Chief Product Officers in Germany

• Role: PO for the mobile app relaunch, e-prescription platform, and online shop of one of Germany's leading online pharmacies. Steering external development partners, prioritizing along business and compliance goals, close alignment with executive leadership and stakeholders.
• Challenge: Complex regulatory environment, high delivery pressure, multiple parallel workstreams with external vendors.
• Impact: Successful app relaunch, continuous development of the shop and eRX integration with stable delivery quality.

Software service provider for AI solutions, automation, and custom software.

Team: built from 2 to 10 developers, 8 direct reports, partly remote · Portfolio: 6 parallel projects (€25k–€250k), scaling > €1M

• Ensured delivery capability for 6 parallel customer projects: role model, capacity planning (510–660 productive person-days/year), hiring roadmap with €380k–€440k/year personnel budget
• Established SDLC framework from scratch in under 6 months: REQ/SPEC structure, V-model gates, GitHub Issues as specification, Definition of Done, release process; consistent, auditable development process across all customer projects
• Prepared large program (3,000–4,000 person-days over 18 months) for decision readiness: AI-native industry platform for the construction sector; scoping, team profile for 8–10 developers, phase 0 budget €390k
• Designed and introduced self-hosted AI platform: vLLM, LiteLLM, Qdrant, Supabase; agent architecture, MCP integration, OCR pipelines; prepared GPU investment with break-even model (month 15–16)
• Systematized presales end to end: lead qualification with maturity scoring, discovery workshops, own sizing model, costing with loaded hourly rates, structured handover to development
• Tangibly improved the security level of a customer platform: penetration test incl. re-verification of all findings

Executive and leadership responsibility: + Member of the Management Committee. + Development of the business and digital strategy. + Product and customer value management, and commercial value creation. + Management of company-wide transformation initiatives. + P&L responsibility + Leadership, development, and coaching of managers and teams.

Further details on the strategic contribution are available in the CV.

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

Freelance work for a large German family office

Built and further developed a modular B2B SaaS platform for professional wealth management and family offices, alongside freelance delivery of production-ready AI, data management, and automation solutions for the wealth management sector.

• Developed an AI governance framework for regulated finance and asset management workflows, aligned with DORA, BaFin-related governance expectations, and data protection requirements, including role definitions, access levels, and decision rules.
• Designed an agentic system with a locally operated open-source language model, including Qwen2.5 via Ollama, for secure querying of an asset database through text-to-SQL-to-text workflows.
• Built AI-supported analysis and reporting capabilities that generate structured answers, tables, and charts from asset data, with domain validation through resolver logic and RAG elements.
• Developed production-grade data import workflows for financial service provider data from CSV, PDF, and API sources, including validation, plausibility checks, and reconciliation with existing asset data.
• Solved the asset matching problem without a cross-system primary key through multi-stage validation rules and human-in-the-loop approvals.

Results:

• Secured EUR 250,000 in SaaS revenue in 2024, exceeding the forecast by 20%.
• Acquired family office clients with EUR 1.6bn in assets under management.
• Reduced manual effort for the largest client by approx. 3 days per month through automated data import and reconciliation processes.
• Reduced operational error risk through structured data validation, multi-stage asset matching, and human-in-the-loop approvals.

• Overall responsibility for platform transformation across ERP, CRM, PIM, and AI-driven process automation
• ERP transformation: Implementing and migrating to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
• CRM & growth stack: Implementing HubSpot as the central CRM and a platform for lead and marketing automation
• Product data & commerce enablement: Introducing an ePIM to scale category management and digital commerce processes
• AI-driven process automation: Designing and implementing agent-based AI workflows to automate processes in business services, accounting, tender management, and marketing
• Building a scalable platform organization including product development, DevOps, UX, cloud engineering, and corporate IT
• Implementing modern product and portfolio governance (e.g., OKRs, portfolio boards, value-based roadmaps) to manage technology-driven initiatives
• Harmonizing heterogeneous system landscapes and transforming them into a modular, scalable platform architecture (ERP, CRM, PIM, integrated customer journeys)
• Coaching and developing product owners, tech leads, delivery managers, and UX teams to build a scalable product organization

• Founded a bootstrapped AI-native startup building digital tools for psychotherapists
• Empowered therapists to enhance therapeutic work without disrupting human connection
• Assembled founding team and reached product-market fit with LLM-powered supervision for psychotherapists
• Integrated generative AI stack, including agentic coding, evaluations, tracing, and prompt management

• Overall responsibility for software, connectivity and services within the smart-metering organization
• Product leadership for 3 team leads and indirect responsibility for 20 product managers
• Strategic development, organization and scaling of the software and service business
• Managed realignment of software development including governance, prioritization and delivery model
• Achieved over 200% increase in service revenue and 80% reduction in open initiatives through a scalable delivery framework
• Initiated company-wide digital transformation and provided top-management strategic advisory on software, platform and service strategy
• Technologies & methods: Digital Transformation, Business Transformation, Cost Optimization, Scaled Agile, IoT, SaaS, Azure, ITIL

• Defined product strategy for healthcare identity management: B2B platform expansion, compliance foundation for future audits, and expansion into new practitioner segments

• Assessed payment platform viability through customer interviews—evidence showed customers needed 7 distinct solutions, not one platform

• Took on CTO role after departure—established predictable development process, achieved 80%+ delivery predictability

• Built structured product function: assessed capabilities, enabled scaling, hired Senior PMs, defined Product and Product Development responsibilities across organization (resolved conflicting interpretations)

• Built product operating system: outcome roadmaps, discovery/validation processes, data-driven decisions—shifted team to strategic planning

• Enabled transparent growth paths: created career frameworks across Product, Customer Success, and Engineering

• Planned loss → profit, 19% revenue growth

• 70% interruption reduction

• 80%+ delivery predictability

• Velocity +100-150%

• Developer satisfaction 75-80%

• Cross-functional alignment across Product/Engineering/Sales/Marketing/CS

I worked on automating cold outreach.

• Developed a queue architecture to support the parallel execution of large volumes of background tasks.
• Integrated multiple email delivery providers.
• Implemented an LLM-based data enrichment process.

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Next.js, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL, Next-Auth, JWT, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, CloudFlare, Traefik, Groq, Jest, Figma

• Architected a business strategy and aligned product strategy increasing organizational clarity, focusing on investor and marketing communication.
• Established Product Market Fit process to refine target customers and use cases.
• Developed business monetization strategies and roadmap aimed at achieving platform profitability within 2-years.
• Assessed operational cost and drafted cost-saving measures doubling runway.

• Advised product and strategy of a cloud-based SaaS for financial institutions

• Co-found and lead end-to-end product strategy and execution for an AI-driven longevity and habit-formation platform, spanning AI personalisation, monetisation, compliance, and go-to-market.