Marie Williere

In the first few weeks, I accompanied my colleagues in the Bizdev and Sales teams to get an impression of my future day-to-day work. In fact, the boundaries between job shadowing and onboarding were very blurred in this phase, as I was already taking on operational tasks that I would perform later.

During my second month at Parkside, I was allowed to accompany the marketing team. I found out more about newsletter campaigns, customer satisfaction analyses, social media concepts and press relations, to list just a few of insights. Since I had already gained experience in marketing before I came to Parkside, this week was particularly interesting for me.

I also shadowed the QA (Quality Assurance) team for a week. Since I had very little idea of the term and the tasks it involves at that time, it was one of the most exciting weeks for me. I mainly got to know the areas of QA management and automated testing.

After that, I had an opportunity to accompany our Agile Team Coach Doris. To be honest, I had little idea of what such a position entails, but Doris quickly introduced me to her tasks and challenges. She gave me insights into her daily work, consisting of organizational development tasks as well as retrospectives and refinement meetings, which are components of agile software development.

My mentor and product owner Lisa was shadowed during the second to last week of my shadowing phase. An important stop, as I will continue to work closely with our product owners as a project manager in the future. This part of shadowing was not only an interesting insight into her everyday work, but also helped me a lot to understand where our points of contact will be in the future.

The last stop in during my job shadowing was the design team. Since user experience (UX) is crucial in software development here at Parkside, this stop was also very educational for me. Not only did I learn a lot about the disciplines and differences between UX and UI, but I also got to look behind the scenes of a team lead and shadow our Head of Design Clemens for two days.

During my 3-month shadowing program, I was able to gain valuable insights into the day-to-day work of my colleagues and learned many new things. I got to know the people on both a professional and private level and now have a better understanding of the areas of responsibility and challenges in the respective departments.