Sandra Drenthen @ Nedap Healthcare

Hello, I’m Sandra. I’m a Product Owner and have worked at Nedap since 2014.

What does no one know about you?

I’m big on fitness – especially strength training. I also love hiking, motorcycling, gaming and board games. And I get to do some of them at work! Thanks to flexible working hours – and because we’re currently working from home – I can work out twice a week during my lunch break. Then every Friday afternoon, we all play games together. Think Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, TowerFall and the latest hype Among Us. We used to do this in the game room at Nedap HQ. Now we do it remotely via our discord server. Still fun!

Role within Nedap?

I originally worked as a developer for Nedap via a consulting capacity for another company. But I later returned as a fully-fledged Nedapper – and product owner – within the very same team!

I’m responsible for every feature of my product. For guiding projects in the right direction in terms of vision and for coming up with the planning. I also unblock any blocking issues. One of the most important things I do, is prioritise and prepare the work: each component must be thoroughly worked out before everything is planned in.

As I work on Nedap Healthcare’s largest product, I often handover the responsibility of working out the projects in more detail to the team. New projects are added all the time, so there plenty of growth opportunity for team members.

What’s your code?

Java, JSP, Ebean, SQL, Cucumber, Ajax, jQuery, Ruby, Jenkins, Jira, Git, Sonar.

What attracted you to Nedap?

The work culture. You can choose to do things that you’re good at. And if you’re not so good at something, you’ll always get energised by someone who is! The lack of hierarchy was also high on my list: you can develop your own ideas, present them to the team and sometimes even implement them immediately. And then there’s the huge amount of freedom, which of course comes with responsibility. Just how I like it!

Nedap ambitions?

There’s always something on the horizon. For instance, we’ve just created a new organizational structure within Healthcare. A group of product owners with the same focus will be collaborating more on mapping out the big picture together. I’m a coordinator for this back-office group, so there’s never a shortage of new challenges!