Senior Product & Growth Manager · Amsterdam, Netherlands
I build and grow products on the internet — from 0 → 1 → 100.
It's what I naturally love, and have been doing extensively for the last 12 years. Senior Product & Growth Manager across SaaS, marketplaces and banking — I led activation at a Dutch neobank, bootstrapped a marketplace to €4M+, and build AI products as an active private investor.
Now — Product Manager, Onboarding, Activation & Growth at ABN AMRO · BUUT
0 → 1 → 100
12+
Years
27+
Products
€4M+
GMV built
Selected work
Things I’ve designed, built & shipped
Products built end-to-end and the design behind them — each pairing a sharp idea with a relentless bar on craft. Tap any project for the approach, stack and features.
Invest — StockSimulator.io
A Revolut-grade investment simulator — €1M of virtual cash, real-time markets, an AI advisor.
An AI-powered paper-trading app that feels like a premium neobank, on live data from global exchanges.
- Custom chart engine — live ticks, market-calendar aware, Revolut-matched.
- AI-assisted investing + a Claude advisor; automated strategies; education.
- SwiftUI on iOS, Next.js on web, Supabase — built solo with agentic AI.
Call My Agent
A phone number elderly people call to talk to their own AI agent. No app, no smartphone.
Dial a number and a warm, patient AI answers — capable help through the one interface anyone already trusts.
- Remembers you; searches the web; sends emails & texts; sets reminders.
- Self-improving: a second model scores and annotates every call.
- Growing on its own — 4 strangers joined in 2 days, all word-of-mouth.
Remote Group
The company behind Coworksurf — an Airbnb for remote workers I bootstrapped from €0 to €4M+ GMV.
Co-founded and ran the product, growth and operations of Coworksurf for six years — hands-on, directing specialists where needed.
- Custom booking system + Stripe marketplace payments.
- Programmatic-SEO engine → 1.25M+ annual impressions.
- Email & SMS lifecycle; time-to-value −65%, audience 19k+.
Design · FigmaDesign portfolio
Selected product, interface and brand design — the craft behind the products.
View in FigmaTrack record
12+ years from 0 → 1 → 100
Regulated fintech, high-growth SaaS, and a marketplace I bootstrapped myself. The throughline: structure in complexity, and numbers that moved.
Feb 2025 — Present
Product Manager — Onboarding, Activation & Growth
ABN AMRO · BUUT
+70%Onboarding conversion- End-to-end onboarding, activation & settings — 150+ screens, regulated parent & child banking.
- Onboarding conversion +70%, support demand −50%.
- Own activation from download to first transaction, plus the experimentation behind it.
- Aligned 20+ stakeholders across Risk, Compliance, Design & Engineering.
2020 — Present · 4.5 yrs
PIProduct & Growth Manager
Pierstein.nl · independent
+541%Visitor → MQL · Share Council- Bedrijfsrooster — workforce SaaS: GTM & growth strategy, site rebuild, time-to-value from hours to instant.
- Share Council — €1.6B+ AUM fintech: visitor → MQL +541%, revenue +75%, sales cycle 172 → 13 days.
- Memberstack (YC '20): visitor → lead +1.2%, lead → customer +23%; 75 customer interviews.
- MadeforCX & other B2B SaaS: HubSpot CRM, positioning & GTM.
ClientsBedrijfsroosterShare CouncilMemberstackMadeforCX2017 — 2023 · 6 yrs
Co-founder — Product, Growth & Marketing
Coworksurf
€4M+Marketplace GMV, bootstrapped- Bootstrapped a two-sided marketplace from €0 to €4M+ GMV.
- Programmatic-SEO engine → 1.25M+ annual impressions.
- Owned email & SMS lifecycle; time-to-value −65%, audience 19k+.
2015 — 2017
WAFounder — Product, Growth & Sales
Wordeys · Acquired
AcquiredOutcome- Bootstrapped a language-learning SaaS to 7,000+ users — built and grown to acquisition.
Where I’ve built from
Built from all over the world
Twelve years of building products on the internet — much of it as a remote founder running Coworksurf — from home bases across four continents.
● Home — Amsterdam, Netherlands
How I work
The audits & research I run
Opinions are cheap; I start from evidence. These are the analyses I reach for to find where a product actually leaks — and what to do about it.
Churn audit
Pull every App Store and Play Store review from the last six months and categorise each one — theme, sentiment, severity — into a detailed spreadsheet, so the real drivers of churn are ranked, not guessed.
Onboarding journey on the wall
Print the entire onboarding flow, screen by screen, and hang it on the wall. The whole team — product, design, risk, compliance — finally sees the real journey in one glance and argues about the same picture.
Per-screen conversion map
Lay real analytics over that printed journey: exact screen-to-screen drop-off, signal by signal, in a single image that shows precisely where and how badly users fall out.
Architecture & checks map
Overlay the architecture behind each screen and the background checks it triggers — KYC, ID&V, deposits — so everyone can see what is actually happening beneath the UI at every step.
Full-funnel audit
Map and instrument the whole funnel from awareness to referral, locate the biggest leaks, and prioritise the fixes by impact rather than by who shouts loudest.
Competitor analysis
Hands-on teardowns of competitor products and flows — onboarding, pricing, positioning, lifecycle — to find the gaps and the moves worth making.
CRM & lifecycle audit
Audit every lifecycle message, trigger and segment: what is calendar-blasted versus behaviour-triggered, where the gaps and over-sends are, and which moments deserve a message they are not getting.
Pricing & packaging audit
Review pricing, packaging and the willingness-to-pay behind them to find where the model quietly leaks revenue or blocks adoption.
User-research synthesis
Run and synthesise customer and partner interviews into structured, decision-ready insight — patterns and priorities, not a deck nobody reads.
Cohort & retention analysis
Read retention curves by cohort and persona to see what actually creates a habit, which features drive it, and what predicts churn before it happens.
Writing
On product, growth, AI & leading the work
How I think about activation, retention and CRM, building a product function from scratch, and using AI to actually ship.
Activation, retention and CRM are one system
Why activation, early retention and CRM belong to one funnel and one owner — not three teams that hand off and leak.
Removing friction across the user journey
Product-led growth as one discipline: value-first onboarding, the commitment curve, and contextual consent — applied stage by stage.
Setting up product from scratch at a neobank
Standing up a product function inside a regulated bank: start where the risk is, make the funnel visible, and build an operating system instead of running on heroics.
Build the clone before you build it
Why every product team should stand up a full AI simulation of a feature first — synthetic users, in-team A/B tests, self-evals — and arrive at the real build already knowing the answers.
Using AI to actually do product
Where AI gives product managers enormous leverage and where it gives none — lessons from building two AI products end-to-end, alone.
Stakeholder management and the limits of the Inspired model
An honest take on Marty Cagan's empowered-product-team model — where it is brilliant, and where stakeholder management becomes the real product work.
Product-led growth from zero to €4M
Growth as a system, not a campaign — from bootstrapping a marketplace to €4M+ GMV and running PLG for fintech and YC companies.
Information Science for the AI Era
A self-study field guide to software architecture, data and AI systems — for a product leader building in technology and banking. Written for a 10-hour flight.
About
Pier Stein
Senior Product & Growth Manager
Product · Growth · Investment Products · AI
Amsterdam, Netherlands
I operate at the intersection of product, growth and design — combining strategy with hands-on building to move fast from first signal to product-market fit. Strong sense of product quality and craft, with real attention to UX and interaction detail.
I bring structure to complex environments, align stakeholders, and build high-performing teams through clear operating systems.
What I do
Tools & tech
HubSpot
Google Analytics
Google AdsFigma
Webflow
Stripe
Supabase
Claude
Next.js
React
GitHub
Jira
Zapier
Mailchimp
Ahrefs