The People Behind Sartorius' Digital Platforms 

Meet One of Our eBusiness Teams

Having fun together, in and outside the office: The eBusiness Web Platforms team

When it comes to creating a simplified and intuitive customer experience, digital touchpoints play a key role: from the global Sartorius website, to the eShop and eProcurement.  Before customers can find a product online or get in touch with a product specialist, and even before sales and marketing teams at Sartorius get to work - one department has already been there: eBusiness Platforms. They own and develop Sartorius’ digital marketing and sales platforms. Meet the team that focuses on web platforms, learn how they launch a website project in just a few sprints and find out why you don’t have to be a cat fan to join them. 

Editor's note: This article dates from 2022; the eBusiness team is now part of Sartorius' IT organization.

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„Basically, the overall ambition of the eBusiness Platforms department is to fully digitize the customer journey and simplify the customer experience: from lead generation to sales conversion to customer service,” Miriam Reißnauer, Manager of the Web Platforms team explains.
 

“To do this, we operate digital platforms, develop them further and empower our colleagues, predominantly from marketing and sales, to use the systems independently according to the self-service principle.” Her team of 14 people takes care of the global website, eShop, the Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems as well as the marketing automation platform. “What is special about us as the Web Platforms team is, that we are not part of the IT or digital marketing department, as is the case at many companies. We are a separate function with hybrid expertise: on the one hand, we know about agile frameworks, digital platforms and usability. On the other hand, there is a deep understanding of the requirements and processes in the commercial areas, especially marketing and sales. In other words: what is needed to explain and sell things," Miriam says.
 

Pioneers in Agile Working

For this bandwidth, the team has diverse academic backgrounds. However, for Miriam, the decisive factors are passion for the job and the will to grow: “In my first job at Google, I worked with philosophers, linguists, business graduates and IT specialists – and it was very successful. Instead of fields of study, I'm much more interested in the career decisions people have made, because there are hardly any formal training paths for what we do: You can't study how to be a Product Owner.” The role of the Product Owner is key in the Web Platforms team.

We were at the forefront of introducing agile working methods, specifically the role of Product Owner, to the company. This allowed us to launch new platforms through sprints within months instead of years.

Miriam Reißnauer, Manager of eBusiness Web Platforms

The team mainly uses Scrum and Kanban and interprets the role of Product Owner very narrowly: “Our Product Owners are “CEOs of the product”, the experts for their platforms. The most important aspect for them is to create business value and that they decide what direction their platform develops into,” Miriam explains.

Freedom to develop: From working student to Product Owner

One of the Product Owners is Annika Burneleit. She started her career at Sartorius in 2018 as a student trainee during her Master Studies in Global Business and has accompanied the development of the department from the very beginning. “I already had the opportunity to take responsibility as a student. And after graduation, I got the chance to step into a newly created position as a Junior Product Owner for our website and the Digital Asset Management platform," Annika recalls. 
 

“An import part of my work is to communicate with the users of our systems. They submit requests and we work with Backlogs, which is kind of a prioritized to-do list, that allows the users and us to keep track of what has already been done. We work in sprints and continuously implement new features to improve the user-friendliness or accessibility of our platforms. The systems have already reached a high level of maturity – it’s amazing to be part of this process.”

Annika also just finished her first own big project, for which she had to organize, moderate, and follow up on more than 100 workshops in which all the major processes of the different eBusiness platforms were elaborated and documented. On top of that, she is an ambassador for knowledge sharing in an internal wiki and develops training sessions for users. “When I joined the team, these topics had not been covered. I considered them important and just started working on them," she says.

That’s what is special about working here: You have a lot of freedom to take on diverse jobs and can really take your personal development in your own hands.

Annika Burneleit, Junior Product Owner

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Collaborative Culture 

Another thing Annika appreciates is the collaborative team spirit: "We get along great, there is no destructive competition, no elbow mentality, but we all focus on our goals. This way, it doesn’t matter which team you’re in, or how long you’ve been with us: Everyone always has an open ear for you. This mentality is a great strength and makes working here fun.”

Paying attention to new hires who live up to the culture while contributing their own personalities at the same time, is important to Miriam. “We are a diverse mix, but we also have things in common, for example our fondness for cats or Star Wars. But of course, non-cat-fans are also welcome,” she says with a grin.
 

The most important thing is that you are passionate for your job. We are all doers and want to move things forward.

Miriam Reißnauer, Manager of eBusiness Web Platforms

Looking Ahead: Ambitious Plans for 2022

And the team has progressed a lot, since it was created in this set-up in 2019: A whole digital platform ecosystem with all of the systems being connected and exchanging data. And what is next? “In 2022, we will focus on improving product data quality using artificial intelligence. And we want to connect the platforms, which already exchange data, even better. In other words, developing cross-platform solution designs,” she explains. For this, the current 35-person eBusiness Platforms team needs to grow. “We have created new roles and are looking for additional Product Owners, Project Coordinators or Solution Consultants,” Miriam points out. “We are a great team and we want to actively drive the digital customer journey together. with new, motivated colleagues.”
 

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