MonitorFish
Product Developement & Operations Manager — Hardware for a Computer Vision System
I joined MonitorFish largely because of its Climate-KIC roots and to be part of Berlin’s cleantech community. My core responsibility was hardware: designing and iterating the underwater camera unit while working closely with software and embedded teams.
As the first and only hardware developer, I failed a lot early. Collaboration became a need, not a want. We worked hard to keep water out, budgets low, and the product small — buoyancy was a serious constraint.
Customer installations repeatedly showed real-world usage diverged from our assumptions. I learned where to cut corners and where not to, and how to bring research prototypes into deployment.
My CTO (a software dev) introduced SDLC thinking and we adapted Scrum principles to hardware. I also did early IoT work here — internal pressure & humidity monitoring inside the camera unit via a small ESP32 system.