Thomas Keller

I started out selling, teaching and interpreting, and more than ten years on, my work has kept that shape. I sit between the people who know something and the people who need to use it, and I make sure the two understand each other.

It usually starts with a conversation. Before I write anything, I sit down with the people who do the work (product heads, sector leads, country teams). I ask what they wish others understood about their work, and what they know that nobody has written down yet. That material is almost always better than the form it's in. I turn it into something the next person can use: a value proposition, a website structure, an article, an email format or a campaign. Then I build it myself, in the tool it has to live in.

I teach it too, and that's the step I hold myself to: the work has to keep running once the teams own it. The port report I first built in 2020 still goes out on the template I redesigned in 2024, new subscribers still sign up through the newsletter page I built in 2021, and the product structure I drew for a global website is still the one in use.

Most of those years were at DHL Global Forwarding, in Basel, Switzerland, and Bonn, Germany. I went from project management to global business owner of the division's website and marketing automation platform, and received two CEO Awards along the way: one for a website redesign rolled out to more than 100 countries, one for EUR 3M in annual savings. Before DHL I worked with Nike's Western Europe sales team. After it came a year in Japan, teaching English, working in hospitality and rebuilding a guesthouse's English website.