"We do it all ourselves: problem & solution discovery, and then ultimately building, deploying and managing software."
Joris de Vreede | Product Owner
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 years of freelancing. "I was a client myself. An (independent) professional who picked up projects at several of our clients. So in that sense I have affinity with the business, but that is not the reason I joined. The main reason was the team and the fact that I can really make a difference here with my colleagues. We are at the controls ourselves and determine - in consultation with our stakeholders - which customer problems we want to solve, in what way and for whom. As a result, a lot of growth is possible and fortunately so, because I don't like to sit still."
Close to the organization's strategy
In the four years Joris has been with HeadFirst Group, the organization has grown as much as ten times in several areas: revenue, number of users and transaction volume. As a result, the demands on the product have also increased at a rapid pace. "If we are even a few minutes down with the platform we immediately have our colleagues at our desk because professionals are already reporting by phone."
In the beginning, the team consisted of three engineers, but now there are three full-fledged teams creating and managing the entire platform end-to-end. "That's also what I love about our team. We are close to the strategy of the organization because the organization runs on our product. We are responsible for the product vision, product strategy and also software delivery. We do it all ourselves: problem & solution discovery, and then ultimately building, deploying and managing software."
"That's also what I love about our team. We are close to the strategy of the organization because the organization runs on our product."
Customer First
What problems are our customers running into? 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 devise possible solutions, create software or integrate software from the cloud onto our platform. This is how we make our customers' lives a little better."
What is your product vision?
"We want to give zp'ers, suppliers and clients access to the entire market of temporary knowledge supply and demand and let them trade with each other as easily as possible, with and without our intervention. On our platform you can already find the most assignments, the best and most professionals. At the same time, you see that we can still improve a lot in searching and matching professionals and assignments, especially with the revolution in AI going on right now. We want to enable zp'ers, suppliers, clients to have an agreement with each other or with us with one click. Our compliancy is intense, files are getting more and more extensive. We want to make this as easy as possible. Our aim: to prepare an agreement within 15 minutes on a mobile device. In addition, we want to unburden professionals in their entrepreneurship and career through our Professionals & Partners services."
We support four value chains: search & match, contracting & invoicing, Professionals & Partners services and, today, a new service "Direct clients." For these chains, teams will become more organized around solving specific problems. "That work is incredibly valuable. Based on feedback and data, we start by defining a question or challenge that exists among our clients. Then we interview customers about it, create prototypes, validate them and then build software and deploy it to production. This is how we get closer and closer to solving our customers' problems."
Will you become Joris' new colleague?
We are always looking to strengthen our organization. Take a quick look at our open positions in Hoofddorp or at one of our other locations!