
Jasper Venema
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Bussum, Netherlands
Toptal member since July 7, 2026
Jasper is a product management consultant with over 11 years of experience in tech, including work for Heineken, Randstad, and JobAdder. He specializes in AI-assisted product discovery and driving end-user value with cross-functional Agile teams. His career spans 8+ products across 7 countries in industries such as FMCG, recruitment, HR tech, and B2B/B2C SaaS. Jasper delivered a 20% cost reduction and an additional 25% improvement in time efficiency at Randstad.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Innovation
- Product Analytics
- Product Discovery
- Product Management
- Storytelling
- Talent Acquisition
- User Experience (UX)
Work Experience
Interim Product Manager
Venema Consulting & Innovatie
- Delivered interim product management and product ownership engagements, covering maternity, sick or sabbatical leave, and bridging the gap between two permanent hires.
- Kept roadmaps moving, stakeholders aligned, and engineering teams shipping, with lightweight handover documentation so continuity never depended on one person.
- Worked on various roles across the Netherlands and remotely in EMEA, including positions as product owner, product lead, group product manager, and head of product.
Senior Product Manager, Salesrep App
Heineken
- Owned the strategic vision and end-to-end product lifecycle for Eazle Advise, a new global sales representative application (SFA), shaping its direction from ideation to deployment.
- Led highly matrixed collaboration across global sales, IT, and local markets (UK, IT, SA) to align product requirements with international commercial objectives.
- Directed the Krakow-based development teams by establishing a clear roadmap focused on key business outcomes and efficiency metrics.
- Drove key performance indicators: increased number of visits per day, increased retail execution scores, and improved the percentage of route compliance.
- Strategically empowered the sales force by integrating with proprietary AI and ML functions to provide data and designing a best-in-class in-app experience.
Senior Product Management Consultant
25Friday
- Defined product strategies and visions for 3 client organizations across 3 industries, synthesizing human-centric research with technical capabilities into actionable roadmaps.
- Led organizational transformation by restructuring development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, dual-track discovery), raising team maturity, and cutting time-to-market by 50%.
- Advised C-level stakeholders on strategic decisions spanning technical scope, go-to-market strategy, and pragmatic tech-debt management, ensuring long-term scalability of the product and technology stack.
- Championed a product mindset across client organizations, shifting teams from output-driven delivery to outcome-driven discovery and measurably improving morale and outcomes.
- Introduced analytics-assisted (including AI) product discovery workflows, speeding up research synthesis and validation cycles for client teams.
Senior Product Manager, Data Platform
Randstad Holding
- Co-authored the comprehensive data product vision and successfully built the product team from the ground up, setting them on a path for long-term success.
- Oversaw the full product development lifecycle, resulting in the successful foundation of the RGN DataHub: a queryable data lake infrastructure capable of processing and storing over 400 TB of source data and billions of transactions per day.
- Delivered significant efficiencies including cost savings of approximately 20% and time efficiencies of around 25% across the cloud and data landscape.
- Effectively managed complex stakeholder expectations and demands by collaborating with diverse local and global teams (developers, analysts, data scientists) to drive a unified platform strategy to minimise time and spending.
- Minimized time and spending on data preparation for machine learning training purposes (pre-AI boom).
Product Manager, Candidate Experience
JobAdder
- Dedicated my time toward improving the customer journey for applicants who entered the JobAdder Applicant Tracking System (SaaS product) in various ways.
- Removed friction from the candidate experience to foster spontaneous and correct communication while supporting feedback loops.
- Proposed a candidate-driven strategic pivot based on market research, customer analysis, collected data, and feedback.
- Added a whole new theme to the strategic roadmap (and marketing and positioning) of JobAdder.
Product Owner, Career Site Platforms
Endouble.com
- Set product goals and objectives, created the roadmap, and managed the backlog for a career site platform delivery system.
- Analyzed the product interaction and usage over time to determine and adapt product strategy.
- Launched the first two customers on the platform: Etos and Gall&Gall.
- Achieved development time savings of 50% per talent acquisition platform deployment.
Interim Data Steward, Finance DWH
Rabobank
- Acted as a temporary business representative for the financial data warehouse.
- Managed completeness and data integrity for financial data warehouse systems.
- Integrated into the data team for the risk and finance data warehouse teams. Took short-term cover of the permanent data steward role.
Business Analyst, Global IT Change Department
Intertrust Group
- Led large and small application migration and IT integration projects for the head office transition to Cloud/IAAS, including moving live product data to a colocation.
- Worked on various niche financial software implementation projects for offices worldwide, including upgrades and implementations in different countries.
- Configured financial software systems while providing setup for end-user training and testing.
Project History
ERE-Vergelijk
https://ere-vergelijk.nl/en- 4 Weeks — Time to Live
- 100+ — Increase in Users per Week for the First 4 Weeks
- 65 — ERE Providers in the Working Prototype
Dutch EV owners and charge point operators can sell emission reduction units (EREs), but the market was opaque: dozens of providers with widely varying commissions, contract terms, and payouts, and no independent comparison. Most consumers picked the first provider they found and left money on the table. The market needed transparency, fast, while the opportunity was unclaimed.
I ran the full product cycle solo. Research: mapped the provider landscape from the official Dutch Emissions Authority (NEa) register, normalizing 65 providers’ commissions, contract terms, and review scores into one comparison model. Build: developed a bilingual (NL/EN) platform with a proprietary earnings engine converting kWh volumes into projected annual ERE earnings with real-time market fees. Delivery: used AI-assisted development (Gemini and agentic coding tools) to ship a production React/TypeScript platform in 4 weeks, with automated register syncing to keep comparisons current.
I achieved live status in 4 weeks with 100+ new users per week within the first month, with zero paid acquisition. Users now compare 90+ providers and get a personalized earnings projection in seconds.
RGN DataHub
https://riviq.nl/blog/waarom-randstad-haar-data-lake-vernieuwt-met-amazon-s3-en-trino-en-wat-het-oplevert/- 20% — Reduction in Data Platform Costs
- 25% — Improvement in Time Efficiency
- 300 — Data Sources Unified in One Data Lake
- 400+ TB — Source Data Processed, Billions of Transactions Daily
Randstad Groep Nederland’s central data lake (300 data sources, 400+ TB, billions of daily transactions) ran on Amazon Redshift, which couldn’t support the mandate to unify all company data: no unstructured data (CVs, video), storage coupled to compute driving unnecessary cost, error-prone manual type mapping, and external cloud sources requiring separate data transport into AWS.
As the product owner of the DataHub team, I led Randstad’s move from Redshift to a decoupled lakehouse: Amazon S3 storage with Apache Iceberg open table formats; Trino/Starburst as the distributed MPP query engine, querying petabyte-scale data directly on S3 and federating lake and operational databases in one SQL query, replacing fragile ETL pipelines; and the open-source DataHub catalog for end-to-end lineage, discovery, and governance. I owned vision, roadmap, and stakeholder alignment, directed specialist partner Riviq on the dual-platform migration, and delivered in 13 months.
I cut platform costs by 20% by decoupling storage from compute and improved time-to-insight by 25% through interactive querying and self-service discovery. I unlocked unstructured data and AI-driven talent matching.
Scale-up in Need
https://levvr.io/- 3 — New Developers Onboarded/Replaced
- 1 — Head of Product Sourced, Recruited, Hired and Onboarded
- 2 — Quarters of Roadmap and Support Provided
The client faced significant issues in team structure, product vision, and engineering culture. The fledgling start-up did get into scale-up level agreements and had to reorganize themselves to prepare for future growth, funding, and feature deliverables. The complexity of the domain of systems-engineering and the (then) relatively young field of graph databases ensured a difficult puzzle.
The technical leadership at the scale had been investigated and needed to be replaced. Together with 25Friday we held difficult conversations and provided meaningful research for the suggested organizational changes which where adopted by company leadership. We had to ensure stability and speed of delivery to satisfy investor demands while doing so.
We replaced an underperforming CTO and 2 engineers, hired a head of product, 3 new engineers, and 1 UX designer, and set up the roadmap, feature prioritization, and cost management. We also implemented the first steps in product analytics with Pendo.
Education
Master's Degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Amsterdam Business School - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Bachelor's Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Certifications
Pendo Product Led Certification
Pendo/MTP
Metrics and Product Management
Mind the Product
IELTS
British Council
Storytelling Essentials
Mezrab Storytelling School
Pyramid Principle Writing
Capgemini
PRINCE2 Practitioner Certification
Global Knowledge
Product Management Essentials
Mind the Product
Sliding Like a Management Consultant
Accenture
Skills
Tools
Jira, Google Analytics, Figma, Financial Data, Claude, AWS SDK, Google Slides, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Kibana, Apache Airflow
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, KPI Frameworks, Agile Product Management, Data Product Management, B2C, PRINCE2, Agile Project Management
Platforms
Mixpanel, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Other
Marketing, Sales, IT Management, Pendo, Gemini, Amplitude, Business, Innovation, Product Management, Research, Analysis, Business Strategy, Business Model Strategy, Analytics, UX Design, UI Design, Product Strategy, Product Discovery, MVP Design, CRM, Communication, Storytelling, Presentations, Metrics, Product Analytics, UX Research, A/B Experimentation, User Experience (UX), English, Product Research, KPI Tracking, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Teamwork, User Training & Support, Consulting, Product Roadmaps, Cross-functional Coordination, Stakeholder Analysis, Stakeholder Alignment, Stakeholder Management, HR Analytics, AI Product Management, Data Strategy, Customer Journey Optimization, Recruitment, Interviews, JTBD Interviews, User Interviews, Data Synthesis, Jobs to be Done (JTBD), User Stories, Talent Acquisition, Talent Strategy, Web Platforms, Feature Roadmaps, Customer Support, Collaboration, Design Systems, Backlog Management, Feature Prioritization, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Backlog, Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospectives, Sprint Reviews, Sprints, GDPR, IT Consulting, Management Consulting, Product Management Consulting, Data Products, Business Intelligence (BI), Dual Track Agile, Agile Leadership, Agile Practices, Data Analysis, Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms, Product Planning, Mobile Apps, Mobile App, Technical Documentation, Information Architecture (IA), Documentation, Design Documentation, API Integration, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Requirements Documentation (PRD), Product Owner, Product Ownership, B2B, Digital Product Management, Product Frameworks, Technical Product Management, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Product Design, SaaS, Funnel Analysis, Cohort Analysis, Risk Analysis, Notion, Codex, Sustainability Strategy, Languages, AI Product Strategy, IT Recruitment, Vibe Coding, SEO Marketing, API Connectors, Data Quality, Interviewing, Leadership, Finance, Google Antigravity, Data Lakes, Data Lakehouse, Mobile UX, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, Data Modeling, AI Agents, Team Leadership, SQL, Company Strategy, Lean Canvas, Product Canvas, Business Model Canvas, Science, Economics, Circular Economy, Agile DevOps, Agile Sprints, Microsoft 365, SaaS Design, Software as a Service (SaaS), Software Development, Software, Image Recognition, Algorithms, APIs, Content Writing, Email, Storyboarding, Articulate Storyline, Creative Writing, UI Research, Tracking, New Products, Project Management, IT Project Management, ITIL, Agile Delivery, Training & Training Content Development, Configuration Management, Product Configuration, Roadmaps, Product Operations, Team Building, Prototyping, Planning, SWOT Analysis, Data Analytics, UX Analysis, Large Language Models (LLMs), Discovery, Market Research & Analysis, Market Opportunity Analysis, AI Marketing, AI-powered Product Design, Coding, Claude Code, Gemini API, render.io, Cloudflare, Web Hosting, Web Analytics, Google Search Console, Search Engine Advertising (SEA), GEO, Data Engineering, Data Management Platforms, Customer Data Platform (CDP), Trino, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Apache Kafka, Streaming Data, Data Stewardship, Data Product Manager, Data Cleansing, Product Vision, Strategic Design, Cost Analysis, Experience Maps, Sentiment Analysis, Discovery Workshops, Customer Analysis, Customer Journey Design, Candidate Experience, Recruiting, Web UX Design, Storybook, Feature Planning, Feature Flags, Data Mapping, Data Quality Management, Data Warehousing, Data Warehouse Design, Data Governance, Account Management, Business to Business (B2B), Business Law, Product Comparison, React, Node.js, Community Growth, Graph Databases
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