Stefanie Lynch

Head of the Product & Design department, member of the management team

Leading the talent management domain with a portfolio of products across recruiting, performance and development. 3 tribes with a total of 10 squads.

Over the last years at Personio I’ve helped build a product tribe with 5 agile, cross functional teams of ~30 engineers, 1 UX researcher, 3 UX designers and 5 product managers. I’m accountable for the vision, strategy and outcomes of the whole tribe. Enabling, developing and supporting my team members to excel in their jobs and hiring for future growth are top priorities for me.

Together with my team, we developed a vision and a strategy for how to scale our Recruiting product further, including the organizational setup. As a result we onboarded a second and a third team onto the domain to create more dedicated focus on strategic growth topics.

I joined Personio as their second PM, taking over end-to-end ownership of the Recruiting product. Together with UX research kicked off discovery to understand the jobs to be done and pain points in the domain. As an outcome we completely redesigned the whole product, resulting in an increase in customer satisfaction of 150%.

This position was at Comvel GmbH / weg.de, at the time owned by ProSiebenSat1, since then acquired by lastminute.com. Set up product management processes with a focus on the discovery phase to complement the already existing software delivery (scrum). Based on newly developed personas, a customer journey workshop, thorough market and competitor analyses, and in close collaboration with UX and marketing, we started setting up an opportunity backlog to assess possible future improvements for our e-commerce product. As product owner I was also responsible for the work of a 4 person development team and maximizing the value of our product. Writing user stories, prioritizing and maintaining the product backlog, sprint planning, and helping to shape and communicate a clear product vision and roadmap were part of my job description. I advocate for our users and customers by keeping a close eye on feedback. A/B tests and closely tracking our KPIs were also essential parts of our data driven approach.

As the domain expert for a number of web and desktop based productivity features including the badge and Office 365 integration, I was responsible for handling the highest level support escalations and the enablement of tier 1 support agents through deep technical understanding, delivering product training etc. The focus of our team was on customer advocacy and closing the feedback loop to engineering, product and design. This involved close collaboration with product managers on the identification of key customer issues and incorporating improvements into the product roadmap, including the drafting of technical specs for such changes. We worked in sprints to directly support our agile teams throughout the launch process.

In this role I was responsible for the operational management of the DACH market support team and gained additional leadership experience through mentoring and leading a team of 6 contractors. Also successfully hired 7 additional head count and project managed the revamp of Channel and Enterprise support for Dropbox globally.

During my time in the Customer Experience graduate program I gained a deep technical knowledge of the Dropbox product and payment systems and became proficient in tier 1 and 2 support, especially for enterprise customers and for the reseller channel. I had the opportunity to work with stakeholders across multiple teams across engineering, product, design, and sales and managed projects like building out the infrastructure for a new localized support model in EMEA.

Focus on software engineering, behavioural economics and auction theory (thesis).

Visiting graduate student at the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Economics with the Baden-Wuerttemberg/Massachusetts exchange program, focusing on database systems, microeconomics and philosophy (at Amherst College)