Rian Van Der Merwe
Senior Director Of Product Management at Cloudflare
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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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 (45)
markdown10
cloudflare10
cloudflare-workers10
mdx10
postmark10
algolia9
jekyll-theme9
inbound9
jekyll9
triangular8
utterances8
github-pages8
algolia-search8
ruler8
product-management7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
rianvdm/pm-resources
Apr 2019 - Dec 2022
Contributions:4 commits, 39 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 8 months
rianvdm/my-music-next
Aug 2024 - Jan 2025
Contributions:432 pushes, 1 branch, 10 comments in 4 months
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