Benjamin Faas

Freelance Product Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Master & Agile Coach

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Berlin, Germany

Experience

Nov 2021 - Present
4 years 3 months

Freelance Product Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Master & Agile Coach

Freelance

  • Freelance product owner, scrum master and agile coach in various projects spanning from local agencies to multinational corporations in diverse industries.

  • Last projects:

  • Adevinta: Technical Project Manager responsible for coordination of several sub-workstreams building the world’s largest classifieds multi-tenant platform.

  • Aroundhome (a ProSiebenSat.1 company): Product Manager implementing and verifying on the business side a concept for digital qualification of user requests for matching service providers.

  • Peek & Cloppenburg Düsseldorf: Product Manager Mobile advising on and guiding the rebuild of Android and iOS apps.

  • Visual Meta GmbH (an Axel Springer company), Berlin: Director Product co-leading the Product & Engineering department together with the Director Engineering.

  • Responsibilities at Visual Meta GmbH:

  • Define and deliver a 3–5 year horizon product strategy including a product vision & mission connecting to existing company strategy and strategies from adjacent departments.

  • Refine an existing OKR process together with OKR master and directors of other departments to increase focus and outcome.

  • Support the Director Engineering in creating a platform transformation strategy to transform a monolithic on-premise tech stack into a service-oriented, cloud-based architecture and establish a domain-based organizational setup.

  • Accountability for a motivated and talented team of 5 head-level colleagues and 17 operational team members from product management, data and UX/UI design.

  • Key achievements at Visual Meta GmbH:

  • Defined and delivered a 3–5 year horizon product strategy including a product vision & mission.

  • Increased focus within OKR process by moving from 10 company-level objectives to 2 and from several hundred team-level key results to a few dozen.

  • Created a career path framework for the product team defining roles and responsibilities from junior to head level positions.

May 2021 - Oct 2021
6 months

Freelance Product Owner, Project Manager & Agile Coach

Freelance

  • Freelance product owner, agile coach & project manager in various projects spanning from local agencies to multinational corporations in industries like finance and travel.

  • Projects:

  • Consorsbank (a BNP Paribas company): Product Manager Mobile creating a financial assistant chatbot for Android and iOS.

  • HRS Innovation Hub (a HRS Group company): Product Manager returning a large rewrite project for a multi-tenant hotel booking platform into feasible timelines and a manageable scope.

  • AutoScout24 GmbH (a Scout24 AG company), Munich: Product Lead Mobile, Search and Engagement driving forward the development of a platform rewrite for the web-based applications ensuring a cutting-edge search experience.

  • Responsibilities at AutoScout24:

  • Refine existing agile and lean working approaches to foster collaboration between the product and engineering departments.

  • Strengthen the market position and economic value of the native mobile applications through conversion rate improvements and close collaboration with external partners like Google.

  • People management responsibility for a team of up to 10 motivated and talented product managers from junior to senior level.

  • Key achievements at AutoScout24:

  • Android app team received the Google Play Top Developer award.

  • Invitation by Google to the Chrome Dev Summit 2015 in Mountain View to pioneer new functionality in the automotive industry.

  • Invitation by Google to collaborate on attribution and customer lifetime value models.

Mar 2016 - Dec 2017
1 year 10 months
Berlin, Germany

Head of Product Platform Innovation

HRS Innovation Hub GmbH

  • Member of the HRS Innovation Hub leadership team and extended HRS leadership team for product development & IT.

  • Responsibilities:

  • Define and deliver a next generation Search & Book platform.

  • Use data, machine-learning and recommendation technology to identify the lowest and best-matching rates for customers.

  • People management responsibility for a team of up to 5 motivated and talented individuals from product management, software engineering and UX/UI design.

  • Interim lead Finance for the product development & IT part of the HRS Innovation Hub from November 2018 to June 2019.

  • Key achievements:

  • Achieved a 48% conversion rate uplift on the new Search & Book platform.

  • Delivered up to 450,000 USD additional monthly savings for the company’s largest account.

Jan 2015 - Jul 2015
7 months
Berlin, Germany

Junior Product Manager

Youtailor - BFB Handels GmbH

  • First product manager for a start-up in the online retail business for made-to-measure clothing.

  • Responsibilities:

  • Responsible for continued development and optimization of the tailored garments configurator.

  • Manage product inventory via the underlying e-commerce system.

  • Support the marketing and customer support departments through creation of audiovisual and written content.

  • Key achievements:

  • Scaled the existing business to further countries.

  • Diversified existing product lines.

Dec 2010 - Dec 2014
4 years 1 month
Kleinmachnow, Germany

Product Manager Mobile

mobile.international GmbH

  • First full-time product manager for mobile applications at mobile.de.

  • Representative for eBay Advertising in the Association of Online Research (AGOF) 2012–2013.

  • Responsibilities:

  • Owned web-based and native mobile applications across various form factors and platform ecosystems.

  • Ensured maximum user and business value through regular user testing, usability testing, A/B testing and analysis of tracking data.

  • Identified and delivered measures to increase the Net Promoter Score of products.

  • Conceived and implemented measures in collaboration with mobile advertising, mobile performance marketing and product marketing.

  • Key achievements:

  • Rewrote an existing iPhone app into a feature-complete app, resulting in 57% more monthly unique users than direct competitor.

  • Delivered a native Android app for phone and tablet, resulting in 107% more monthly unique users than direct competitor.

  • Delivered a state-of-the-art web-based mobile website, resulting in 56% and 173% more monthly unique users than the company’s own iPhone and Android apps.

Summary

Freelance Product Owner, Scrum Master and Agile Coach in various projects spanning from local agencies to multinational corporations in diverse industries.

Worked as Director Product and Head of Product Platform Innovation with responsibilities for product strategy, OKR refinement, platform transformation and leadership of cross-functional teams.

Extensive experience in mobile product management, platform rewrites, search and engagement, and data-driven product development in sectors such as classifieds, travel, finance and e-commerce.

Strong track record in delivering measurable business impact, including significant conversion uplifts, cost savings, user growth and market share gains for web and native mobile products.

Skills

Personal Competencies

  • Leadership Skills
  • Building Performant And Happy Teams
  • Managing And Improving Team Performance
  • Functional And Disciplinary Leadership Of Internal And External Workforce
  • Goal Setting And Monitoring Via Clear Objectives And Measurable Key Results

Teamwork & Communication Skills

  • Communication With Internal And External C-level Stakeholders
  • Management Of And Collaboration With Internal And External Partners
  • Building Relationships Based On Mutual Trust And Respect

Business Skills

  • Definition Of Vision And Mission
  • Deriving Strategies And Roadmaps From Vision, Customer And Market Insights
  • Transfering Qualitative And Quantitative Data Into Actionable Topics
  • Decision-making Under Ambiguous Conditions

Personal Skills

  • Professional Workplace And Business Ethics
  • Flexibility Towards Changing Environments
  • Resilience Against Stressful Situations
  • Perseverance And Determination To Reach Set Goals

Specialist Knowledge

  • Agile Frameworks And Techniques: Scrum, Kanban (Training In Theory And Practice Under Stefan Roock, Andrea Tomasini And Markus Andrezak), Story Mapping
  • Agile Software Development Processes: Behavior Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment
  • Lean Approaches: Hypothesis-driven Product Development, Minimum Viable Product, Split Testing, Build-measure-learn Cycle, Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, Project Canvas
  • Techniques For Problem Solving And Idea Generation: Design Thinking, Product Discovery
  • Objective And Outcome Management: Objectives And Key Results (Okrs), Smart Goals, Key Performance Indicators (Kpis), Progress/plans/problems (Ppps)

Certifications

  • Certified Scrum Product Owner (Cspo), Scrum Alliance
  • Certified Scrum Master (Csm), Scrum Alliance

Information Technology

  • Tools: Google Analytics, Google Bigquery, Google Data Studio, Balsamiq
  • Programming Languages: Sql

Product Management & Agile

  • Product Management: Jira, Confluence, Productboard
  • Project Management: Monday

Technology Stacks

  • Cloud Computing Platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform
  • Programming Languages, Frameworks And Techniques: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Scala, .Net, Objective-c, Swift, Html, Css, Javascript, React, Node.js, Ajax, Http(s), React Native
  • Application Programming Interfaces: Restful Apis Using Json And Xml, Graphql, Soap Apis
  • Software Architecture: Monolithic Architectures, Service-oriented Architectures, Micro-services
  • Databases: Relational Databases (Sql), Document-oriented Databases (Nosql)
  • Container Management: Aws Ecs, Kubernetes
  • It Infrastructure Monitoring: Grafana, Kibana, Pingdom, Prtg, Datadog
  • Version Control Systems And Continuous Integration: Gitlab, Github, Jenkins, Hudson, Gitlab Ci

Languages

German
Native
English
Advanced

Education

Oct 2007 - Jul 2008

University of Cambridge Judge Business School

MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation · Innovation, Strategy and Organisation · Cambridge, United Kingdom · With Merit

Oct 2002 - Sep 2007

Tübingen University

M.A. in Political Science and Sociology · Political Science and Sociology · Tübingen, Germany · Good

Certifications & licenses

Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

Scrum Alliance

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

Scrum Alliance

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