// About prodct · est. 2018 · Essen, Germany

The company we wish existed when we were the client.

prodct is a technology consulting firm that doesn't stop at strategy. We were founded by operators who'd sat on the buyer side — burned by decks that never shipped, by pilots that never scaled, by consultants who mistook slides for delivery. We built the firm we wished had shown up for us back then.

2018·
// founded in Essen by four operators, ex-client side
~ 60
// people. 100 % senior. no staffing pyramids.
4
// specialized units. one shared delivery bar.
82%
// of clients return within 12 months, unprompted.
// 01 / the bet

We bet the market was tired of advice.

// Essen, Germany
// written by
Jan B. Fischer
Founder & Managing Director

In 2018, I founded the company after watching too many programs fail at the same handover — not because the strategy was wrong, but because the consultancy that wrote it never had to ship it.

I'd been a founder, a product lead, and an operator building my own software. I'd seen the pattern from the buyer side: the best firms in the room diagnosing problems they'd never have to fix. Slides after slides. Then the partners present, the engagement winds down, and the team that has to actually deliver is left alone with a roadmap and a tracking sheet.

Around the same time I met an experienced data architect, and an entrepreneur — later my co-shareholder — who'd spent years building tech across the full value chain. We'd all seen the same thing. Strategy and solution: done. Delivery: next. And that's exactly where most consultancies stop working.

We wanted a firm that stayed for the part where code ships, data moves, and a team that didn't exist six months ago starts picking up the pager on a Tuesday night. — founding memo, March 2018

So we built one. The bet: if we organized senior operators into four specialized units — each deep enough to win on its own, all four wired together — we could cover the full arc from discovery to live product without the baton drops that kill most enterprise programs. No pyramids. No offshore backroom. No "the junior will pick it up from here."

Eight years in, the bet held. We're ~60 people, still senior-only, still based in Essen, still running programs we could have pitched as strategy decks — except we ship them instead.

// 02 / operating principles

Seven beliefs we've refused to negotiate for eight years.

P · 01

Seniors only. No pyramids.

Every engagement is staffed with people who've shipped this before. Median tenure on our projects is 14+ years. We do not sell junior hours billed at senior rates. There is no offshore team you'll discover in month three.

P · 02

We commit to outcomes, not deliverables.

Every statement of work names the KPI, the target delta, and the measurement window — before the first line of code. If we miss, that's on us, not the spec. We'd rather lose a deal than sell a deliverable list we already know won't move the number.

P · 03

Business cases, not features.

Every feature we build answers a CFO question: what would this be worth, and when? We've killed more scope in discovery than we've shipped. The best project we run in a given year is usually the one we talked a client out of.

P · 04

GDPR by default, not by afterthought.

Every AI system, data pipeline, and customer touchpoint we build is lawful on day one. prodct [Elements] owns the governance pattern; the other units inherit it. We've never had to retrofit a compliance story after go-live.

P · 05

Your team owns it when we leave.

Every engagement has an end date. We hire toward redundancy: docs as we go, pairing on every commit, runbooks before hypercare ends. If your team can't run what we built without us in the room, we haven't done our job.

P · 06

We'll tell you the uncomfortable thing first.

The CRM and the ERP disagree about which customers exist. The MVP you funded is a feature, not a product. The AI pilot is working because three people are doing QA in a spreadsheet. We say it on day one, in the room, on the record.

P · 07

Delivery is the first deliverable.

No kickoff before a working ticket. No workshop before a running environment. Strategy docs come after we've proven we can ship something — however small — in the first two weeks. That's how we earn the scope conversation.

// 03 / how we're structured

Four units. One delivery bar. Compounding value when combined.

[CX] lead · Boris E.

Customer experience & commerce.

Replatforming, personalization, loyalty. We build the systems customers actually touch.

14seniors
9platforms run
11markets shipped
[Labs] lead · Boris E.

Digital products from scratch.

Concept → live product. MVPs, AI agents, micro-apps. Concept paper on Monday, staging on Friday.

17seniors
9 wkavg. to launch
34products live
[Elements] lead · Jan B. Fischer

The data foundation everything runs on.

Common data models, governance, integration. We fix the foundation first, then the thing on top actually works.

12seniors
0 hcutover downtime
7ERP migrations
/skills lead · Jan B. Fischer

Team enablement, not dependency.

Advisory, workshops, shadowing, coaching. Taught by operators who build and ship — not trainers who teach.

8seniors
42teams enabled
3–12mo programs
Units rotate on cross-unit engagements. A [Labs] product with bad data goes to [Elements] before it ships. A [CX] replatform with a green team gets /skills in the room from week one.
// 04 / leadership

The people who sign the statements of work.

JF

Jan B. Fischer

// Founder · Managing Director
// Lead · [Elements] + /skills

Product & commerce background. Shipped 40+ platform programs before founding prodct. Still writes the hard SOWs himself.

// since2018 · founder
// ownsstrategy · revenue · biz dev
// basedEssen
BE

Boris Eckstein

// Lead · [Labs] + [CX]

Engineer-founder who sold an AI product in 2021, joined as partner the week after the earn-out closed. Turns concept papers into production systems.

// since2022 · Lead
// ownsconception · AI ops · units
// basedCologne
// the bar we hire to

Who we actually hire.

We'd rather go short-staffed than drop the bar. Here are the four gates every candidate — senior or partner — has to clear before we make the offer.

See open conversations →
01
Operator experience. You've owned a real system in production for at least three years. You've been on-call. You've restored from backup.
02
Client-facing judgment. You can run a steering committee without a deck, and say no to a scope you think is wrong — in the room, to the CFO.
03
Craft, still. Partners write SOWs. Partners review PRs. Partners pair on the hard ticket in week two. The day you stop wanting to, we talk.
04
Can teach. Every senior here either coaches juniors on the client team or runs a /skills format at least once a year. Knowledge isn't hoarded.
// 05 / where we work

One HQ. One meeting space. Anywhere DACH when you need us on-site.

// DACH · reach map
Hamburg
Essen · HQ
Cologne
Frankfurt
München
Ljubljana
// HQ

Essen

prodct GmbH
Bismarckstr. 5
45128 Essen, DE

// hello@prodct.group

// on-site

Anywhere DACH

For discovery and cutover, we embed locally. Rest of the
engagement runs from Essen + your Slack.

// avg. 2 days / week on-site, 3 remote

// remote

Rest of Europe

Remote-first for discovery + ongoing delivery.
Travel on agreed sprints. Reach on request.

// async-capable engagement model

Tell us what
needs to ship.

30 minutes. A senior partner from the relevant unit. No sales, no forms in triplicate — we'll tell you within the call whether we're a fit.