Team Spotlight - Featuring Marcel Justus (Product Manager)

Marcel, thank you for being the first person in our new series! Can you shortly introduce yourself to our readers?

Of course! Hi everyone, I am Marcel and I am a Product Manager at Entrix. I studied Business Administration in Mannheim. After my Bachelor’s degree I decided to go into a more technical field and studied Data Science in my Master’s. Meanwhile I completed multiple internships in tech consulting but at the end decided to join an Energy Tech Startup.

A bit about me personally, I am half German half French, love living in Munich with all the outdoor activities like trail-running in the summer and ski-touring in winter. I have a big passion for surfing but have yet to try the famous Eisbach river wave we in the city.

Consulting must have had its good parts too, why go into an Energy Tech Startup?

Even though I had a great experience working in consulting in my past internships, I decided to join Entrix for several reasons. Picking a startup allowed me to pick a topic and focus on a specific problem I was passionate about which is the energy transition. Here I can have a bigger impact in scale and a team that I can grow with.

The Energy industry specifically was not an area I was deeply in, so I learned a lot of its details on the job. Nevertheless, during my Master’s Degree I worked on a project where I worked a lot with household energy load data to create a new innovative product for energy suppliers to create a product with a flat pricing model. This experience made me realize that the energy industry is producing a lot of interesting data that can be utilized and optimized.

So what does a Product Manager actually do at Entrix?

The role of Product Manager can certainly mean a lot of different things in different companies. At a high level, as Product Managers at Entrix, we ensure the right features are built at the right time.

Of course there are several categories that I can name. On the one hand, we have the energy markets and it is not a market where you just buy and sell energy, it is more complex than that. There are different markets with different requirements that we need to understand, so digging into the regulatory aspects and translating them into concrete product requirements is a big part. On the other hand, being close to our customer and building relationships within the industry and translating our product vision into roadmaps and milestones.

Another aspect I personally find very interesting is making the product not only transparent to the customer but also internally to our team. Our product is very technical so bringing more clarity into how our product performance and how it actually works is something we feel responsible for in the Product Management team.

What is a common misconception about your job?

(laughs) Product Managers are constantly writing Jira Tickets!

It certainly is part of the job sometimes but actually the team takes a great responsibility in managing them.

Another one is that the hardest part of the roadmap is building it first. I think it is at least equally challenging to maintain it with changing requirements or circumstances and always keep the whole team informed about it.

You have been now with Entrix almost for two years. Now that we are ending this year, what has been the highlight of the year for you?

The year I started, we brought our first battery live and that has been the highlight of last year. Now looking back at this year, the highlight for me is that we have proven that our product performs really well, we are an established player in this sector, and we are on a great path to enable more flexibility and speed up the energy transition.

Thank you for giving us more insights to the company and to your job. Let’s move on to talk a bit about you now. Can you tell us a bit about the skills you value the most and those you are working on developing further?

The skill that I use the most and value a lot these days is cross functional communication. I am collaborating with the whole company, and interacting with multiple teams at once. There is the strategic vision that flows into the roadmap and at the same time lower level requirements. As a Product Manager, I need to hear both the higher level and the lower level aspects and also translate them to each other keeping in mind the different levels of technical and commercial in-depth knowledge.

What else are you reading? Any fictional favorites?

I like the books of Sebastian Fitzek quite a bit, that’s what I usually read when I am on vacation.

Wrapping this interview up, can you tell us your favorite Energy Industry fact?

This is a good one!

In Europe the energy grid is highly interconnected and the entire energy grid in Europe is alternating around a frequency of 50

Hz. I find this quite fascinating and the grid frequency it is also quite central to what we do. It doesn’t always stay exactly at 50 Hz, it goes a bit below and above, and it actually tells you a lot about how balanced or “healthy” the energy system is in that moment, a bit like a human pulse. When there is a an oversupply in energy the grid frequency goes up and when there is a shortage the frequency drops below the 50 Hz level. We, as Entrix, support the grid stability by either charging or discharging the battery in the right moments.

Can you explain a bit for our readers from outside the industry how crucial this is?

Maintaining grid frequency within a narrow range around the standard value is critical for the stable and reliable operation of the electrical grid and supporting the efficient balance of power supply and demand. Grid operators continuously monitor and adjust frequency to maintain stability in the power system, as deviations of more than 1-2 Hz are quite severe and can lead to blackouts in the worst case.

thank you very much for taking your time to tell our readers about you, your role and more Marcel!

If this article caught your attention and you are looking to join an Energy Tech company where you can have as much impact as Marcel does check out our open positions!