Hugo Schotman

Dutch IT professional, part-time Ski instructor, living in Zurich

Innovative User Experience Leader with a strong technical background and extensive consulting and project delivery experience on over 30 projects in 10 years in the United States and 7 European countries. I bridge the technical, creative and cognitive disciplines. I am passionate about finding simple and elegant solutions to complex problems. I was a key member of teams building User Experience departments in 3 companies. I enjoy working with people from many different academic and cultural backgrounds. My colleagues have praised my consistent optimistic and relaxed attitude especially in high-pressure situations. Successfully delivered 10 international projects as a project manager of which 7 involved distributed teams. My leadership style is cooperative and coaching. I thrive in flat organizational structures.

Next to my regular career I have contributed to publications about Podcasting and skiing and have become an ISIA certified ski-instructor, I still sometimes teach/guide off-piste/ backcountry skiing.

Hugo grew from being a consultant and developer on client-server projects to technical architect on Internet projects. He was the technical lead for the User Experience groups at Cambridge Technology Partners (Amsterdam) and later Accenture (Zurich). Hugo has also acquired significant project management experience.

Before Optaros, Hugo worked at an Internet Startup and was responsible for the technical architecture and infrastructure based on Ruby on Rails running in an environment with FreeBSD, Apache and MySQL.

Industries
Telecoms, Media, Publishing, Banking, Insurance, Governmental organizations, Management consulting, Building technologies, Tourism, Logistics

Roles
User Experience architect, Consultant, technical architect, project manager, product manager, writer, presenter, sales, troubleshooter, trainer, coach.

Projects
Next Generation Internet, Web shops/e-commerce, podcasting, catalogs, online booking, stock trading, mortgage application, insurance comparison, CMS, audio/ video production, DVD authoring, ERP systems (SAP, custom).

Technology
UNIX (including Linux), Mac OS X, Windows, client-server applications, Internet application architectures, DHTML, AJAX & other front-end technologies, Prototype, Yahoo UI Library & other libraries, Flash, RSS, PHP, MYSQL, Ruby on Rails, Apache, IIS, Java (J2EE), audio/video codecs, and many other technologies.