Vincent Lauer
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Toptal member since March 21, 2020
Vincent brings experience in delivering complex digital projects and products both as a venture-backed founder delivering B2B solutions with large corporates and as a senior executive at large institutions. As an entrepreneur at heart, Vincent loves building new products that help fundamentally unlock the next level of growth for businesses and people.
Project Highlights
Expertise
Work Experience
Executive Advisor - Strategy: Product & Partnerships
Startup Bank in Middle East
- Drove strategy on key strategic partnerships delivering know-how, competency, and business collaboration at a financial institution with $8 billion in committed capital.
- Delivered feedback and guided the product roadmap, including required team composition and expertise. Managed stakeholder expectations and reported on timeline for collecting business requirements and implementing a core banking system.
- Provided specifications and requirements for the business process management and front-end layer. Ensured UI usability for the bank's clients and internal stakeholders.
Product & Commercial Advisor
Stealth Neurotech Company
- Coached the neuroscientist founders through the stages of developing and managing a hardware product and companion app.
- Worked with world-leading external design agencies to craft the UI, testing, and validating this with user feedback using platforms, e.g., userinterviews.com and usertesting.com validating the product proposition for use in venture capital fundraising.
- Assessed various market verticals and beachhead market opportunities and the downstream implications for data gathered and impact on algorithm against market and brand positioning.
Product Management - Insurance
iptiQ Life S.A. UK Branch
- Modeled digital sales processes (flow diagrams), wrote requirement specifications, performed capability gap analyses, engaging with domain experts (e.g., compliance, legal, production development, underwriting), IT developers, and business analysts.
- Ensured that the implementation as delivered by the development team matched specifications, e.g., by participating in biweekly sprint reviews and performing UI/UX testing. Managed the review and sign-off process with internal and external stakeholders.
- Managed the majority of the user experience and optimized the conversion performance of the life insurance sales platform that distribution partners use to sell insurance directly to end customers and via intermediaries.
Entrepreneur in Residence
Entrepreneur First
- Incubated a fintech idea from a "napkin" idea to a testable MVP within weeks and generated a six-figure annual contract volume in confirmed customer interest.
- Provided idea feedback and support to founders with a specific and unique market edge on a daily basis.
- Designed and implemented a wearable company fundraising and strategic partnership roadmap, which led to the acquisition of a leading UK partner for materials manufacturing. I was responsible for the partnership's legal and financial structuring.
CEO
HandEX
- Designed and implemented a platform digitalizing the export finance space, improving access to SME export loans between €100,000 and €5 million utilizing optical character recognition, natural language processing, and robotic process automation.
- Closed strategic partnerships, allowing us to integrate via an API with financial institutions and insurance groups in order to finance, underwrite, and reinsure the risk in the loans.
- Raised a large seed round and hired the initial team to execute the initial go-to-market and product development strategy.
- Processed over €100 million of requests for financing in the first three months after publicly announcing the launch of our bank partnership and corresponding media buying.
- Wrote underwriting documentation requirements, created initial mock-ups, gathered metrics and set up analytics tools before and after product launch.
- Led OKR setting on an organizational level and also at a product-team level; translating the product roadmap into team OKRs.
- Led two-week agile sprint planning alongside CTO (scrum master) cross-functional teams of developers, designers, and QA both onsite and remote development teams in other time zones by utilizing project management 2.0 tools such as Jira and Slack.
- Conducted user interviews with insurance providers, partner banks to understand their processes and integration requirements, translating them into detailed business requirements.
Venture Partner
Global Ventures
- Acquired new potential investment opportunities in the fintech and renewable energy space, presenting them to the investment committees.
- Closed $6 million worth of financing for startups across a broad range of sectors.
- Trained and hired junior staff in topics such as fund structuring, contractual clauses, financial modeling, and market research preparation.
Commercial Product Manager
Monedo
- Product-managed at one of Germany's fastest-growing fintech across products including short/medium-term loans and B2B2C POS loans including "Buy-Now-Pay-Later" and "Rate Payments."
- Designed and structured a scalable acquisition strategy for implementing the new B2B2C POS loan product allowing for systematic onboarding and integration of eCommerce merchants.
- Ensured implementation and delivery of departmental OKRs by coordinating and working cross-departmentally with product managers and scrum masters of the Underwriting, Data Science, Product, and QA.
- Worked with design teams to work on new user flow designs and pro-actively contributed to maintaining product performance across various user devices based on performance analytics tools such as Hotjar.
- Improved Partner (B2B2C) repeat-customer CLTV metric by implementing new underwriting methods that broadened the data set used in evaluating risk and propensity to repay.
Venture Team Member
Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners
- Worked on a team of investment pros, closing three transactions in the marketing tech, computer vision, and enterprise architecture software spaces: $56 million AppsFlyer (Series C), $17 million Fornova (Series B), $7.5 million LeanIX (Series B).
- Conducted market analyses, producing research on high-interest verticals.
- Reviewed and managed deal documentation, conducted company and market due diligence and prepared investment memorandums.
CMO
Fabulyzer
- Developed an initial prototype—measuring the acetone concentration in the breath both before and after exercise—to assess the level of fat-oxidization.
- Supported in raising a seed round from London-based seed investors along with German pharma companies (Bayer).
- Managed a team of interns, working on marketing strategy and supporting in product design.
Project History
Digitizing Export Finance and Insurance
Designed and developed alongside our corporate partners, a digital platform for uniting exporters, importers, banks, and insurers alike. Over €100 million in financing requests within the first three months.
Fintech Point of Sale and Direct to Consumer Lending
Successfully improved CLTV metrics by working with marketing, product, and underwriting departments.
A nine-digit volume of loans issued across all product types. I successfully steered the improvement of CLTV metrics by:
• Analyzing KPIs across marketing, product, and underwriting.
• Developing and testing hypotheses around performance.
• Implementing the wider roll-out of changes upon successful testing.
Measure Your Fat Burn with a Handheld Device
Led the user experience design for a handheld sensor measuring fat burn and an app recommendation engine for diet optimization.
Education
Master's Degree in Finance
ESADE Business School - Barcelona, Spain
Semester Abroad in Entrepreneurship in Latin America
Universidad de los Andes - Bogota, Colombia
Bachelor's Degree in Business Management
Bournemouth University - Bournemouth, UK
Semester Abroad in Business in China
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - Shanghai, China
Skills
Tools
Jira, Office 2010, Tableau, Confluence, HubSpot, Slack, Zoom, Google Analytics, Figma
Paradigms
Agile Project Management, Agile Product Management, B2C, Marketplace Platforms, B2B2C, Kanban, Scrum, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Banking & Finance, Insurance Technology (Insurtech), Marketplaces, Startup Accelerators, Venture Capital, Insurance
Platforms
QlikView, Google Ads, Blockchain
Other
Fundraising, Partnership Strategies, B2B Partnerships, B2B Sales Pipeline, Strategic Partnerships, Hiring, Loans & Lending, Innovation, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Growth Strategy, Business Strategy, Sales Growth, Business to Business (B2B), Communication, Digital Product Management, Disruptive Innovation, Innovation Management, Innovation Strategy, Leadership, Product Vision, B2B, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Validation, Team Management, Startups, Fitness, Business Models, Early-stage Startups, Product Launch, Third-party Management, Sales Pipelines, Product Ownership, Entrepreneurship, Fintech, Product Management, Market Research, Financial Modeling, CEO, Seed Fundraising, Strategy, Revenue Strategy, Go-to-market Plans, SaaS, User Needs, User Retention, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Backlog Management, Execution, Feature Analysis, Feature Planning, Feature Roadmaps, User Stories, Digital Payments, Mobile Payments, User Experience (UX), Cryptocurrency, Wireframing, Scope Management, Product Roadmaps, Enterprise SaaS, Software as a Service (SaaS), SaaS Product Management, B2B Product Management, Prototyping, Anti-money Laundering (AML), Fraud Prevention, Risk Management, Dashboards, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Product Strategy, Budget Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Resource Allocation, Project Management, Stakeholder Management, Startup Consulting, Agile Leadership, Client Management, Client Reporting, Onboarding, Data-driven Decision-making, Lean, Technology, Sales, Product Design, Big Data, Facebook Marketing, Data Analysis, UX Design, UI Design, Consumer Insights, Market Research & Analysis, Product Marketing, Data Analytics, Product Owner, UX Flows, Business Analysis, Discovery, Requirements & Specifications, Project Scoping, Mobile Apps, Documentation, Data Science, Machine Learning, Bubble, Tech Sales, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), API Integration, Data Integration, CSS, Notion, Biometrics, Hardware, User Interface (UI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Customer Research, Photoshop CC 2019, HTML, Python, Python 3, SQL, Cybersecurity, User Interviews, Go-to-market Strategy, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring