Before Maria joined Slash, people called her a “firefighter”. Wherever there was a challenge, that’s where she would be. For many years, she had a hard time articulating what she was really good at. Her roles always sounded generalist, but they were always close to problem solving.
When she met Marc, Andries, and Alex, she thought she could bring her experience in building communities and managing operations. She was drawn to how they led the team, and how they made sure those values were embedded in how the company approached engagement and culture.
She expected a relatively straightforward role focused on people, culture, and internal operations. What she found instead was a company that never settled into a fixed mindset and always questioned the status quo. She became involved in strategic initiatives, growth, and shaping where the business should go next. Her initial guess was quite far off. But what stayed true was the opportunity to build, and she sees that in many Slash team members too. This has always been a place where your role can evolve when you see a problem, take ownership, and are willing to learn something completely new.
Here’s what a decade at Slash taught her.
Q1: The Flashback
“When you first joined Slash, what did you honestly think this place was going to be, and how far off was your initial guess?”
Before Slash, I had always been a generalist and a problem solver. One of my previous teams called me the “firefighter” because whenever there was a messy problem that did not clearly belong to anyone, I usually ended up there. For years, I actually struggled to explain what I was really good at.
When I met Marc, Andries and Alex, I thought my role would be fairly straightforward: people, culture, community and internal operations.
I was quite wrong. I realized Slash was a place where roles could evolve around the problems the business needed to solve. I became involved in strategy, then growth, and eventually in shaping where the business should go next.
That experience also changed how I think about leadership. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skills will change by 2030, while analytical thinking, adaptability and leadership remain among the most important skills.
So my initial guess was far off, but one thing stayed true: Slash gave me room to build. If you see a problem, take ownership and are willing to learn, your contribution does not have to stop at your job description.
Q2: The Global & Remote Reality
“After years of working remotely across different cultures, languages, and time zones, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about making global teamwork actually work?”
The biggest lesson for me is that global teamwork can’t run on good intentions alone. It needs clarity, context and repetition. People from different cultures can interpret the same behaviour very differently. Silence can mean agreement to one person and discomfort to another. Direct feedback can feel efficient in one culture and harsh in another. Remote work makes those misunderstandings harder to catch.
So as a leader, I’ve learned not to assume that because something was said, it was understood. I explain why we are making a decision, what good looks like, who owns what, and create room for people to question it.
For me, this is also how trust gets built. After years of working remotely with a global team, I think clarity and trust are much more connected than we sometimes realize.
Q3: Real Talk on AI
“Now on AI. Where do you land on AI right now? How much has it actually evolved into your daily routine and workflow?”
I am optimistic about AI, but I am going to keep challenging its existence in our society. I use it daily in my work, but I’m not interested in using it just because every leader is using it and keeps challenging its existence as a human race.Â
It helps me structure messy thinking, challenge my assumptions, explore different angles, or remove repetitive work so I can spend more time on decisions that actually need judgment. It has become part of my daily workflow, but I still believe the responsibility to understand the problem and make the final call stays with us.
We need to keep challenging how AI is actually impacting our lives and work, not just whether we are adopting it. In this fast-moving shift, the more important question is not how quickly are we adopting AI, but how are we improving because of it. Instead of focusing on metrics like how many AI agents we created or how many people have completed AI training, we should be asking better questions: How many better decisions are being made? How much time have we given back to our team, our families, our passion we never had the time to do because of redundant work?
I think about this a lot as a parent too. My daughter is five, and I genuinely don’t know what her work will look like 20 years from now. What I do know is that simply teaching the next generation how to use AI tools will not be enough. They need to learn how to think analytically, understand how things connect, ask good questions, and form their own judgment.
The World Economic Forum expects 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, but analytical thinking, resilience, leadership and collaboration remain among the skills employers value most.
That is also how I see the challenge for businesses. We should not just ask how AI fits into today’s roles. We should be willing to redesign the roles themselves. At Slash, that is the transition I find exciting. We have always valued learning and adaptability, and now we have the opportunity to help society rethink what innovation actually look like, and navigate AI transformation.
Q4: Talent & Tech Landscape
“Looking back at recruitment and talent acquisition, what’s the most striking difference in tech supply and demand between 2016 and 2026?”
The biggest difference is that in 2016, the problem was largely supply. In 2026, the problem is much more about capability.
In 2016, we had a supply problem. Companies were growing their technology teams quickly and competing for a relatively limited pool of developers. Many companies were already expecting a shortage of skilled developers.
Now, we have capacity challenges. Strong technical talents are still valuable, but simply being able to execute is no longer enough. The scarcity has moved towards people who can understand the business problem, make good judgments, communicate with different stakeholders, and use technology to create an outcome.
PwC’s 2026 AI Jobs Barometer captures this shift also. In AI-exposed roles, skills are changing more quickly, while new tasks are 2.5 times more likely to require human capabilities such as judgment, empathy and creativity.
So if we compare 2016 with 2026, technical skill still gets you into the conversation. But increasingly, your ability to connect technology with business value is what makes your presence essential.
Q5: Building the Playbook
“On multiple occasions, you’ve stepped into roles that were created for the very first time. When there’s literally almost no playbook to follow, where do you even start, and how do you translate high-level stakeholder expectations into actual, tangible results?”
I have rarely worked in roles where there was already a clear playbook, so I have learned to start with two questions: where can I genuinely add value, and what problem does the business actually need this role to solve?
I do pay attention to my own strengths, values and energy because they tell me where I am likely to contribute at my best. But then I quickly connect to what are we trying to change? What does success look like? What are the few outcomes this role should actually influence?
From there, I translate high-level expectations into something we can test. I’ve been fortunate at Slash because experimentation is part of how we work. We can try something, look at the evidence, and adjust.
So for me, building a playbook is not about writing the perfect plan upfront. It is about getting clear on the problem, aligning on what good looks like, starting, and being willing to change the approach without losing sight of the outcome.
Q6: The #1 Skill in the Age of AI
“In this age of AI, everyone has an opinion on what skills matter most for the future. If you had to point the younger generation to just one core ability to master, what’s your top pick, and why?”
Can it be two core abilities? 😀Â
My top 2 are Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence. They are strongly connected to each other.
Critical thinking helps you question information, recognize weak assumptions and decide what actually makes sense. Emotional intelligence helps you understand your own biases and emotions, listen well and build trust. You need both, especially when AI can give you a very convincing answer in seconds.
The World Economic Forum still ranks analytical thinking as employers’ top core skill, while leadership, empathy and active listening also remain important. So I wouldn’t tell future generations to compete with AI on how quickly they can produce an answer. I would teach them to question the answer, understand the wider system around it, understand the people affected by it, and then decide what to do.
If we can develop a generation with that kind of cognitive and emotional resiliency, I think they will be much better prepared for whatever technology comes next.
Q7: Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone
“You’ve described Slash as a place where your role naturally evolves when you spot a problem, take ownership, and step up to learn something new. What’s something you had to learn from scratch that pushed you furthest outside your comfort zone—and what did that process teach you about how you actually learn best?”
Moving into growth while still overseeing people operations probably pushed me furthest outside my comfort zone. I was suddenly leading an area where I did not have deep technical experience while trusting the people operations team to autonomously run everything.Â
I had built businesses before, so I understood positioning, commercial priorities, and how different activities eventually connect to revenue. But in a smaller company, leadership also means getting close to execution. The most challenging part was that I had to learn while already being responsible for the results. There was no period where we could study everything first and then start the job.
That taught me something important about how I learn. I think I learn best through real problems. I ask a lot of questions, find people who know more than I do, keep asking why until I understand the logic, then test what I have learned against reality. Sometimes that also means admitting quite quickly that an idea is not working and changing direction.
So I have become much more comfortable entering spaces where I am not yet the expert. As a leader, you do not need to know everything on day one. You do need to know how to learn quickly, who to learn from, and how to turn that learning into better decisions.
Q8: The Hard Lessons
“Some of the best lesson and insight come from things going sideways. Is there a specific moment where something went badly wrong, and what did you learn from picking up the pieces? How do you do that?”
The hardest lessons have not come from one single moment. They have come from repeatedly being in situations where I had to make difficult decisions, manage a crisis, have uncomfortable conversations, or learn something new while people were already expecting answers from me.
As you become more senior, leadership can also become lonelier. There are moments when people are looking to you for calm and direction while you are still processing the situation yourself.
What has helped me most is learning to meta-reflect rather than immediately move on. I would ask myself: what actually happened, what part of this was within my control, what could I have handled differently, and what do I want to do differently next time? Which part do I want to carry forward?
That ability to reflect has helped me bounce back from stress, recover from sudden changes, and adapt without losing my sense of direction.Â
Q9: The Slash Secret
“After all this time, what do you think genuinely sets Slash apart from every other tech company out there?”
What genuinely sets Slash apart is the amount of space people have to shape the company, not only perform a predefined job.
You can join with one role and gradually find yourself solving completely different problems because you are nurtured to have a growth mindset, and because the business has evolved and you have evolved with it. That freedom can be uncomfortable because there is not always a clear path, but it also creates an unusual level of ownership that trains you to stand out. Hence the trust our clients place in us.Â
Slash gives people room to experiment, take responsibility, challenge how things are done, and build something that did not exist before. For me, that combination of trust, flexibility, and constant reinvention isn’t easy to find elsewhere.
Q10: The One-Liner
“Ten years in, summarized in a single sentence: What is Slash to you?”
Slash is a place that keeps questioning where innovation should go, models the kind of empathetic leadership I have learned so much from, and challenges people to grow beyond their roles.
