I ran LiveRamp's core product portfolio in San Francisco and the German business at JobTeaser. Today I advise B2B companies and take interim mandates.
Twenty years of international B2B operating leadership, twelve of them in the United States, from startups to NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies. I work with CEOs, boards and operating partners, usually where a US or group headquarters and a German subsidiary have stopped understanding each other.
A short glossary of misunderstandings
Five words both organizations use. Each one means something different at a US headquarters than it does in a German subsidiary, and each difference costs a quarter before anyone names it.
- “Committed”
A weighted judgment call, reviewed weekly, with movement priced in.
A commitment. You do not report a number you might miss.
- Forecast
An instrument, re-cut weekly. Changing it is doing your job.
A plan. Revising it mid-quarter means you planned badly.
- Escalation
Hygiene. No surprises, raise it before it is real.
Proof you could not solve it in your own remit. You escalate with a solution or not at all.
- “Reduce the team”
Measured in weeks.
Notice periods of three to six months, possibly a works council, possibly a negotiated Sozialplan.
- ARR
Monthly committed revenue, where churn shows immediately.
Annual upfront invoicing with automatic renewal.
So headquarters discounts a figure that was already conservative, and the region reads the discount as distrust.
German numbers move late, and headquarters reads late movement as concealment.
Headquarters reads the silence as hiding. The subsidiary reads the weekly probing as micromanagement.
A restructuring synchronized to a US timeline is not ambitious. It is unlawful.
Compare the regions without adjusting for that, and one of them is always mysteriously behind.
The glossary is longer. Most of it comes up in the first conversation.
Operating record
LiveRamp
NYSE: RAMP · San FranciscoHead of Product, core portfolio
The core product and the company's largest portfolio by ARR, a nine-figure business. Leading people managers and product leaders, with more than 100 developers across three regions.
Comscore
NASDAQ: SCOR · Menlo ParkSenior Director, then VP Product Management
Grew a nascent product portfolio roughly 70 percent year over year, then took on the full advertising suite, a nine-figure ARR business, and brought operating cost down by about a third.
JobTeaser
Cologne and ParisGM DACH
Full P&L, reporting to the founder-CEO. Regional ARR grew about 2.6x in two years; the team from 15 to 48, and back down when group strategy changed.
Proximic
Palo AltoVP Product & Operations
From inception to acquisition. Knowledge graphs and early LLM technique at more than two million requests per second.
Diplomkaufmann (German master's-level degree in business administration), Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires. German and English native. Based in Cologne.
Engagements
For CEOs, boards, and PE operating partners of B2B companies. Engagements so far have run between €20M and €400M ARR, usually where a US or group headquarters holds a German subsidiary, or a DACH company is scaling into the US. They run in multi-month operating phases, not workshops.
Product strategy
Deciding what to kill. Portfolio focus and platform direction, including the two products that should not survive the review. Strategy is mostly subtraction.
Product management coaching
Building product leaders, not roadmaps. People who can defend a bet in front of a board and cut one when the numbers say so.
Interim mandates
A defined problem, a fixed term, an outcome I own. Carrying a general management or product agenda through a transition: a carve-out, an integration, a market entry, a turnaround. Not a vacancy filled.
Operating model and governance
Not slides. Who decides what, in which forum, on what cadence, against which KPI definitions. Most transformations fail at exactly those four questions.
AI loop engineering
Designing AI into how the company actually runs: hands-on, inside the loops where decisions are made, not in the deck. Grounded in knowledge-graph and early-LLM work at two million requests per second.
- LinkedIn/in/felixhansen
- Emailfelix@fh-advisory.com
There is a second portfolio, made of photographs: felix-hansen.com