Christian Strunk – Product Management Coach & Consultant

Product Coach (Freelance) | Berlin, Germany

As a product management consultant based in Berlin, I help startups and scale-ups (up to 500 employees) build lean, efficient product processes that enhance speed and quality. I specialize in working with founders, CEOs, and CPOs who need a pragmatic sparring partner - not another consultant who runs 4-hour workshops and delivers 50-page presentations nobody reads.

My approach as a startup product coach combines hands-on execution with strategic thinking. I join your leadership meetings, ask the questions that challenge assumptions, and bring structure to chaos without slowing down momentum.

I work on two key levels:

Leadership Level: I collaborate with leadership to craft a clear product vision and derive a strategic roadmap. This strategy is then executed through a robust, well-defined process that connects directly with the team's operations, ensuring alignment from strategy to execution.

Team Level: I implement user story mapping to establish a structured product planning process. This brings clarity, priorities, and stronger communication across the entire product development lifecycle, helping teams ship faster while reducing miscommunication and rework.

Real-world impact: For Trade Republic, I helped reduce a critical product launch timeline from 5 months to 2 months through focused planning sessions and dependency mapping. This acceleration saved hundreds of thousands of euros in daily delay costs and enabled a faster go-to-market.

Product Bakery Podcast - Host | Berlin, Germany

Product Bakery is a leading product management podcast where I bring people from all product functions together to discuss what it takes to build successful products customers love.

With 137+ episodes and counting, I've interviewed product leaders from Amazon, eBay, Zalando, and experts from Silicon Valley Product Group. Together with my Co-Host and Design Manager Alex Dapunt, we break down traditional silos between Product Management, Design, Development, and Marketing, fostering an open dialogue that helps product teams work better together.

If you want to understand the complete product development process - from strategy to execution - this is where product professionals come to learn from the best in the industry.

Listen: Product Bakery on Spotify

University of Applied Sciences Aschaffenburg - Guest Lecturer (Innovation Management)

Invited back to the university where I earned my Bachelor's degree to teach Innovation Management to business students working on a real-world consulting project.

The challenge: A traditional Bavarian brewery needed a marketing plan to better reach Gen Z customers. I was brought in as the expert docent to help students develop a professional product management and marketing framework.

My role involved:

• Teaching product management fundamentals and go-to-market strategy
• Guiding students through customer research and product timeline development
• Reviewing and refining their strategic recommendations
• Preparing them to pitch their consulting plan to the brewery's leadership

This practical collaboration between university and industry gave students hands-on experience translating theory into real business recommendations - the same approach I bring to every coaching engagement.

Trade Republic - Product Management Consultant (Freelance) | Berlin, Germany

Brought in as a strategic product advisor during Trade Republic's hyper-growth phase to help scale product operations and organizational structure as the company expanded from 100 to 500+ employees.

Working directly with the CTO, engineering managers, and product leads, I helped establish the foundational processes and structures needed to support exponential team growth while maintaining product velocity and quality.

Key contributions:

Organizational Scaling:

• Designed and implemented cross-functional team structures that enabled autonomous, effective product delivery at scale
• Established hiring frameworks and interview processes for product management roles to support rapid team expansion
• Continuously adapted organizational structure to accommodate weekly growth while maintaining clarity and effectiveness

Product Process & Strategy:

• Led workshops and user story mapping sessions to streamline backlogs and improve product planning across teams
• Collaborated with product leads to develop clear product strategies for each area of the platform
• Implemented a comprehensive double-diamond product development process that balanced discovery with delivery

Operational Excellence:

• Established stable, repeatable processes for product development that scaled from startup to scale-up phase
• Worked with engineering managers to improve cross-functional collaboration and reduce bottlenecks
• Created frameworks that allowed teams to move faster without sacrificing strategic alignment

This engagement during a critical growth period helped Trade Republic maintain product excellence while scaling operations to meet market demand.

SumUp - Senior Product Manager POS | Berlin, Germany

As Senior Product Manager for mobile point of sale (mPOS), I drove product strategy and development that directly impacted more than 2,000,000 merchants worldwide. I joined during another hyper-growth phase (600 employees) and was part of the scale-up journey to 2,000 employees - experiencing firsthand what it takes to maintain product quality and velocity while rapidly scaling operations.

My focus was making payment processing faster, more compliant, and easier to integrate for small businesses across Europe and beyond.

Key achievements:

• Built a new product catalog service that improved merchant onboarding and product management
• Enhanced compliant reporting systems to meet regulatory requirements across multiple countries
• Built an SDK that enabled partners to integrate with our platform, expanding our ecosystem
• Led a complete redesign of iOS/Android apps, improving usability and performance for millions of daily transactions
• Redesigned our merchant dashboard (migrated from Angular to React JS), reducing load times and improving merchant satisfaction
• Supported the SumUp design team by introducing Circuit UI, our design system that accelerated product development across teams

Beyond product development, I focused on process improvement and staying connected to real merchant needs:

• Served as global Jira admin, optimizing workflows that helped 15+ teams ship faster
• Taught agile methodologies (Scrum and Kanban) to product and engineering teams
• Conducted weekly merchant visits and calls to understand pain points and validate solutions
• Ran continuous user testing and maintained tight feedback loops between customers and development teams

NewStore - Product Manager Omni-Channel Shopping Experience | Berlin, Germany

At NewStore, I helped build the next-generation retail platform that enables brands to unify their online and offline shopping experiences. My focus was on product management tools for retailers and the SDK infrastructure that powered consumer-facing applications.

Key responsibilities:

• Led product management and import functionality that allowed retailers to seamlessly migrate and manage their product catalogs from existing shop systems
• Directed the NewStore SDK project (based on React Native), enabling enterprise customers and agencies to build consumer apps (mobile apps and progressive web apps) from a single codebase - significantly reducing development time and costs for our retail clients
• Built the store associate app that combined clienteling, mobile point of sale, and endless aisle functionality, empowering in-store staff to serve customers better

In my final six months, I joined the Order Management System (OMS) team to work on the platform's core infrastructure:

• Order routing logic for optimizing fulfillment between stores and warehouses
• Inventory management that provided real-time stock visibility across all channels
• Fulfillment and shipping integrations that ensured orders reached customers efficiently

This role deepened my understanding of complex platform architecture and how to balance flexibility for enterprise clients with robust, scalable core systems.

Shopgate - Product Owner Apps | Butzbach, Germany

At Shopgate, I owned the mobile app and mobile website product lines, working with two development teams (Scrum and Kanban) to help 10,000 merchants sell more effectively to over 20,000,000 end users.

Major achievement: I drove a complete redesign of all mobile apps, transitioning from iOS6 skeuomorphism to the modern flat iOS8 design language. This wasn't just a visual update - we helped merchants increase their app conversion rates by over 60%, directly translating to significantly higher revenue for thousands of small and medium businesses worldwide.

Innovation highlight: I led Apple TV app development as Product Lead, and we launched one of the first shopping apps on Apple TV in 2015 (Golden State Warriors App) - positioning Shopgate at the forefront of emerging commerce platforms.

Beyond the consumer-facing apps, I managed the web dashboard that merchants used to onboard, integrate their shopping systems, and configure their mobile storefronts. My focus areas included:

App Store Optimization (ASO):

• App upload automation and screenshot generation
• Keyword optimization to improve discoverability for merchant apps

Merchant Empowerment:

• Built a drag-and-drop widget system (App CMS) that allowed merchants to design their apps without technical knowledge, democratizing mobile commerce

Conversion Optimization:

• Implemented intelligent push notification systems that helped merchants re-engage customers with abandoned cart reminders, personalized discounts, and timely promotions - driving measurable increases in sales

This role taught me how to balance technical complexity with merchant needs, optimize for app stores, and use data-driven approaches to improve conversion rates at scale.

Bekleidungsfachschule Aschaffenburg - Lecturer (Industry Collaboration)

This lecturer position was actually a strategic collaboration between Pocketrobe (my startup) and the fashion vocational school. We were building something ahead of its time - an early machine learning approach to solve online fashion sizing problems.

The Challenge: Pocketrobe was a wardrobe app where users cataloged their clothes with detailed information (brand, size, fit). We noticed we were sitting on valuable data - if we knew someone's Marco Polo shirt was size M and fit well, could we predict what size they'd need from other brands in our affiliate shop?

The Solution: We partnered with Bekleidungsfachschule Aschaffenburg to access their expertise in garment construction, sizing standards, and fit analysis. Together with students, we:

• Studied how different brands' sizing systems varied
• Learned about measuring techniques, cuts, and fit principles
• Collected data on how brands' actual measurements compared to their stated sizes
• Built a knowledge base to improve size recommendations in our shopping app

The Outcome: I officially taught as a lecturer, covering technical basics of our app and product thinking, while simultaneously the students taught us about fashion industry standards. This collaboration improved our product significantly and gave students hands-on experience building data-driven product features - a win-win that demonstrated how startups and educational institutions can create value together.

This experience reinforced my belief in learning by building real products with real users, a principle I now bring to every coaching engagement.

Pocketrobe UG - CEO & Founder | Goldbach/Aschaffenburg, Germany

While studying Business Administration, I founded my first startup with my friend Alex Guretzki. We met in 2012 working a student job at a small IT booth repairing and upgrading old PCs. A simple daily frustration - our girlfriends spending 30+ minutes every morning deciding what to wear - sparked an idea that would launch my product management career.

The Problem: People had no easy way to visualize outfit combinations from their existing wardrobe, leading to decision paralysis and duplicate purchases.

The Solution: Pocketrobe ("Your whole wardrobe in your pocket")

We built two iOS applications:

1. Wardrobe App: Allowed users to photograph clothing items, crop them, import into a digital closet, and create new outfits by swiping through combinations - think Tinder for your clothes
2. Affiliate Shopping App: Connected to the wardrobe app, recommending complementary items based on what users already owned and their style preferences

The Achievement: Both apps were featured in the German Apple App Store in April 2014 (lifestyle charts) - a significant accomplishment for a student project and validation of our product-market fit.

The Impact: This project taught me the complete product development lifecycle: ideation, user research, technical development, go-to-market strategy, app store optimization, and growth. More importantly, it opened the door to my product management career - Shopgate hired me directly because of Pocketrobe's success.

Watch: TV interview about Pocketrobe on Main.tv

What started as solving a personal problem became the foundation of my career philosophy: the best products come from deeply understanding real user needs and iterating quickly based on feedback.

Baker Training & Master Certification | Bavaria, Germany

My journey into craftsmanship began with a traditional 2-year German apprenticeship (Ausbildung) at Bäckerei Hench in Mainaschaff, combining hands-on bakery work with vocational school education. I was recognized as one of the top trainees in Germany, earning the Unterfränkischer Kammersieger 2009/2010 (Regional Chamber Champion) award and government funding to pursue the prestigious Bäckermeister certification.

After completing my apprenticeship in 2009, I worked as a journeyman baker at Bäckerei Dölger before pursuing the intensive master craftsman program at Frankfurter Bäckerfachschule J.A. Heyne in 2010. I then worked as a certified Master Baker at Bäckerei Fischbach until 2011.

Why this matters for product management:

This period taught me production systems thinking that directly translates to building digital products:

• Daily shipping cycles: In a bakery, you produce, ship, and get customer feedback every single day. There's no "launch in 6 months when it's perfect" - you ship, learn, and iterate continuously.
• Production system optimization: Understanding Kanban workflows, quality control at scale, and managing dependencies across production stages
• Customer feedback loops: Immediate, direct feedback from customers that drives rapid improvement
• Balancing craft and pragmatism: Knowing when to pursue perfection and when to ship "good enough"

The parallels between baking and software development - continuous delivery, tight feedback loops, production systems, quality standards - have made me a more execution-focused and pragmatic product leader. I understand what it means to ship every day and respond to real customer needs, not theoretical perfection.

Institut für Beziehungsdynamik - Assistant Body Psychotherapist | Berlin, Germany

Completed a 1-year assistantship following my body psychotherapy certification, deepening my practical experience in understanding human behavior, interpersonal dynamics, and the psychological patterns that drive decision-making.

This advanced training enhanced my ability to identify underlying team conflicts and communication breakdowns that block product development - issues that most technical product consultants miss because they focus only on processes and methodologies.

Institut für Beziehungsdynamik - Body Psychotherapy Training | Berlin, Germany

Certified Body Psychotherapist

This formal training gave me a unique competitive advantage as a product coach. While most product management consultants focus on frameworks and processes, I can read what's actually happening beneath the surface.

What this means for clients:

When a product team says "we need better prioritization," the real problem is often unspoken conflict between stakeholders, lack of psychological safety to challenge bad ideas, or team members protecting their turf. When a PM says "users want Google single sign-on," they're addressing a surface request rather than the core need.

My body psychotherapy training taught me to:

• Read team dynamics and power structures that influence product decisions but are never discussed openly
• Ask questions that uncover real problems, not just stated symptoms (like distinguishing between "users want one-click login" vs. "users don't want to think about authentication at all")
• Understand psychological drivers behind stakeholder resistance, team conflicts, and communication breakdowns
• Create safe spaces where teams can have honest conversations about what's actually blocking progress

This combination of psychological insight and technical product expertise allows me to solve problems that pure process optimization can't address. It's why clients like Trade Republic bring me in for their most complex challenges - I can navigate both the technical and human dimensions of product development.

University of Applied Sciences Aschaffenburg

Bachelor of Arts - Business Administration, Management & Marketing

Studied business fundamentals while simultaneously founding and running Pocketrobe, my first startup. This parallel path - learning theory in the classroom while applying it in real-world product development - shaped my pragmatic, execution-focused approach to product management.

Rather than treating business education as purely academic, I immediately tested concepts with real users, real development teams, and real market feedback. This combination of structured learning and hands-on entrepreneurship became the foundation for how I coach today: balancing strategic frameworks with practical execution.

Frankfurter Bäckerfachschule J.A. Heyne - Certified Master Baker (Bäckermeister)

🏆 Unterfränkischer Kammersieger 2009/2010 (Regional Chamber Champion - Top Baker Trainee)

Earned Germany's highest baking qualification, the Bäckermeister certification, after being recognized as one of the top baker trainees in the country. This achievement earned me a government scholarship (Stipendium) to pursue the intensive master craftsman program - a competitive award given only to exceptional candidates.

The Bäckermeister represents more than technical baking skills - it's a comprehensive business and leadership qualification that covers production management, quality control, team leadership, and business operations. In Germany, only certified Meister (master craftsmen) are legally allowed to train apprentices and run their own craft businesses.

Why this matters for product management: The master craftsman training taught me systems thinking, production optimization, quality standards, and how to balance craft excellence with business realities - skills that translate directly into building and shipping great products at scale.

Bäckerei Hench - Baker Apprenticeship (Ausbildung) | Mainaschaff, Germany

Completed Germany's dual vocational training system (Ausbildung), combining practical work at the bakery with theoretical education at vocational school. Recognized as one of the top trainees nationally, earning the Kammersieger award and funding for the Bäckermeister program.

This traditional German craftsmanship training laid the foundation for understanding production systems, continuous improvement, and customer-driven iteration - principles that directly shaped my approach to product development years later.