And thus, after graduating from high school, I already knew I wanted to go into the professional direction of either IT or cars. I decided upon the more practical way and completed an apprenticeship as an IT specialist - probably also because I didn't really think I had the manual skills for an apprenticeship in the automotive sector yet.

However, the apprenticeship alone was not enough for me, so I started a degree in business informatics afterwards. As my passion for practical work remained, I worked for Liebherr and later for Nokia while completing my bachelor and master studies.

After my studies and my time at Nokia in Ulm, I decided to go on a little "adventure" within consulting. In a medium-sized but international IT consultancy, I advised on exciting topics such as asset backed securities for banks in the automotive sector or completed tasks in reporting including their technical implementation. In this context, I was able to build up my leadership skills and lead my first team of software developers. Luckily, this brought the human factor increasingly to the fore.

At that time, I was unfortunately still lacking the enthusiasm for and connection to a tangible product. By coincidence, I became aware of the BMW Car IT in Ulm. Due to its very independent and international culture, the BMW Car IT is the powerhouse for software development within the BMW Group. The job advertisement as a Product Owner in the head unit development intrigued me and I applied for the vacancy. This was a super spontaneous decision I’ve never regretted. As a Product Owner I could finally unite all my passions. Developing the route guidance in combination with the head-up-display and the customer identifier was great fun. I understood how important it is for me to know which fruits my work will bear in the end. And that’s my greatest motivator today! Because every day when I sit in my own BMW, I’m proud to see the products we’ve developed and the great work of my team, a team of motivated and talented engineers which I was able to develop over the years.

Later I was involved in developing the display for semi and highly autonomous driving and, with my team, brought the Assisted Driving View to the road. Another great feature and product that’s also very popular in the market.

Even in my free time, I usually sit behind the steering wheel when exploring lonely regions of our planet such as Northern Canada, Alaska, Australia or even our beautiful Europe with my off-road camper.

Now I'm off to Munich, to a new exciting task. I’ll be in charge of the HMI (Human Machine Interface) Software Development for the voice control and personal assistant in our vehicles. This is exactly what I find so exciting about working at the BMW Group – being able to discover new areas over and over again and having so much personal development potential!