Hendrik Schüler-VP Product / CPO · Product Strategy, AI-Enabled Platforms & Scalable Market Systems

Led product strategy, cross-functional delivery, and the evolution of the platform and operating model at a VC-backed B2B SaaS company (~60 FTE at peak) operating a multi-sided enforcement platform — connecting brand owners, marketplace operators, and enforcement workflows — scaling from founding-stage concept to commercially validated product.

PRODUCT STRATEGY & BUSINESS IMPACT

• Defined and iterated product strategy aligned to ICP refinement, competitive positioning, and long-term revenue growth
• Refined segment focus to concentrate capacity on highest-value enforcement use cases, improving customer retention and average contract value
• Redesigned pricing and packaging after identifying that a modular, feature-based model was enabling customer cherry-picking and creating confusion at the point of sale. Collapsed a multi-page pricing structure into a single-page, outcome-based model — anchored on what the customer actually wanted to protect, not which modules they selected. Contributed directly to a 10× ACV increase on a key account (€500 → €5,000/month)
• Replaced ad-hoc stakeholder-driven prioritisation with a structured decision framework — coupling OKR alignment, ICE scoring, and a fixed roadmap split (50% strategic initiatives / 30% customer feedback / 20% tech debt) — ending a pattern where sales requests and leadership interventions routinely displaced planned work mid-quarter
• Redesigned the customer onboarding process after identifying a recurring failure pattern: misaligned sales commitments, missing customer-side inputs, and siloed handoffs between sales, CS, and product were routinely delaying time-to-value. Introduced structured pre-onboarding requirements and cross-functional handoff protocols — ensuring customers arrived with the data needed to go live, and internal teams operated from a shared baseline

LEADERSHIP, DELIVERY & OPERATING MODEL

• Built and led a 20-person cross-functional organisation spanning product management, engineering, design, and operations
• Introduced OKR-driven planning and quarterly review cadences, providing consistent strategic alignment across functions and seniority levels
• Built decision-routing frameworks that pushed operational and product decisions down to team level — replacing a pattern where analysts and PMs escalated routine calls (e.g. enforcement actions, edge-case handling) to leadership by default. Defined clear ownership boundaries and decision criteria so the team could act independently on the vast majority of cases, freeing leadership capacity for genuinely non-standard situations

AI-ENABLED PRODUCT & WORKFLOW TRANSFORMATION

• Led the development of an AI-enabled website detection system that replaced much of a previously manual review process, reducing analyst workload by 70–90%
• Redesigned key operational workflows to incorporate AI-enabled classification and decision routing, increasing detection throughput 20× without linear cost growth
• Defined AI product KPIs covering coverage, accuracy, and false positive rate — embedding measurable quality standards into the development cycle
• Defined where automation should replace, support, or escalate human decisions, balancing scale, quality, and customer-facing risk