Hi, I'm Rikard 👋
I've found my home in product community of Oslo, in the intersection of technology, design, and sustainable energy solutions. After I joined Otovo in 2016 as one of their first employees, I've helped grow the company to where we are today: Hundreds of employees, precence in 13 markets and tens of thousands of homes with solar panels on their roofs (and we're not done yet).
I come from a life of priviledge, there's no doubt about that. I've probably been given more opportunities than most, but I also believe in making my own luck. I've come to understand that both history and life is only as straight as the stories we tell. So with that in mind, here's mine:
While studying informatics at NTNU in Trondheim, my partner and I spent a year as exchange students at UCT in Cape Town. When we weren’t in the computer lab, visiting vinyards or at the beach, I dedicated evenings to working remote for CosyTech, a Norwegian startup. This was my first real experience with startups and the world of product. Although we won a few competitions, CosyTech never found product-market fit. No customers meant no revenue, so we decided to close shop after ~12 months.
Andrroy and I proceeded to freelance together part-time for the remainder of our formal studies. We built an e-commerce site for wedding dresses, we MVP'd an online learning platform, and spent about a year building a "game" that was played in an fMRI machine as part of a research project. We had no idea what we were doing back then, but we were good enough to getting paid to learn, play and have fun.
An unexpected turn of events while writing my
master's thesis,
lead me to break my contract for an upcoming full-time position at
BEKK, and accept a job offer from
DNB, Norway's largest bank. This was thanks to
productive procrastination a hackathon in 2016 that went
surprisingly
well.
During that summer, Hanna, Camilla, Siri and I (the team from the hackathon) spent a few weeks at the bank to get a feel for working in such a large organization. My impression was generally good – we were given enough freedom and trust to get started on a developer portal, which would eventually morph into their Open Banking platform. However fun, I felt like I belonged in a smaller company. So I ended up cancelling my second contract in just 3 weeks.
Instead, I followed my intuition and walked back into the office of a client Andrroy and I had been working with for the past 6 months – the newly founded solar startup, Otovo. Beliving they had lost me to the bank, Andreas and Simen were surprised to see me. Their surprise quickly turned into excitement, and within an hour after I asked if I could join full time, the contract for a position as software engineer was signed. 2016 was a crazy year.
Since then, I contributed to building nearly every product and I've taken part in all of the 13 market launches we've done.
I've always had a knack for design, so my first few years were naturally spent on front-end and customer facing experiences. However, one of the benefits of being in a small team you get to cover a lot of ground. I now look back at nearly a decade of front-end, back-end and mobile development, product development, UX and visual design, and even some marketing and sales.
This "all over the place"-attitude was kind of addictive, so as the organization grew, product management was a natural next step for me. I did that for a few years, pre and during Covid-19, where my team focused on setting our platform up for market expansion. First in Brazil, as a white labling effort for Holu, then later launching Otovo in Italy, Poland and Germany.
In 2022, my team transitioned into working on partnerships and growth. After a few years of applying our previous market launch experiences into this new strategic bet, around 20% of our sales were coming from partnerships.
While this was a lot of fun and rewarding, but I also started to grow weary of spending too much of my time away from the day-to-day trenches of hands-on building. So when the opportunity to jump into engineering management presented itself, I took it.
Today, I lead Otovo's marketplace team as engineering manager. We're responsible for building and maintaining the core mechanics of our platform. It's been a roller coaster, but I'm still having fun chasing the sun together with Otovo ☀️
I never worked a day in my life, I just laid back and let the big beat lead me
As you might figure, these experiences were never strategic career moves for me. However, I learned some important lessons in:
- Navigating uncertainty.
- The importance of having fun.
- Placing bets on who to surround yourself with.
Away from the keyboard, I like to cook. Ideally for larger crowds. Since 2019 I've been spending my summers cooking for the kids at Feriekolonien. The rest of the year, I enjoy cooking for my (rather) large family. I have fun when I can be curious, have attention to detail, do just enough™ planning and focus on playful execution.
I think dogs are pretty great. We've had three Belgian shepherds since 2007: Sam & Tiva and most recently Yoda 🫶. They're a constant source of unconditional love, and a daily reminder that patience, commitment and consistency go a long way.
Life is better with music, which is why you'll always find me listening to it. Semi-long distance running and tap dancing are my go-to activities for keeping in shape.
That should do it for now. If you still haven't gotten enough, here's some content from my old site that still haven't been ported.
Cheers, Rix1 ✌️