Moving on

Tomorrow is my last day as a consultant. On Monday I will start working as a designer for Quinyx, a company that makes Workforce Management software.

My career began at a tech startup in Stockholm. We made advanced storage and backup software and I learned so much from my time there. I got the chance to do everything from interaction design to testing, from sales to web development, and I really enjoyed the process of building something. However, the company failed and I decided to start working as a consultant. After all, that’s what most of my friends from university was doing and they seemed to like it.

Since then I’ve been working as a consultant, getting thrown into different projects, mostly doing code monkey stuff, producing the kind of horrible enterprise software that I was pretty sure every user was going to hate. Actually I still don’t know what any of the users think – user feedback never made it all the way back to me.

As a consultant, I’ve been in all sorts of projects in all sorts of organizations and I’ve learned from all of them. Some projects have been fun, some have been boring. But none of them have been mine. I have always been building someone else’s thing. I have never been responsible, and I’ve never been on a project long enough to see it through. You rarely get bored as a consultant, but you never become attached to something either.

It might be naïve, but I hope working at a product company will give me a chance to do something about that. I’m hoping to get an opportunity to build something great, iterate on it and live with it. And more than that, I hope to help make peoples lives a bit easier.

I am really excited about the future.