<tom> lore drop incoming.
origin story
My dad had a plant nursery. “Kwekerij”, it's a Dutch word worth learning. His world was one you could touch. I grew up in a digital world, and never really left it. I like to think we did the same work in different soil: he raised seedlings, I raise products.
From a young age there was a headset on my ears and a mic in front of my mouth. I was talking with people from all over the world before I had ever left the country.
Skype first, then TeamSpeak, then Discord, where I still am today.
Somewhere between those calls I started building websites. Small ones. Rough ones. Mine. What stuck was the feeling: you type something, you hit refresh, and there it is, real, in the browser. I have been chasing that feeling ever since. These days it has AI in the loop, but it's the same rush.
I tried a graphic design degree. It made sense on paper: I liked making things, and design is making things. But something kept itching. I did not only want to make things look good. I wanted to build the things themselves.
the floor
After moving to the Czech Republic I found a remote job at Change, selling for the Marktplaats team. Unglamorous, and honestly a great product education: all day inside other people's problems, told in their own words.
I kept building what my team needed. First a tracker so everyone logged their results in one place, then dashboards, then full applications. Each one pulled me a step closer to product.
That led to product manager at Change AI, where I now build tools for the person I used to be. The full quest log is on thework page.
the gaming thing
I'm a gamer at heart, and I mean that as a work skill, not a fun fact on a slide.
I have always played competitive games: Counter-Strike, Valorant, and plenty more. Climbing the ranks, playing as a team, and entering tournaments. A few things from that transfer directly:
- learning loops: games teach you to try, fail, see what went wrong, and go again. Product work is the same loop, just slower.
- reading systems: getting good at a game means figuring out how its rules work together. I do the same with a workflow: find out what really drives it.
Not every hour of gaming was useful. A lot of it was just fun. But the overlap is real, and I use it every week.
<tom> that's the lore. where next?