Hi Stephen! To kick-start this conversation, let's get into the student mindset: what and where did you study - and how did it get you to where you are today?

I studied Electronic Engineering with a major in Computer Science. Originally from Cape Town, I moved to Berlin, where I spent eight years building consumer-facing marketplace products — the sort of places where supply, demand, and trust collide — and became rather fascinated by the mechanics of how platforms grow.

From Berlin, I moved to Amsterdam for Studocu, which felt like a natural next step: a marketplace of student notes that was both distinctive and genuinely trusted. I joined as Chief Product Officer because I believed the sixty million documents students had shared and worked with constituted a remarkable asset whose potential had yet to be fully realised. That belief has only strengthened since.

What does a “typical” day in your life as Chief Product Officer at Studocu look like?

Honestly, my days have changed a lot since December. The latest generation of AI models finally became genuinely amazing, and that shifted how I spend my time. A much bigger share of my day now goes to working directly with AI — prototyping, evaluating what the models can actually do for students, and stress-testing new features with my team.

The rest follows a familiar rhythm:

• Mornings are usually async catch-ups, reviewing designs, checking metrics, and reading through updates.

• Mid-morning is reserved for deeper thinking work — strategy, product reviews, or solving prioritisation problems with Product Managers.

• Afternoons tend to be more collaborative, with engineering syncs, design critiques, and stakeholder conversations.

But the honest answer is: far more AI than six months ago, and I expect that ratio to keep climbing.

What gives you the most energy in your role day-to-day?

I love building. Full stop. Taking a problem, forming a point of view about what the solution should be, and then seeing it come to life in the product is still the most energising part of the job for me.

The best days are when I’m close to the work - reviewing a prototype, debating a difficult design trade-off with the team, or watching real students interact with something we shipped the week before.

Strategy matters. Org design matters. But the thing that gets me out of bed is making something that didn’t exist yesterday.

One project I’m especially excited about right now is Studocu Ace, which is focused on helping students navigate the challenges of academia on a daily basis.

What is a key project or initiative you and your team are currently working on, and the impact you expect it to have for students?

That would definitely be Studocu Ace. It’s our push into the daily-use case. Historically, Studocu has been something students reach for around exam time - maybe a few times per semester. Ace changes that.

It’s built around the idea that students think in courses, not documents, and that the product should support them throughout the semester, not only when they’re panicking before exams.

We’re layering AI agents on top of course context so the product can actively do work between study sessions:

• preparing students for tomorrow’s class,

• flagging weaker topics,

• generating mock exams when an exam date gets announced,

• and helping students stay consistently engaged with their coursework.

The impact we’re aiming for is a shift from monthly to daily engagement - making Studocu something students rely on every day, rather than something they cram with twice a semester.

How do you and your team stay close to the student experience when making product decisions?

A few ways, and none of them alone are enough. We constantly look at quantitative data: Mixpanel, retention metrics, funnel drop-offs, and behavioural patterns. But numbers only tell you what happened, not why.

So we combine that with:

• regular student interviews,

• session recordings to observe where students get stuck,

• app store reviews,

• and experiments through our Learning Impact Lab, where we test whether features improve actual learning outcomes - not just engagement metrics.

The thing I push hardest on is overlap. When a qualitative insight and a quantitative signal point in the same direction, you can move very quickly with confidence. When they contradict each other, that’s usually a sign to dig deeper before committing.

Nothing beats having both strong product instinct and corroborating data.

If you think back to your time as a student, what feature of the Studocu platform would you have used the most?

More worked solutions for maths problems. I genuinely loved mathematics, but the thing I always wanted more of wasn’t just the answer - it was understanding the reasoning behind it:

• how someone approached the problem,

• where the difficult substitution happened,

• why one method worked better than another,

• and how to solve problems creatively in your own way.

Studocu’s ability to surface worked examples from students who previously took the same course - combined with AI that can walk you through each step - would have been exactly what I was looking for.

I absolutely would have been the student loading up every past exam solution I could find.

If you could grade Studocu with an A+ in one area, what would it be for and why?

Course-level specificity. You can learn maths from anyone. But you can’t easily learn Dr. Jones’s version of maths for this semester at your university from a generic AI chatbot.

That granularity - professor-level, course-level, semester-level, exam-level - is something no general-purpose AI can replicate, and it’s what makes Studocu uniquely useful.

We have over 60 million documents mapped to real courses at real universities, plus thousands of lecture recordings uploaded every week. That data layer has been built over thirteen years, and it’s what allows our AI experiences to generate answers grounded in what students will actually be tested on.

When hiring for Studocu (which we are!), what traits do you generally look for in someone joining the team?

Autonomy. I want people who can take a boundary condition - “here’s the problem, here’s what success looks like, here’s the constraint” - and independently figure out how to get there. I don’t want to be the bottleneck, and I don’t want people who need me to be.

The second thing is intellectual honesty: being willing to hold a strong opinion, but also being willing to update that opinion when the evidence says otherwise.

And finally, kindness. We’re demanding of each other, but that only works when people are genuinely kind. If you can combine high standards with empathy and respect for others, you’ll do very well here.

Finally, but importantly… which Studocu house are you part of?

Hupwell! 🚀