Our people: Nina van der Behr

“I love that I get to collaborate with clever, passionate people to solve problems at scale.”

Whether it’s in a karaoke bar or one of the boardrooms of Learnosity’s Sydney office, Technical Product Manager Nina van der Behr has a voice worth listening to.

What do you do at Learnosity?

I’m a Technical Product Manager in the “Admin Apps” team. We manage a range of internal and external products related to self-service administration, authentication, BI Analytics, and backend processes. 

How did you get into that area?

After finishing my degree in anthropology, I took a job as an office manager in a software R&D firm. I realized the industry was full of really smart people trying to solve challenging problems. So over the last eight years, I’ve worked my way up, moving through a bunch of different roles before finding the sweet spot in Product. 

What would you say has been your biggest challenge at Learnosity to date?

Dealing with transition while the business scales. Learnosity’s user base has doubled in the last year and we’ve seen significant expansion in nearly all departments. It’s been challenging managing the “business as usual” across multiple products while supporting our rapidly scaling user base and iterating on how we all work together here. 

With that being said, we’ve navigated pretty well through this change by focusing on communicating clearly across the business. We make a concerted effort to collaborate with the right stakeholders at the right times. We record decisions transparently, including info about other options we considered and the data behind why we decided to go a certain route. It’s all about utilizing the Learnosity brain trust while making sure our colleagues (both present and prospective) have an opportunity to understand why a certain thing was done a certain way.

What work project are you most proud of and why?

My team was the driving force behind Learnosity Console, a product that lets clients easily manage, analyze, and configure their Learnosity settings. We launched it mid-2018 and within six months we had close to full adoption across our client base, which I’m really proud of. It’s been a great way of giving clients more control over configurations without needing to contact our support team.

We’ve also been able to leverage Console in a way that it offers our clients key operational data insights so they get a high-level view of their user traffic and composition and health of their learning content. It’s nice to be involved in the production of such a helpful solution. 

In your opinion, what makes working at Learnosity different?

I love the fact that I learn something new every day and get to collaborate with clever, passionate people to solve problems at scale. Everyone goes the extra mile to support customers – from the support team to engineering and right up to the top level of management. It’s refreshing to be in a company that nurtures such dedication, love for learning, and lets you work with industry-leading technologies every day. 

What do you do to relax in your spare time?

When I’m at home you can find me pottering in the garden or lazing on the front deck with my partner and our cats. Also, on a holiday to Japan I once did karaoke seven nights straight, so if we’re going out I’m always up for a good song and dance. 😉