Our profile feature takes a look at some of the global professionals working across performance marketing, shedding light on the varying roles and companies across the flourishing industry. This week we head to Berlin, to meet Jan Schwenzien. 

Name:

Jan Schwenzien.

Job title and company: 

Co-founder and CTO of testcloud.

In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?

Thanks to our Crowdtesting approach we offer the easiest way to test websites and mobile apps for e-commerce companies, app publishers, digital agencies or media companies with a crowd of more than 15,000 testers who consist of both professional developers and consumers and uncover even the most hidden bugs in our customers’ software. 

What are the company’s unique selling points? 

Since testcloud’s foundation in 2011, our crowd testers found more than 194,000 bugs in websites and mobile apps, ensuring bug free software for our customers like Alex Springer or Zalando as well as the fastest and easiest way for them to test their software.

Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?

We’re about to enter the US market and we signed new key clients such as tout. Additionally, we had a relaunch of our website including a new product lineup to even better suit the needs of our customers.

Duration in current role:

I co-founded testcloud in August 2011 and have been the CTO ever since, so for 4 years now.

Where are you based?

We are based in the heart of Berlin – Europe’s new startup capital.        

Previous performance marketing-related companies you have worked at:

Before testcloud I used to work as a freelance developer (mainly with Ruby on Rails) and helped building Wimdu, a Rocket Internet company and competitor of Airnbnb, as well as the non-profit platform Betterplace – all companies were strongly data-driven and used different KPI dashboards to measure performance. 

What are your main job responsibilities?

I am responsible for the product development and expanding the testcloud platform as well as everything else that is related to technical aspects of the company. 

Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday: 

I always start by talking to my team in our stand-up meeting. I then look at my dashboards to see important metrics about our marketing and sales campaigns as well as other KPIs. Apart from that I try to make every Monday different, but some strategic meeting is usually part of it. As a developer I am highly interested in the technical development of our products, so you most likely find me discussing new features and developments with our research and development team.

What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?

  • Stackoverflow/Github – to solve that one problem I’ve been thinking about.
  • Techcrunch – to be up to date with tech related media releases.
  • Hackernews – to be up to date before reading it on Techcrunch.

What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?

Be creative, learn to look at data unbiased, and embrace risks as with skills and imagination you will be able to come up with new ideas that have not yet been developed before. And break a rule every now and then.

Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years’ time?

In three years’ time testcloud will be the one place to go to when it comes to ‘Continuous Testing for Software Development’. Therefore I hope that by then we will have established our brand in the US market and even expanded our client portfolio in our home market. I look forward to scaling all of this up.

Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?

I am a 9gager (but I don’t have a potato for you).