrated that starting a new project from scratch in parallel is rarely the best course of action, as they often never finish. Instead, my approach involves delivering business value while gradually migrating towards the new standard.
I’ve been around the block and have learned that you should write code imagining that you will have to come back to it 3 years later. At that point your nifty one liner will no longer make sense and your future self will hate you for it. The main goal of your code is to take any uninitiated reader by the hand and guide him through the logic.
People want to have the feeling that they are making an impact. I feel my biggest duty is to maximize each team member’s productivity. Is someone doing a mundane task? Automate it. Is someone repeating a task often? Automate it. Is someone doing a task that is hard to do in a consistent way every time? Automate it. Developers should focus on what they are good at: Being creative and adding value. I’ll try to take away any other task.
Jasper was great to work with and to have as part of our management team. Three things that I particularly valued from his time with us at SnappCar:
1) Ability to combine strategic thinking (what is best for the company in 2-3 years, what are our blind spots?) with pragmatism (what does that practically mean for what we need to do tomorrow and how do we do that in a time and cost efficient way?)
2) Building and engaging a product development team – he got great 360 feedback on listening and genuine care for people in his team; also he is able to co-create solutions to difficult problems together with the team, even if it could impact their careers quite a bit
3) Open, flexible and trustworthy as colleague – we gave him a rollercoaster ride and he was perfectly fine and happy with it; he is not afraid to constructively challenge and pull his weight in the management team, but also very welcoming, social and fun to hang around with (pro tip: ask about his hobbies).
In summary: please don’t put him on your shortlist (so he is free whenever I need a CTO again).
Jasper brought a lot of energy and expertise to the role of CTO at SnappCar. First of all, he showed great strategic insights in tackling several complex and mission-critical topics. Second of all, he took great care of his team: Making sure that they were able to handle all the challenges that came with the global Covid pandemic, all the while helping the team perform better and making sure the quality of the platform improved with every step. Finally, he brought great energy to the company, combining hard work with fun downtime and a lot of laughs.
Jasper is the 10x guy you want to contract. For three reasons: 1) excellent mentor for the team, backed by years of experience, 2) high quality output, with fast delivery, 3) outstanding technical knowledge, able to bring infrastructure and software architecture to higher quality standards. I would recommend any team to get Jasper on board for all three reasons above. On top of that, he brings great joy to the team and fosters collaboration. Genuinely nice guy to work with, looking forward to our next shared project!
You can always contact me by using my first name + @jasperschulte.nl
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