What does Christian do?
As an MBA Student Requirements Engineer Battery Cell at Volkswagen.

My year abroad in China was perhaps the best year of my life (so far), but it also showed me the country's biggest problem. I saw the danger that air pollution and environmental damage poses. This has had a lasting effect on my desire for my future job: I no longer only want to work on technically interesting projects, but also develop solutions to solve our huge environmental problems.

We basically ask ourselves the question "What does the battery cell have to do?"Answering this and breaking it down to technical properties helps us to either develop a battery cell ourselves or to buy it from suppliers. In the end, we are the extended arm of the customers and try to translate their wishes into technical values while mediating between the different interests. In addition, we also work hard to achieve the optimum for Volkswagen in terms of costs, technology and deadlines.

At the moment, our team is working hard to develop the requirements for the battery cells of the future, which is quite complex. Requirements come from the end users (e.g. "How much power do I want in my new car?"), but also from our other interface partners, such as the battery system ("How are the battery cells constructed, how big are they, how heavy are they?"). In the end, our component does not work alone, but must be installed in a battery system and power the vehicle. And it is not only the technical requirements that play an important role for us. In our department we also work on requirements such as the CO2 footprint and the recycling of the battery cells. It is not an easy task to reconcile all these requirements!

We work as requirements managers for the battery cell for the entire VW Group. This means that we work on exciting vehicles for all brands, but it also means that all these brands have different customers and therefore want to achieve equally different technical solutions and goals. That makes the work incredibly varied, but also poses a great challenge.

Definitely our general organisation: We work both, generically and project-specifically. The generic requirements are based on boundary conditions that are the same for all projects, e.g. the temperatures that the cells have to withstand. These generic boundary conditions are then supplemented or adapted for the individual projects, e.g. the power varies from cell to cell. So we combine a generic basic set of requirements with a specific, dynamic part for our final specifications. This approach is a great relief for our work, because we do not have to start all over again. In this way, we combine the further development of the generic requirements according to the current state of research and lessons learned from ongoing projects with the project-specific requirements and wishes of our stakeholders in order to build coherent specifications and to be able to drive the vehicles of the future.