Jürgen Šuvalov playing guitar. It is a black and white image. I am wearing playing a Fender Jazzmaster. I am wearing a white shirt and black tie. Some other musical gear such as drums and a keyboard can be seen in the background.
This photo is from awhile ago.

About Me

Hi! I’m Jürgen Šuvalov. I am a product manager and technologist from Tallinn, Estonia.1 I’ve spent the bulk of my professional career working on digital government tech, mainly in the interoperability domain. Which is a convoluted way of saying "how do we organize our digital data, digital identities and API integrations in an efficient and nationally scalable, secure way". In my spare time I am always tinkering with tech and writing unfinished music. This personal website serves as a playground for experimenting with web dev tech.

Professional History

2022 - Now

I have mainly been doing consulting gigs on various digital government transformation projects. From management consulting to helping technical teams set up their platforms. Looking for a new product role.

2020 - 2022

I worked as a product manager at Nortal, a client services agency headquartered in Tallinn but with offices around the world. I joined a brand new account with just a handful of people working on it and we grew to 100+ by the time I left. Our product teams augmented the client’s teams and we worked on building various greenfield smart city solutions. My main focus was on API integration platforms and I helped other teams with various security and privacy solutions.

It was pretty wild and interesting, but I really missed working in a more conventional product role.

2014 - 2020

I worked at the Estonian Information System Authority which is a public sector organization responsible for providing platform services in Estonia for things like digital identity, data management and API integrations, digital voting and various other domains.

I worked in the data exchange domain on the interorganizational API integration platform X-Road - ensuring secure decentralized data exchange between both government and private sector organizations. X-Road was first launched in Estonia in 2001. In 2016 we open-sourced it after beginning collaborating with Finland and these days it’s used in various parts of the world and the development is handled by Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), a non-profit we started together with Finland.

I worked as the product manager for Estonia’s platform. My main strategic focus was on improving the developer and customer experience, both for X-Road the technology as well as the Estonian platform. We built a new self-service environment for customers, reducing the onboarding time from weeks to potentially days or less, and provided additional features to help our clients manage their membership and services.

Before becoming a PM, I worked on the platform in an operations role, making sure that the services stay up, new releases get deployed without issues and so on. My team also provided technical support to our customers - mostly technical implementation and integration support.

When I first joined the organization, I started in a customer support role. I think most people would benefit from working in customer support for a period.

Other Interests

Music

I’ve been playing guitar for over 20 years. I think I am pretty decent at it but I’ve never had goals to become a real virtuoso in it. I haven’t played professionally, but I’ve been a part of various amateur bands throughout the years, mostly playing for our own pleasure. There are some videos on YouTube from our org band from my public sector days. That’s me on the left. We played mostly rock/punk covers of popular songs with our own parody twist on the lyrics. I once got to play at a surprise party at the Presidential Palace in Tallinn with this group, that was pretty cool.

More recently I’ve been dabbling with electronic music in Ableton. I’m still having a rough time mixing. And finishing songs. But I might share some stuff on this site once in a while.

Tech

I like tinkering with tech of all kinds. Whether that is cosplaying as a DevOps Engineer, writing this website or producing silly meme projects just to toy around with a new technology. Currently looking to get more into homelabbing, but the prices are unfortunate. I am also pretty excited about the fediverse stuff going on and atproto in particular.

Podcasts

I listen to an unhealthy amount of podcasts. Mostly about tech, business and comedy, with some history sprinkled in. I include my media diet highlights on the /now page.

Elsewhere

You can find me on Bluesky, Mastodon and GitHub. And unfortunately I need to be on LinkedIn too. Or you can just e-mail me at hey@jyrkki.eu.