Rian Van Der Merwe
Senior Director Of Product Management at Cloudflare
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRian Van Der Merwe is a product leader with 21+ years designing and scaling B2C, B2B, and platform products, now leading Data Platform and Product Analytics at Cloudflare where his teams run one of the world’s highest-throughput ClickHouse deployments. He combines strategic context-setting with hands-on execution—writing code, building MCP servers, and shipping internal tooling—to close the gap between platform infrastructure and end-user product outcomes. Known for raising the bar on AI-assisted product work, he built an open-source AI workflow for PMs, runs internal training, and publishes practical guides on agentic workflows and integrations. Rian has repeatedly grown and integrated products through acquisitions (Jeli → PagerDuty, Wildbit → ActiveCampaign) and scaled Postmark from $1.7M to over $12M ARR, blending revenue accountability with product craft. Based in Portland, he pairs academic depth (advanced degrees in information science and internet marketing) with a rare mix of research-driven thinking and operational discipline.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc (Eng), Information Science, M.Sc (Eng), Information Science at Stellenbosch UniversityPh.D, Internet Marketing, Ph.D, Internet Marketing at Curtin University
English, Afrikaans
Stackoverflow
11reputation
608reached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (47)
markdown10
cloudflare10
mdx10
algolia9
product-management9
postmark9
inbound9
jekyll9
music9
management8
devrel8
lastfm8
jekyll-theme8
sdk8
github-pages8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
rianvdm/pm-resources
Apr 2019 - Dec 2022
A collection of resources for product managers.
Contributions:4 commits, 66 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 8 months
product-management
rianvdm/my-music-next
Aug 2024 - Nov 2025
Website and Discord bot for album and artist info, and universal streaming links.
Contributions:1 PR, 475 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year 3 months
musicmusic-bot
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.