Anja Holzgethan
Product Leader

Built and lead the product management and engineering teams (8 FTE) for both SaaS and hardware from the ground up, establishing the structures, processes, and team needed to manage two fundamentally different product types.

Defined and executed the company-wide product vision, strategy and roadmap, creating a product-driven organisation shaped by clear priorities, measurable outcomes, and a shared framework for decision-making across product, engineering, and sales.

Secured a funding grant of €1.5 million, validating the strategic direction of the product and giving the organisation the financial runway to accelerate development and growth.

Led the product and UX team (3 FTE), defining the product vision, mission, and strategy to anchor the organisation around user-centric discovery and delivery as a shared direction across teams. Acted as the primary interface between product, engineering, and C-Level, translating business objectives into a coherent product strategy and ensuring alignment across a complex stakeholder landscape on a platform serving diverse user groups at scale.

Enabled data-driven product management by further developing the HEART KPI framework and strengthening agile ways of working, establishing hypothesis-driven decision-making as the foundation for prioritisation and delivery across teams.

Results: +50% new user retention, +10% activity among registered users

Owned the roadmap and prioritisation, working closely with engineering translating product discovery into a clear sequence of bets for the team to develop, validate, and improve the platform.

Built gutefrage.net's user research program from the ground up, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to surface user needs at scale. The resulting insights directly shaped backlog prioritisation and roadmap decisions, backed by cross-functional stakeholder management that kept priorities aligned across the wider organisation.

Implemented the Digital Services Act in a genuinely user-friendly way, treating regulatory compliance as a product problem rather than a checkbox exercise.

Owned the strategy and roadmap for the medical appointment management system for patients and medical professionals, and improving new functionality together with a 6-person engineering team, translating research findings directly into shipped value.

Operated across the entire product lifecycle, spanning strategic discovery, user research, and design sprints through to roadmap planning and OKR definition, pairing hands-on delivery with a consistent focus on organisational impact and cross-team collaboration.

Built and rolled out company-wide user research processes including patients and medical professionals, scaling what had been ad-hoc feedback into a repeatable, professionally led practice. Coached 4 product teams on product discovery, building their capability to run qualitative and quantitative research independently and embedding discovery as a standing practice within each team, giving teams faster, more direct access to user insight for their own roadmap decisions.

Responsible for the user experience of a fleet management tool that helped rail operators plan service efficiently and transparently, turning a complex operational domain into a usable, trustworthy interface.

Designed and ran cross-departmental workshops spanning Quality, R&D, Logistics, and Sales to optimise the digital product portfolio alongside underlying business processes, aligning teams that rarely worked together around a shared product direction.

Developed and delivered cross-departmental training in Design Thinking and agile methods, building lasting methodological capability across the organisation rather than leaving user-centred practices confined to a single project team.