In this interview, meet Julien, our Product Manager and message delivery platform specialist. Discover his career development at Mindbaz, his vision of product design, his background… Let’s take a look at our Product Manager’s profile.
Julien’s email product expertise
Julien joined Mindbaz in 2017. For his arrival, it was the customer service department of the deliverability specialist ESP (Email Service Provider) that brought him back to France.
Discovering ESPs
After graduating with a Master’s degree in e-commerce project management, Julien joined the web teams of a major mail-order company for 2 years. After contributing to the development of their marketplace, he joined the marketing and CRM team.
“I found it very interesting to understand the impact of an email campaign, whether on traffic, sales or even turnover. And the possibilities are wide-ranging. I worked on promotional, loyalty and product emails, as well as targeting and tracking. It was pretty diverse.”
It was also at this time that Julien became familiar with ESPs such as Mindbaz.
Database animation
After 18 months in Australia, he returned to Paris to manage email campaigns for an online game publisher. While there, he built up his expertise in database activation, aimed at strengthening customer loyalty.
“During those two years, I managed the statistics and proposed email campaigns. The company used an email router that was actually the forerunner of Mindbaz. That was my first contact with the team.”
International email experience
Después de 18 meses en Australia, regresa a París y trabaja con campañas de email para un editor de juegos en línea. En este momento, desarrolla su experiencia en la animación de bases de datos, con el objetivo de fidelización.
“Durante esos dos años, gestioné las estadísticas y propuse planes de email. La empresa utiliza un router de email que en realidad es el antepasado de Mindbaz. Mi primer contacto con el equipo.”
International email experience
After this experience, Julien moved back up to Northern France. He joined a large ready-to-wear brand as CRM project manager.
“I managed the customer base in France, Germany, Spain and Italy. I was in charge of defining the content of email campaigns, target audiences, etc.”
Then, he spent 1 year in Hong Kong before joining Mindbaz.
Julien and Mindbaz: understanding customer issues
Joining email router Mindbaz
Mindbaz customer service hires him for his email expertise. After meeting the team during the recruitment process, Julien is confident:
“I had a good feeling during the interviews, but what also convinced me were the possibilities for career development within the company. As everyone I met was so nice, I decided to join Mindbaz.”
In his new team, Julien follows up customers and builds a knowledge base about customer issues that will prove useful to him. He quickly focused on optimizing processes and tools to increase the platform’s automation.
“We were keen to build a reliable, secure tool that would enable customers to be independent.”
Julien’s internal career path: from Customer Service to the Product team
After 4 years in customer service, Julien has acquired a solid understanding of customer issues and needs. Customer service no longer holds any secrets for him, and he’s looking for new challenges to keep growing and challenged.
He was offered the chance to evolve within the company. He joined the Product team.
Today, Julien manages the development of Mindbaz. Email platforms, SMS, APIs… He studies needs and transforms them into developments or creations.
To do this, he applies a tried-and-tested method:
- Study of requests and needs in collaboration with the customer service department
- Monitoring competitors, trends, markets, etc.
- If the project is interesting and promising, user interviews to pinpoint needs and start shaping the project.
- Compilation and analysis of user feedback
- Discussions with developers
- Creation of functional user stories
- Work on the design system and UX
“It’s true that the Product team interacts a lot with the technical teams. I really like this part of my job, it allows me to acquire different skills.”
Evolution and creation projects
Switching to REACT
Together with Rachel, Lead Product Manager, Julien is involved in one project after another. The current priority: completing the migration of our platforms to REACT.
Why Mindbaz decided to switch to REACT:
- Performance
- Closer to user expectations
- Compliance with UX rules
- Use of a single technology for all tools
- Use of modern technology
- Easy maintenance
- Time saving
“We’re taking advantage of this migration to redesign our pages, to make our interfaces UX friendly, efficient and pleasant.”
Datavisualization: optimized to meet our users’ needs
In 2022, several users told us about a possible area for improvement:
They waste time accessing their statistics database by database.
“We came up with a simple, effective solution to meet this demand. The project is almost complete. We’ll tell you all about it soon!”
Get to know our Dashboards feature for visualizing your email campaign data
For Julien, joining Mindbaz means: Proximity – wellbeing – growth
These are the 3 words Julien uses to describe his Mindbaz adventure: Proximity – wellbeing – growth.
The company’s size is an advantage:
“Working in a small team means you can talk to everyone. Communication flows smoothly, and that makes it easier to acquire new skills.”
As for the atmosphere, Julien’s feedback is positive:
“We have a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. We work hard and we’ve got some great challenges ahead of us, especially for 2023. But that doesn’t stop us from having a very healthy working atmosphere.
The work/life balance is carefully respected. We do a lot of remote work, for example. This has no impact on the confidence of our managers.”
Mindbaz’s benefit as a small company?
“Mindbaz has been around for over 10 years. There’s no risk of us going under tomorrow, unlike start-ups that aren’t yet solid.
Moreover, the coming years are going to be very interesting: the challenges are quite ambitious, the company continues to grow and we’re hiring in several departments, including the Product team.”
Join the Product team: Mindbaz is hiring!
The move in December 2022 to new, modern premises in the center of Lille was the icing on the cake.