Closer and closer to the best solution

Joris de Vreede is product owner of the Select platform, which will get a new user interface and new name (Striive) later this year. He joined HeadFirst Group on a permanent basis after working as a freelancer for many years. “I started out here as a client,” he says. “As an independent professional, I took on projects at various clients. So in that sense I have affinity with the business and the customers, but that’s not the reason I joined.

The main reason was the great team here and the fact that I can really make a difference, together with my colleagues. We ourselves are at the controls here, and in consultation with our customers, we decide what we make, why and for whom. This creates a lot of growth potential, which is just as well, because I don’t like sitting still.”

Close to the organisation’s strategy

In Joris’s four years at HeadFirst Group, the organisation has grown ten times as big in terms of turnover, number of users and transaction volume. This has also meant an exponential increase in customer requirements. “Even if our platform is down for only a few minutes, we immediately see our colleagues coming up to us, because professionals are already getting on the phone.”

To start with, the team consisted of three engineers, but now there are three fully fledged teams that create and manage the entire platform end-to-end. “That’s exactly what I like about our team. We’re super close to the organisation’s strategy, because the organisation actually runs on our product. We’re responsible for the product vision and strategy as well as software delivery. And we do it all ourselves, from problem and solution discovery to building, deploying and managing software.”

Customer first

What are the challenges our customers are facing? That’s what the BizDevOps team focuses on. “Together with stakeholders, we examine the bottlenecks among our independent professionals, suppliers, clients and our colleagues. We then think of possible solutions, create software or integrate it. That’s how we make our customers’ lives a little better again.”

This year, the direction lies in four value chains: search & match, contracting & invoicing, Professionals & Partners services and our new platform solution for direct clients. For these chains, teams will become increasingly organised around solving specific problems. “That work is incredibly valuable,” emphasises Joris. “Based on feedback and data, we start by defining a question or challenge that exists among our customers. We then interview them about it, make prototypes, validate, build and deploy them. This is how we get closer and closer to the best solution. We won’t stop until all our customers’ problems have been solved.”