Product Manager Pieter ter Berg, who has moved from the Netherlands to Finland, is one of Pinja’s many international reinforcements that complement Pinja’s Muster team with their diverse expertise. Based on his architectural studies and design background, he is excited about the combination of software development and good design, and believes it is one of the keys to Pinja’s international success.
Pinja’s Product Manager Pieter ter Berg, who lives in Jyväskylä, moved from France to Finland with his family in the summer of 2019 and soon after that began working at Pinja’s Muster team. Ter Berg, who is originally from the Hague, says that he applied for several jobs at the time, and that Pinja stood out positively because his application and CV had clearly been read carefully.
For Ter Berg, who comes from a family and friends with strong entrepreneurial background, Finland seems like a very systematic country where recommendations are rules – according to Dutch mentality, even rules are often interpreted as recommendations. As a team leader and product owner, he avoids strong top-down control.
– Bossing around is not natural to me. Instead, I like to discuss things, listen to the thoughts of co-workers, and provide suggestions as needed. I want to let the team members do their own work undisturbed, because they are good at it, Ter Berg says.
Good user experience requires good planning
Pinja’s Muster team develops a versatile vehicle inspection system that is used in about 90 % of Finnish inspection stations and increasingly also abroad, for example in Sweden. In the future, the focus will increasingly be on the international market, and good customer experience is key to reaching this goal.
– The inspection business is quite specialized and a niche market, in a way also relatively traditional. The work is fast-paced, so the core requirement for a work-supporting system is that it works reliably, is simple enough and allows integrations with the customer’s other systems. Add to this a good customer experience and design, and an internationally interesting solution is at hand, Ter Berg says.
In addition to his own project work, Product Manager Ter Berg works with a variety of other things, including coding, as well as UX and UI design. He considers the design work to cover much more than the layout of the system, as the topic is also related to the overall functionality and fluidity of the service, as well as a pleasant user experience.
– The technical implementation must, of course, be good and functional, but that alone is not enough. Technology alone does not set us apart from our competitors. Actually, we sell a good user experience, and it’s rewarding for the customer companies and us, as well, Ter Berg says.
Language studies and woodwork
Product Manager Ter Berg, who has lived in Finland for a couple of years, especially values the nature and spaciousness of Finland. He has previously lived in various parts of the Netherlands and, before arriving in Finland, for a few years in a small rural village of 38 inhabitants in France. He says that Jyväskylä comfortably represents the middle ground for his family – it’s busier than the French village but not as much as the Hague.
– The Finnish language is challenging, so I find it positive from the point of view of a non-Finn that so many Finns speak English well. Public administration materials can also be found in very good English, unlike in France, for example, where it was practically mandatory to speak French, Ter Berg says.
He considers that a huge advantage of his hometown is that the grandparents of his children live close by, and he has found a balance for the work, among others, in a woodworking course at the civic college that he attends with his father-in-law. He works variably at home and at Pinja’s Jyväskylä office.
Ter Berg has greetings for future international people of Pinja.
– In Finland, everything works very systematically, and Pinja takes good care of its employees.
Read more
Get to know Pinja as a workplace, the career stories of Pinja's employees and open positions
The Junior Software Developer internship provides a good basis for working life
Pinja’s training promise is a guarantee of future sustainable services and professionalism
