Client Portal

After a presentation with the COO and my future manager, I didn't wait for a job posting. I reached out directly and said I wanted to be part of what they were building. There was a position available: a brand new Global Client Portal, one platform to service all Randstad markets worldwide. I applied, got the job, and a promotion to Product Manager. Then I requested a transfer from Prague to Amsterdam. Randstad said yes. I moved countries for this role. I'd do it again.

It was the most complex product challenge I'd taken on. And I said yes immediately.

Before writing a single user story, I went deep on the business. I pulled financial data to understand revenue by business line and market. I mapped client profiles from small businesses to global enterprises. I analyzed what Randstad actually offers across its services and asked the hard question: who will genuinely benefit from this portal, and who won't?

The insight that shaped everything: hiring managers don't care about HR processes. They need people, now. The portal had to be seamless and uncomplicated while still being legal, compliant, and organized. And it had to match the B2C experience users increasingly expect: self-service, transparent, fast.

I defined personas at three levels: company, buyer, and the hiring manager. I benchmarked internal tools, competitor products, and B2C comparables. User research became continuous and central. It informs every roadmap decision we make.

This was a major multi-year strategic initiative as part of Randstad's global digital transformation. Which meant I didn't just build a product. I built a team and a way of working.

I participated in vendor selection, onboarded an IT partner, recruited product owners, business analysts, and designers, and established how we'd all work together. I ran workshops to define our way of work, created RACI matrices for a 50+ person extended team, and documented processes and expectations so that hundreds of people across the organization could find a path forward.

Remote-first, globally distributed, high complexity. I was fully remote while most of the core team was in Amsterdam.

We launched a minimal viable version in the first year, built on a dual architecture capable of supporting both global and local market systems from the same codebase.

I'll be honest: it wasn't a smooth ride. Significant vendor challenges, organizational turbulence, and high team fluctuation, including multiple parental leaves across key roles simultaneously, tested the team's resilience at every stage.

My job through all of it was to stay close to the designers, product owners, and architects, keep everyone aligned on the vision, and make sure every role understood how to move and when. I pushed for engineering best practices throughout: DevOps, CI/CD, proper QA, scalability, even when the corporate environment made that slower than it should be.

We have been praised for our resilience, our organization, and genuinely having a good team culture. I'll take that. When I reduced my hours for a few weeks during my move from Prague to Amsterdam, things kept running. That's not luck. That's what good organizational design looks like in practice.

The portal is live in 3 countries with more rollouts planned. My team of 3 product owners, 3 business analysts, 3 designers, and 3 architects, none of whom report to me directly but all of whom I consider my team, has a solid foundation and a clear set of shared values:

My role has evolved to span broader initiatives across the product organization, but the Client Portal remains my product. The organizational design we built here works. It can be replicated and adapted. That's the kind of thing I care about: not just shipping features, but building the conditions for a team to keep shipping long after the hardest moments have passed.