Francis MABIKA

KUENZA is my services and consulting company, founded in 2017. Two purposes: — The Belgian entity through which I invoice my freelance consulting missions, including the European Commission engagements listed below. The EC roles from 2017 onward run through KUENZA, which is why the dates overlap. — A web and design studio delivering to 11 SME and institutional clients to date — website creation, branding (logo, colour systems), web and graphic design, IT support, project management. Clients include AFGT (long-term repeat), Cosmo Consult International and EEZYONE. KUENZA gives me end-to-end exposure to the product cycle outside large institutional contexts: scoping with non-technical clients, translating their needs into deliverables, and shipping.

EEZYONE is a Belgian basketball performance startup. I co-founded it and invented XTRA BUCKET, a mechanical shot-return system in aluminium and stainless steel, designed for solo shooting practice without a power source. As Product Owner I own the product end to end vision, roadmap, backlog, and release decisions. — Discovery: validated the concept before build with a 260-respondent survey. Shooting practice preferred by 78.4%, 70% approval for the court-rental use case, and the product ranked most useful of 8 accessory categories tested (83.8%). — Market: mapped 20+ competing products across the EU, US and Asia, identifying an unaddressed €100–600 band where no European product pairs a physical ball-return system with a digital layer. — Hardware iteration: 2 years of R&D, 9 homemade prototypes then 2 industrial versions with engineering firm Quimesis, each round prioritised against testing with external and youth players. — Commercial: 15 units sold, 5 deployed for demos, first production batch of 100 units underway. Validated at 6 basketball events (Belgium, 2025–2026) and endorsed by Belgian Lions U18 coach Donovan Walasiak. — IP and funding: European patent filed with Calysta (EP 24 19 6356, pending) after prior-art and freedom-to-operate research; EU trademark registered (Feb 2025); three INNOVIRIS grants plus Brussels Economy support. — Go-to-market: built and run the e-commerce front (PHP/JS, Mollie payments, GA4, Meta Pixel), A/B testing ad and email campaigns against the analytics, and set quarterly OKRs across product and go-to-market. — AI-assisted delivery tooling in daily practice since 2025: application development, testing and technical exploration, plus structured automation of recurring product and go-to-market deliverables. See the product in use: youtube.com/@EezyOneBasket/videos https://www.eezyone.com

Maintained and evolved 8 EU-wide information systems for the internal market (ATI, ATOF, ADMA, PARCEL, POSTA, VTO, DPRCFT), serving users across all 27 Member States. — Turned requirements into shipped features across the 8 platforms, taking them from project managers and, where the need was unclear, directly from business and user sessions. — Shaped data structures, user roles and workflows on ATI and ATOF alongside their Product Owners, as part of the platforms' architecture decisions. — Built ATI's admin dashboards from scratch for a dedicated role across all 27 Member States (around 30 users: one national Technology Centre manager per Member State, plus EC reviewers and publishers). — Delivered self-service PDF and Excel export for search results and periodic reports, letting EC managers pull their quarterly figures straight from the interface instead of requesting them from the webmaster by email. — Led the integration of EU Webtools across the platforms to meet a compliance and security mandate. — Reworked map-based search on ATI and ATOF (filtering, geolocation, and the map/search-form interaction) to surface more data and improve result relevance. Tech: Drupal, Symfony, PHP, AWS Lambda, LAMP, GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, JSON web services, Jira, Confluence. Methodologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban) tailored per project, classic project management.

Delivered and maintained NextEuropa, the Commission's flagship Web Content Management platform (Drupal 7 / LAMP) — a multi-DG estate of 460+ websites, 2.8M pages, across 20+ DGs. — Shipped through the platform's weekly CI/CD release train: security and dependency updates (Composer/npm), bugfixes and feature releases deployed from Docker images, raising PRs and proposing pipeline improvements. — Fielded feedback and issues direct from customer DGs across the estate for 6 months as second-level support. — Built the team's custom local Docker spin-up for OPENEUROPA, the next-generation Drupal 8 decoupled platform, during its early architecture and build phase. — Represented the team in cross-DG technical working groups and user-coordination sessions, communicating with a broad multi-directorate audience. Tech: Drupal 7, Drupal 8 (decoupled), PHP, LAMP, Composer, Docker, Git/GitLab, Jenkins, AWS Cloud9, Jira. Methodologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban).

Delivered iFlow (a business-process application) and iKnow (a knowledge-management tool), two internal Commission applications, across the full requirements-to-delivery cycle. — Built and maintained features on a ColdFusion 8 / Oracle back-end with XSLT and JavaScript front-end work, handling development and technical analysis across the stack. — Delivered under a formal RUP process with Rational ClearCase / ClearQuest (structured requirements-to-delivery discipline from the start of my EC track). Tech: ColdFusion 8, XSLT, JavaScript, Oracle 10g, Tomcat, WebLogic. Methodology: RUP

Freelance web and graphic designer for SMEs and independents. Translated client communication needs into web and print deliverables — Photoshop, Flash, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL, ColdFusion.