Willem-Jan Jansen

Marktplaats is where The Netherlands trades its goods and services, reaching 60% of the online population every month. Rapidly rising smartphone adoption required adaptation of our desktop-web products to mobile when there were few precedents and technologies and app stores were still in the early stages of evolution:

- Developed a narrative around the impact of mobile devices, and educated decision-makers and stakeholders across the company on implications, forecasting the share of mobile usage to grow from up to 10% to over 80% in five years.
- Created a strategy to leverage capabilities and address the limitations of smartphones and tablets for key use cases in buying, selling, and trading.
- Worked closely with commercial functions to address revenue impact, especially in CPC and display advertising.
- Collaborated with Engineering to transform teams and processes, increasing the number of designers and developers and up-skilling people and teams in omnichannel product development.

Outcomes and impact:
- 4.5 rated apps that ranked No. 1 in their App Store categories
- 30%+ YoY growth in buyer and seller engagement, listings and leads, reigniting growth for a mature business and translating into double-digit revenue increase

Marktplaats, the #1 online marketplace in The Netherlands, aimed to improve the product and accelerate product development by re-platforming from an outsourced legacy monolith to a modern in-house tech stack, removing technical debt and increasing release frequency.

User migration was completed by the deadline and resulted in:
- Double-digit growth in key metrics like listings and leads
- Modern API-based architecture that enabled new functionalities and mobile apps
- Agile workflows with weekly releases, moving towards continuous integration and continuous deployment

As head of product, I was responsible for:
- Stakeholder management with all functions, departments, and business units, from management to marketing, sales, engineering, legal, and customer support
- Roadmap planning and prioritization
- Collaborating closely with engineering in scoping of work, improving workflows, and actual product development
- Signing off on acceptance criteria and completed work
- Coordinating qualitative and quantitative user feedback
- Collaborating closely with marketing in closed beta-testing and go-to-market strategy
- Functionally managing a team of seven product managers, designer/user researchers, and a product analyst

XS4ALL was the first, and still is the most authoritative, internet service provider in The Netherlands. As product manager, I was responsible for our portfolio of B2B email and hosting services.

When the company expanded, we aimed to reduce costs of our enlarged data center capacity by offering self-managed server hosting (colocation) on top of our portfolio of managed web hosting services.

We developed a unique flat-fee proposition that offered customers up-front certainty around costs, rather than receiving a monthly invoice based on data usage -a key feature in all competitive offerings and a major source of concern for customers, especially in the high-end of the market.

This differentiator leveraged our unique strengths as a leading provider of both consumer broadband access and professional webhosting services, giving us a surplus of essentially free peering traffic. It also made implementation easier, as we did not have to implement dynamic billing.

Our go-to market plan offered system administrators special invites through message boards and forums, while simultaneously targeting decision-makers like CIOs and CTOs via ICT business publications.

We exceeded the best case sales scenario by 50% in the first year.