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§06 About ↵ back to home

Twenty years.
One job description:
ship things that work.

Director of Product Management at Deutsche Telekom. 20+ years building digital products used by millions across Europe. Started in tech support, moved through dev, now leads product. Or as I like to call it: making digital transformation sound less like a buzzword.

Started at Hrvatski Telekom in 2006 as the "have you tried turning it off and on again" guy. Moved to web dev, then product. Joined Deutsche Telekom in 2014. Built OneApp (one codebase, 10 EU markets) and OneShop (multi-tenant telco e-commerce, end-to-end). The pattern I keep seeing: digital transformation isn't a project. It's a way of operating, or it isn't anything.

Based in Zagreb. Close enough to the Adriatic to smell it, far enough to skip the tourist jams. Father, husband, and self-appointed BBQ specialist (my family politely disagrees on the rib rankings). The home lab stays on. The electricity bill confirms.

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Operating principles

01
The whole journey matters.
Care more about how the complete experience feels than any single feature. You can nail every detail and still lose the user at checkout.
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02
Platform thinking beats product thinking.
A well-designed product can serve new markets without rebuilding from scratch. Faster time-to-market, less duplication, more impact.
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03
Speak both languages.
Tech support, development, product management. The path taught me to translate between customers, engineers, and executives. Someone has to.
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04
Simple is hard.
Making things simple is harder than making them complex. Any team can add features. It takes discipline to say no.
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05
Data informs, not decides.
Data guides decisions, but it can't predict what doesn't exist yet. For proven paths, measure everything. For new territory, experiment.
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06
Technical empathy compounds.
Technology cycles went from five years to one. Early decisions matter more than ever. The technical details aren't noise to ignore.
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07
Authority beats agility.
Alignment is not consensus. Make the call, document the reasoning, ship, measure, course-correct. Committees don't build products.
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08
Digitalisation is not a rename.
Adding a "digital" prefix to a department does not digitalise it. Rebuild the team, rebuild the tooling, rewire the incentives.
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09
Ship boring things.
The boring thing that ships beats the beautiful thing that doesn't. Velocity is a feature. Consistency is a feature. Being finished is a feature.
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Career

2024 – NOW
2 years
Director, Product Management
Deutsche Telekom
Leading product strategy for app and web products across European markets. Now I lead the people who lead the products. The spreadsheets got bigger. The code got further away.
2018 – 2024
6 years
Product Lead · eCommerce Europe
Deutsche Telekom
Built OneShop, the first multi-tenant e2e telco e-commerce ecosystem. Fully automated sales journeys, 3–5× conversion uplift, multi-basket support, standardized checkout. Acquisition and retention in one platform instead of three.
2014 – 2018
4 years
Senior PM / Owner
Deutsche Telekom
Launched OneApp, a single-codebase self-service app now live across 10 EU markets under brands like Moj Telekom, Mein Magenta, and Telekom. Coordinated business, design, and technical teams who all had different opinions. They still do.
2006 – 2014
8 years
Support → Web Dev → PM
Hrvatski Telekom
Started in tech support (yes, "have you tried turning it off and on again?"). Moved to Web Developer, then Product Manager. Built CMS/CRM platforms, led the MyT portal, launched bonbon's digital channels. Nine years, three careers, one company. Tech support teaches you something product school doesn't: most "feature requests" are workarounds for something else that's broken.