Part 2: Building from the Ground Up – Amber on Product, Data, and Finding Her Place at Thylander

Amber’s move from Singapore’s tech scene to Thylander in Denmark became more than a new role. It became a chance to help build the company’s digital foundations, learn a new industry, and shape smarter ways of working from the inside.

When a career shift becomes something bigger

Some career moves are about changing jobs. Others are about changing context entirely. That feels true in Amber’s case. Before joining Thylander, she had spent six years in Singapore working within the Alibaba network. Less than a year ago, she moved to Denmark and stepped into a very different setting as Head of Product and Data. What began as a two-week consulting visit quickly turned into something more permanent, a chance not just to join a company, but to help shape how it works behind the scenes.

What drew her in was not only the role itself but the challenge behind it. As she came to understand the business more closely, one issue kept surfacing, there was data, but not in a form that made it easy to use. It was spread across different sources, fragmented, and unstructured enough that people often had to spend too much time simply finding the information they needed before they could even begin making decisions.

Turning scattered information into something useful

A lot of Amber’s work sits at the point where business needs and technical structure meet. In simpleterms, her team helps identify the company’s different data sources, organise them, and build a foundation that makes them easier to use across the business. The goal is not just to collect information, but to make it accessible enough that people can understand what is happening quickly, whether they are looking at property performance, tenant-related data, or fund-level decisions.

What makes that interesting is that Thylander did not simply want an off-the-shelf solution. Amber explains that many companies of a similar size rely heavily on third-party platforms, but Thylander chose a slower and more deliberate route to structure and own its own data in a way that makes sense for the company itself. It takes more time, but it also creates a stronger foundation for the future. That decision says something important about the role she stepped into. This is not just about maintaining a system that already exists. It is about helping build one from the ground up.

“We are building something from the ground up.”

What smaller companies make possible

Amber also speaks very openly about the difference between working in a large organisation and stepping into a smaller one. In a bigger company, processes often already exist. In a smaller one, they do not always. Sometimes that means fixing what is there. Sometimes it means creating something entirely new.

That seems to be one of the things she values most about working at Thylander. There is room to step forward, build, and shape. If something adds value, it is not immediately shut down just because it is new. In her telling, that openness is not only about systems and processes, but also about people. Younger talent is encouraged to grow, and responsibility is something people are trusted with rather than made to wait for.

That matters for students and early-career readers in particular. One of the strongest points Amber makes is that, from what she has seen, ideas are taken seriously when they are backed by thought and context. She has not seen working students dismissed simply because they are early in their careers. If someone has something valuable to say, there is room to say it.

“If you have an idea and you can back it by rationale or context or whatever, I don’t think that there’s any situation where it would not be heard.”

Finding a culture that feels open

For Amber, starting at Thylander was not only about learning a new company. It was also about learning a new country, a new workplace culture, and a new way of working with people. She says one of the biggest helps in the transition was that people understood exactly that. The work was new, but so was everything around it. What made the difference was feeling supported rather than made to feel like an outsider.

That sense of openness seems to show up in small, everyday ways. She describes a workplace where people are willing to sit down and explain what they do, where feedback comes from a collaborative place, and where social life does not feel boxed into rigid groups. Lunch stands out in her account as one of those simple but telling rituals, a shared pause in the day where conversations happen naturally across teams rather than only within them.

“There’s a very fun element to working at Thylander.”

Asked to describe Thylander in a few words, Amber lands on collaborative, encouraging, supportive, and forward-thinking. That combination feels consistent with the rest of what she describes, a company that is not trying to become a tech company for the sake of it, but one that clearly sees the value of building smarter, more scalable ways of working.

Work that feels like it is going somewhere

What seems to motivate Amber most is not just the technical side of the work, but the feeling that it is moving toward something meaningful. She talks about the satisfaction of working on things that can make a difference, and about moments where the work becomes visibly real, like coming out of a meeting and realising that they are actually designing their own system. For a company of Thylander’s size, that still surprises her. It also seems to be one of the reasons the role remains exciting.

That sense of momentum is what gives the piece its shape. This is not just a story about dashboards, data models, or business KPIs. It is a story about joining a company at a moment when its digital foundations are still being built, and finding meaning in helping shape what comes next.

Why this matters

For students reading Shortreads, Amber’s story offers a different kind of lesson than the Marie and Freja piece did. It is less about the first bridge between theory and practice, and more about what happens later, when work becomes about judgment, direction, and helping create the structure that others will build on.

It is also a reminder that meaningful digital work does not only happen inside typical tech environments. Sometimes the more interesting work happens in places that are still learning how to digitise, still figuring out what they need, and still open enough that one person can genuinely influence the shape of what gets built. At Thylander, that seems to be part of what made the move worthwhile for Amber.