Selma Willemsen

Why this persona fits the audience

Works in Amsterdam for a 12-person software company and already uses a different desktop AI tool alongside Claude Code to inspect screens, capture window text, and automate small UI tasks on a Mac. Spends part of each week translating product and support workflows into repeatable prompts and checks.

• Age: 35
• Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Occupation: Growth engineer
• Income: €78,000
• Education: MSc Computer Science
• Company size: 12 employees
• Years in role: 4

“I used to think automation was about saving time. Now I realize it's about saving my attention span—there's only so much mental RAM in a day.”

Selma Willemsen grew up in Utrecht, the oldest of two kids in a household where computers were both tools and hobbies. Her father, an electrical engineer, built their family PC from parts, which Selma soon upgraded to run early Linux distributions while her brother installed every game he could find. That dynamic—rational systems vs. playful experimentation—shaped her technical identity. At TU Delft, she focused on software engineering but volunteered at a maker space where she learned hardware debugging by necessity. After graduation, she worked two years at a Dutch fintech before joining her current startup as Employee #6. The company's scrappy environment suits her: she's the only full-time growth engineer, which means she's either building technical infrastructure or convincing others to use it. Her relationship with AI tools is pragmatic but not reverential—she's quick to note when Claude stumbles on conditional logic, or when screen capture tools misread UI elements. Lately, she's been obsessed with creating a 'prompt library' that lets non-technical teammates use the same automation she's built, though she's reluctantly conceding that documenting her processes might be as hard as building them. She's stymied by how often tools that work perfectly in controlled environments fail on real user data. Her immediate priorities are stabilizing the support automation system and proving that her experimental user segmentation can move the needle on conversion rates. Money is comfortable but not lavish—Selma keeps a detailed Ledger sheet where she tracks every euro, with separate budgets for 'work tools' (usually a line item for Alfred Workflow tweaks) and 'climbing gear' (which she justifies as 'prehabs for shoulders'). She's considering teaching an evening class at a local tech school, though she's worried it'd cut into bouldering time. Her biggest professional fear is becoming 'the automation gatekeeper'—a role where she spends more time managing tools than building them. Privately, she's convinced that if she could just find the perfect combination of scripting and AI, she'd have hours of her day back. She'd rather spend those hours climbing than explaining yet again why the new support tool didn't capture the ticket correctly.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

6:30am, she wakes to the sound of Thor's demands. Coffee is precisely timed to finish while she checks overnight monitoring tools. 7:30am, a 12-minute cycle to the office (she always takes the bridge over the canal). By 8:30am, she's in a Slack huddle about last night's failed data sync. Afternoon is divided between troubleshooting a support agent's script and testing whether Claude Code can handle tabular data better than their current tool. She sneaks in 20 minutes of climbing at a nearby gym during her lunch break. 5:00pm, she heads home to make a careful dinner of one ingredient (tonight: mackerel, lemon, capers) while muttering about the day's technical frustrations. 8:30pm, she finally relaxes with a documentary about 19th-century typography, which somehow always makes her think about UX patterns.

Lifestyle

Selma lives in a third-floor apartment near De Pijp with a balcony that's just big enough for two potted plants and a dining table for solo WFH. Her mornings start with black coffee and 15 minutes of mobility stretches that look like a slow-motion dance to any eavesdropping neighbors. She cycles everywhere despite owning a car, maintaining the bike's chain herself to the frustration of the local repair shop. Her social calendar is a mix of bouldering sessions (where she's the only one who won't grunt during climbs) and monthly dinners with her brother and his girlfriend. She keeps a meticulous grocery budget but splurges on artisan chocolate from local vendors. Healthwise, she's more concerned with shoulder mobility than weight, though her doctor insists she stop skipping eye exams.

Work life

At her growth-focused SaaS startup, Selma's role blurs between engineering, product, and operations. Her standing desk is covered in sticky notes tracking experimental flows, with a 24-inch ultrawide monitor divided between a chat client, terminal, and a running spreadsheet of user behavior. She spends Monday mornings reviewing last week's automation scripts, tinkering with regular expressions to make text extraction from screenshots more precise. She's currently building a homebrew system to tag and label every support ticket with metadata from conversation patterns, which the team's AI assistant then parses. Her biggest workplace tension is with the CEO over prioritizing 'quick wins' versus systematic improvements. She admires her colleagues but finds herself quietly exasperated by anyone who mouses instead of keyboarding.

Relationships

Selma's parents worry she works too much (though she's pretty sure her dad's side gig selling rare tropical fish is more unpredictable). She's close with her younger brother, who's studying industrial design and constantly tries to convince her to visit a museum. Her friend group consists of former university classmates and climbing partners, though she finds herself drifting away from people who've moved into management roles. Her cat, Thor, is a constant negative reinforcement trainer—purring only when she's debugging and stepping on her keyboard the instant she needs to submit something.

How they decide

She builds small-scale proofs of concept before committing, but once convinced, moves decisively. Prefers decisions that can be reversed but are still impactful. Hates committee-style debates, though she'll passively-aggressively prepare better documentation than anyone else. Financial decisions get cross-referenced with three spreadsheets—she once spent 45 minutes comparing a €30 router's specs to justify its purchase.

How they sound

Speaks in a measured tone with dry humor, liberally using Dutch colloquialisms even though her colleagues don't understand. Uses precise technical language with friends as much as coworkers. Avoids preemptive apologies but will admit to being wrong with the same energy she uses to criticize other people's code. Mutters technical mantras under her breath ('.idle() is your friend, colleague'). Prefers precise instructions to vague requests.