Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany
My passion for problem solving is instantly triggered by a sentence I hear way too often: “This won’t work out”. Combined with a highly curious mind and user centered design methods, I always find a way - Yes, always.
In the department Digital Quality Assurance we are managing the lifecycle of all problems that happen or could happen within our digital Service Ecosystem. The primary objectives are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening. We make sure that the customer's requirements are met during product development and additionally take care of solving problems occuring during usage of the digital products within the Volkswagen Brand, whether it's regarding the car, its user interface, our apps or while using the webshop. Currently I am responsible for releasing all combustion vehicles' mobile online services and for defining future vehicles' and platforms requirements regarding mobile online services, emergency calls and related topics.
Within the Faculty of Business Administration I teach its international Master's Course "Digital Technology Management" in Design Thinking. It's a hands on approach, meaning the students are actually taking each step of the development process themselves in order to fully understand the method and therefore being fully prepared to implement the design thinking process within their future career.
The Ideation:Hub is a division within the GroupIT which supports innovation projects and opens new perspectives on users, colleagues and employees. They support their Group wide project partners by user-centered methods, out-of-the-box thinking and creative approaches to establish user-centered working methods and drive the digital transformation of the Volkswagen Group from within. As a service and process designer, I managed projects and focused my work particularly on the needs of diverse users and on establishing our corporate values.
At the Head Office of Group Research I was responsible for adjusting the division's strategy and therefore restructuring and developing internal processes and systems. My main role was to bring the user centered designer's perspective into the implementation of the new Group strategy "Together 2025" within the research division and into the resulting reorganisation of internal processes. With my colleagues in mind, I focused on making their obligatory work processes more intuitive and flexible, while keeping all the stakeholders satisfied.
I was supporting the Smart Mobility Team within the Group Digitalization, which is responsible for generating value-adding mobility services for our customers and steering the mobility services departments all over the Volkswagen Group including its brands. During my internship I had an advisory and assisting role in developing and executing a qualitative user study for the future of autonomous driving. While conducting the user study I started to write my master's thesis within the Smart Mobility Team, focusing on the implementation of product-service-systems and customer's needs into the physical product development process of the Volkswagen Group.
The Business Innovation Team is a department within the research and development field of the Volkswagen Group. It is responsible for inventing value-added services all around the leading topic mobility and is also specialised in generating new business model ideas. Through exploring the customer's needs and behaviours, we created efficient services, while meeting the company's high requirements. While supporting the department as a service designer in various projects, such as the Audi connect parcel delivery service in cooperation with Amazon and DHL, I was also writing my bachelor's thesis in collaboration with the Business Innovation Team about a mobility concept for active families.