# Product manager who still builds.

- Canonical: https://matheja.me/work/
- Site: Ben Matheja (https://matheja.me), llms.txt: https://matheja.me/llms.txt

Work & Skills

I'm a Senior Product Manager at Porsche, working on cloud-native platforms. I lead with strategy and flow, and I keep my engineering hands-on: everything in the lab on this site is built and run by me.

[Get in touch](mailto:ben@matheja.me) [Explore the lab](https://matheja.me/lab/)

![A narrow paved path winding through trees in autumn colours, yellow on the left and red on the right.](https://matheja.me/assets/img/forest-path-2020-960.jpg)

_An autumn path. (Photo: Ben Matheja)_

## What I can do

Each skill links to something you can read or inspect.

### Product and portfolio

- **Product strategy** for platform products: vision, roadmaps, outcomes over output
- **Agile at scale** SAFe release trains, PI planning, flow metrics
- **Portfolio steering** across several teams and locations
- **Coaching** product owners and teams

[See the experience below](https://matheja.me/work/#experience)

### Platform engineering

- **Kubernetes** on Talos Linux, Cilium, ingress and certificates
- **GitOps** with Flux, External Secrets
- **Infrastructure as code** OpenTofu, Ansible, Proxmox
- **CI/CD** GitLab pipelines, semantic-release, Renovate

[See the lab](https://matheja.me/lab/)

### Identity and operations

- **SSO** with Authentik: OIDC and forward auth for every service
- **Secrets** in Vault, short-lived tokens instead of root tokens
- **Observability** Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry
- **Backups** with restic, tested restores

[Post: Replacing root tokens with SSO](https://matheja.me/2025/11/20/vault-oidc-authentik-sso.html)

### AI and agents

- **Agent workflows** with Claude Code: a main session plus focused minions
- **MCP servers** and a gateway that puts them behind SSO
- **Model choice** frontier models to plan, cheaper ones to execute
- **Local LLMs** measuring what small models can and cannot do

[How I work with AI](https://matheja.me/how-i-work/)

## Experience

1. 2022 – today **Senior Product Manager**
2. 2019 – 2022 **IT Product Owner**
3. 2016 – 2019 **IT Project Manager**
4. 2010 – 2016 **B.Sc. and M.Sc. Information Systems**

University of Münster.

Role details are in the CV, on request.

At a glance

## At a glance

- Product and engineering, both sides of the table
- German native, English fluent
- Based in Hesse, Germany

Certifications

- SAFe® 5 PO/PM
- CSPO
- CPSA-F
- Deputy RTE
- AWS Advanced