Get to know me
About Me
Good product ownership isn't a luxury for when you happen to have time.
I'm Jasper — rational optimist, 11+ years in tech, 8 in product. Still curious why one team ships while another stalls. My story, in short:
- Where I come from. Business Administration at the University of Amsterdam, innovation research at Shell, Philips and KPN — then building product from Sydney to Johannesburg.
- What I learned along the way. The real problems are rarely in the backlog. They live in assumptions nobody tests out loud, decisions left hanging, and teams working past each other. That's where my work starts.
- How I arrive. The first two weeks are mostly listening — to the team, the customer signals, and what's been tried before. No grand plan on day three, but a fast, sharp view of where things are stuck.
- How I leave. From day one I build towards the handover: decisions documented, the team at the wheel, a roadmap that keeps moving without me. Interim work only succeeds if my exit leaves no gap.
- Not just my word. Toptal admitted me in July 2026 as a Verified Expert in Product Management, after a multi-round screening that places me in the top 3% of freelance product managers. A nice confirmation, but what former colleagues say says more.
- Off the clock. CrossFit, city trips and hiking trails, time with family — and building things with AI tools that used to take a full engineering team.
Product Philosophy
Too many product orgs chase velocity when they should be questioning direction. They adopt frameworks before understanding their own context. They ship features and call it progress. I've seen the pattern everywhere — and made some of these mistakes early in my own career.
The antidote isn't another framework. It's product thinking as a daily practice: validating assumptions honestly, staying close to the user, and having the discipline to stop what isn't working.
Three convictions drive my approach. Strategy without execution is philosophy — I build roadmaps that ship, not decks that collect dust. Data informs, humans decide — AI and analytics are tools, not a replacement for judgement. Great products are built by teams — engineers, designers and PMs as equals, documentation treated as a product, and proper handovers so what you build today still works when the team looks different tomorrow.
My Journey
My path didn't follow a straight line — and that turned out to be a strength. I started as a Business Analyst at Intertrust, rolling out software across international offices, from Switzerland and Luxembourg to the Bahamas. That gave me something no certification could: a practical sense of how technology actually lands inside real organisations.
From there: product ownership of talent-acquisition platforms at Endouble, then Sydney — where my product research laid the groundwork for the pivot to the candidate perspective in JobAdder's applicant tracking software. Back in the Netherlands I built Randstad's queryable data lake on AWS S3, with an automated metadata catalog. At 25Friday I helped Dutch scale-ups improve product as a discipline, and ran product-maturity assessments for investors. Most recently, at Heineken, I built the complete vision and strategy for a new global sales tool — for thousands of reps selling beer all over the world.
Every company was different. Every challenge needed a different approach. That range made me adaptable — not because I have all the answers, but because I've learned which questions to ask and which people to bring together to find them.
AI & Building
I treat AI as a force multiplier in PM work. I build prototypes and side projects with AI tools — what some call "vibe coding" — and it's genuinely unlocked new capabilities for me. Work that used to take weeks with an engineering team, I now explore and validate myself.
At the same time, that experience has only deepened my respect for software engineering. A prototype is one thing; production software that scales, that a team can maintain, that outlives the people who wrote it — that takes proper engineering and collaboration.
AI lowers the bar to start, not to finish. Great products are built by teams — AI just gives each team member more leverage. For a PM that means speaking the language of engineering, prototyping your own ideas, and making better decisions because you understand the material.
Companies I've worked with
Now that you know how I work
The next step is a 30-minute conversation about your team and what is stuck right now.
Get in Touch