Interview with Birthe Lindenthal on 10 years of OpenProject

OpenProject is special. Several of their employees have been with the company for over 10 years. Birthe Lindenthal is one. She built up the company from the very beginning together with her boyfriend and later husband and CEO, Niels Lindenthal.

In this interview, we learn that in times of constant change and uncertainty in tech, OpenProject stands out for its deep care for its employees. Under her leadership, the OpenProject team regularly organizes offsite meetups for its remote employees to get to know each other and feel connected.

“At our offsites we focus on the personal side, on getting connected, not doing more work. That’s what matters during these events. And it shows how much it means to people,” she said in this interview.

In this employee spotlight, learn more about Birthe and her role as Chief Marketing Officer at OpenProject.

Tell us about your day-to-day responsibilities as CMO for OpenProject.

I’m responsible for all marketing and communication programs at the company. Every day I work with the marketing team to organize their efforts and priorities, and review their work.

I am responsible for defining and maintaining the brand strategy of OpenProject, ensuring consistent messaging, and managing the brand’s identity across all of our channels. I love working on our website myself and coming up with content strategies and topics to focus on. I also enjoy planning for conferences and events that are relevant to our efforts or industry.

Tell us about how you got started at OpenProject.

I started with the company before we even transitioned to an open source project management tool. Back then, we were offering custom development of a variety of services to clients. I’ve always enjoyed taking on the marketing and communications behind these projects, taking care of our website, and running training workshops for the customer.

Back then, we needed a project management system for all of these projects, and we used Redmine. We needed to make changes to meet our needs, i.e. with regard to privacy topics, and so we did, as it’s open source. We pushed the changes upstream, but they weren’t accepted as often as we hoped, so we forked it and started OpenProject.

We started offering it to our clients, and my role was to explain how it worked and take their needs and feedback back to the engineering team. I have a love for the customer that goes back to the beginning! And, I still love hearing how OpenProject makes a difference for people and businesses. Especially our NGOs and non-profits who need robust, affordable tooling to do their work. I am proud to hear about all of the great organizations collaborating with us!

What do you love about talking with customers?

From the beginning, I’ve prioritized getting feedback from our clients. I take that feedback to engineering, sales, and marketing.

I have done many client trainings as well, which is always a fun way to show off what the product can do and take feedback in the moment from the people using it.

Our customers are all over the globe, it’s really cool. I look at our analytics often, and there’s hardly a country in this world where we’re not present.

I am proud because clients like Greenpeace, GIZ, and many others do work that contributes to a better world or protects the planet’s wildlife and ecosystems.

I know the German government uses OpenProject. Can you tell us more about their goals?

The German government is now focusing more on data sovereignty and data privacy. They are therefore trying to implement tools that are open source instead of being tied into proprietary software such as Microsoft 365.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs (BMI) has launched a startup from the public administration, ZenDiS (Center for Digital Sovereignty), which aims to create alternatives with its own open source projects, like OpenCoDE and openDesk platforms. OpenDesk is a sovereign workplace that, unlike previous attempts, is based entirely on known open source components.

How does OpenProject approach building a remote company culture?

We started out quite traditional, with an office, and we didn’t even have an HR department. At that time, I was doing a lot of the HR tasks together with a few others from the team.

About 4 years ago, we officially hired an HR professional. This allowed us to set up a strong remote culture, and it all happened for us before the COVID epidemic. We were well prepared and already had a hybrid working model, so it was easy for us to shift to fully remote during that time.

We still have a small office space in Berlin, and some employees love coming in. But we’re remote first and allow our employees to choose what they prefer. We are as productive as ever, and we organize offsite meetings to get to know each other better in person.

Are you currently hiring?

Yes! The company is around 45 employees currently, and we’re looking to grow that to 75-100 employees over the next year or two.

5 things about Birthe

What are you reading or learning right now?

I’m reading quite a lot with regard to leadership development. So, as we’re planning to grow in a healthy way, I am thinking about how our leadership team needs to grow to even better support our employees and the product. One thing I’ve learned is that conflict can be good - it shows you what needs to improve, so it’s all about how you approach and handle it. I recently read a German book, “Die Kunst des Konflikts” which influenced my way of thinking about conflicts.

What is your favorite activity outside of work or your favorite hobby?

I like outdoor sports: running, cycling, and hiking.

What did you study at University?

I studied business administration. I spent one year in Spain and one year in South Africa.

What was your first job?

My first job during school was helping as a turnip farmer! Very manual, and you could see the result of your labor.

My first professional job after University was as an IT consultant at Accenture.

Anything else you would like to share?

I really enjoy driving the organization forward. I am happy when we have achieved something together, such as a new release. You can’t do it alone - only with a great team. I love the fact that everyone can contribute to make OpenProject so successful.