On 01.03.2022 Gergana joined the SUSI&James team as a project manager. Due to her background in research, she is able to assess customer needs as well as process flows well in projects with research character. Due to her enthusiasm for innovative topics, Gergana quickly found herself in our team.
"With SUSI&James, I associate exciting projects with clever voice interaction and a great team."
Gergana is a cheerful, but also critical person. In her everyday life she deals with issues such as sustainability and the environment, preferring plastic-free and natural products, paying attention to fair production in clothing, etc. Gergana likes to spend her time with her family and takes care of her insect-friendly garden. An avid rock and jazz fan, Gergana occasionally attends concerts of her favorite artists. She also enjoys participating in game and karaoke nights with friends and tackling creative projects such as remodeling lamps and creating flyers and video invitations.
Our project leader is from Bulgaria. She came to Germany when she was 20 years old and speaks in her family daily in three languages, German, English and Bulgarian. Since all her relatives live abroad, she is a very independent person. Gergana studied computer visualistics and wrote about virtual worlds and intercultural competence in her diploma thesis.
Her doctoral thesis is currently in the final phase and deals with augmented reality techniques for use in education and nature. Even before joining SUSI&James, Gergana was responsible for coordinating innovative software projects, designing websites and sharing knowledge, and always had the opportunity to develop herself through this. Gergana then applied to SUSI&James for the position of project manager.
As a project manager, Gergana is always in contact with customers. To this end, she records the requirements for the product in customer meetings and, in the next step, prepares offers for them.
"It's important to me to work on interesting and innovative projects, to take ownership and drive SUSI&James forward, and then when the customers are satisfied and the team's work is recognized, a lot has already been achieved."
Once the project is established, Gergana is responsible for planning and organizing sprints for the development. She discusses the necessary tasks with the developers and coordinates between them. Since Gergana is an organizational talent, this task is not difficult for her. Furthermore, she models use cases and writes user stories that help the development team to realize customer requirements.
Along the way, Gergana creates presentations for her client meetings to keep clients up to date. In doing so, she makes use of her open and communicative nature in the discussions. This also makes it easy for Gergana to speak openly with the team when difficulties arise in project implementation and to work together on optimizations. To avoid this as much as possible, Gergana tests a lot and also pays very close attention to the quality of the products.
"So far, I have found all the projects I have been able to work on very interesting. In one project, our digital employee SUSI speaks in English and is used internationally during driver testing. In another project, the research character is a bit higher and that's where my heart particularly beats for it, too. In this, I can also suggest my own ideas and get involved."
We thank Gergana for the interview and are happy to have her on the team!
