Jens Nikolaus designs software in Colorado, USA
Currently, I am Head of Design at pganalyze leading product discovery and design efforts
Often I get hired to help with anything product and design, sometimes I will move
into a product management role or create a pull request on GitHub. At the end of the day I'm a
designer. You can read my resume to learn how I ended up here, but this is what I am doing
now.
- Leading and setting up product discovery and design processes
- Interviewing and working with customers using Jobs to be Done
- Understanding how a business earns and spends money
- Translating and communicating customer problems
- Facilitating cross-functional collaboration
- Mentoring and connecting people
- Producing high-fidelity prototypes to validate concepts
- Ship software and repeat
I push for inclusion, a healthy work/life balance, sustainability, slowness, and I am trying my best to weave these values into my day-to-day work.
What I'm learning right now
For the last month or so I started learning how to eat better, and Noom is driving the change. Noom uses cognitive behavioral therapy to reduce stress and anxiety.
The biggest and probably not surprising takeaway so far is that change is difficult, and that being a student relieves me from a lot of stress. I don't own the process, and that feels great. I enjoy losing weight, but the biggest plus is that my energy levels considerably improved since I began this journey.
I also started practicing yoga recently.