Hi, I'm Janis

I have always enjoyed building websites, web apps, or processes that are clean, simple and intuitive.

In 2004, I built I-Galaxy, one of my first websites. It was a portal about high school years in the USA. Back then, traffic came from banner exchanges and links—not search engines or LLMs. Despite my age, major business portals linked to mine because my banners matched their professional quality.

Ever since then I have been building websites and web apps, or managed the development as a project or product manager.

At Better Collective I built a language exchange portal (tandempartners.org), which grew organically to above 200,000 users. I also built the company's first Intranet, and as a side gig built my first web app - from scratch: A simple task manager called Projelo, which was used by quite a few of the company's employees.

During that time I learned a lot about search engine optimization (SEO), conversion rate optimization (CRO), and web development. I also gained some experience in agile project management, and was certified in SCRUM and Kanban.
I used this experience to start my first e-business together with a friend. It was a web portal called Babyartikelcheck, which allowed users to find and compare baby equipment and read reviews about them. The portal generated some revenue via partnerships with baby equipment manufacturers, and we gained quite a lot of search engine traffic.

Later I joined Unity and was the product lead for the Asset Store, Unity's marketplace for 3D assets. Together with my team, I worked on making the shopping experience better, and introduced experimentation (CRO), which resulted in a significant revenue increase. I also oversaw the development of a new publisher/seller portal, and built tooling for the merchandising team to run sales more efficiently.

Most recently I was a Group Product Manager at Chaos (Cylindo), where I was primarily in charge of the Platform and Distribution. My team and I built a new customer portal, worked on the first AI Product, and built internal tools to make the 3D asset production more efficient.

Both at Unity and Chaos there was no dedicated product operations manager, so I took care of it:

Among other things I built custom Airtable setups, improved the internal bug reporting flow, built internal communication frameworks, built a customer feedback loop, and created a custom product dashboard called Product Hub, to make it easy for everyone to find anything product-related (KPIs, roadmaps, backlog etc.).

While the technology has changed a lot over the years, the principles that I follow have not. I strive to shape websites, apps and processes that are seamless and sustainable - solutions that make a real difference, that last, and feel good for the people using them.

Let's build something great together!