Maarten Egmond
In our employee spotlight series, we invite different employees to share their stories. With a face-to-face interview, we provide you some insight about what their role is and how we work at Genexis.
This employee spotlight is with Maarten Egmond. Maarten joined Genexisin 2005 and now works as a chief technology officer at our Eindhoven office.
What does your role as a chief technology officer entail?
The CTO has quite a diverse role: I keep track of the latest technology and standards, as well as new market trends. Meanwhile, I look internally at the direction we’re heading in on a strategic level. You could say, in summary, that I am responsible for the product strategy.
You’ve been working at Genexis for more than 17 years,how do you see the company’s growth during these years?
Things have changed in many aspects. The most visible change is our size. When I joined, we had only 5 people. And Genexis now has over 100 employees. At the same time, some parts remained the same. For example, we’re still the same company in the sense that we still develop products for fiber broadband networks. And I think one of the most interesting things is to be in this growing industry where you can do new things, improve, and get better.
What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I like where I am now, and I don’t really have anything to tell my younger self: you should have done this and that. But for everyone who’s on this path, my advice would be to have fun. Yes, it is a very serious business with complications and hard work, but it should be a bit of fun as well. For example, when you’re having a meeting with customers, it’s nice if you can make them smile even with a small joke. And sometimes ‘fun’ can make the products better.
How would you describe your team?
I would say I have a kind of ‘virtual’ team. I don’t manage people directly; you could argue that I have no team. However, I work with everybody in the company. Because the content goes through everything we do, as everything centers around the products and solutions that we build. In general, focusing on the technology side, I talk to many people: developers, customers, sales, etc. And they help me a lot to see different things and figure out what it means for us as a company. So that over time, I can formulate our product strategy. I always like to consider everyone my colleagues, and I always tell new people: if you have new ideas, come talk to me. Ultimately, we’re all consumers who use broadband at home, so we might all have ideas on what could be better.
What do you think is the most unique part about working here?
I think the unique part is the combination of us as a technology-oriented company and our size. We’re small enough for individual people to make a difference, but we’re also big enough to build great products that have an impact on the market, and really help people in the end.