Germán Hüttemann

Tech and Product Strategy

More than 20 years turning capabilities into services, and services into products people keep choosing.

Twenty years, eight platforms, four industries. Government, Digital Banking, eCommerce, and Energy. A decade of it owning platforms, APIs, and data products.

Lead Product Manager, IoT Data Platform at Schneider Electric · Barcelona

I started as a software engineer writing C, and I have spent the rest of my career on the other side of the interface: deciding what a platform exposes, to whom, and on what terms. Opening it is the easy half. The lasting work comes after: keeping the service reliable, evolving it without breaking what already depends on it, and making it the obvious choice rather than the imposed one.

I design for both audiences at once: the people using applications, and the developer ecosystem building on the API underneath them. This is what I have turned into services.

Whole businesses
  • Information search and access
  • Digital banking
  • eCommerce
  • Energy & Industrial IoT
Platform capabilities
  • API management
  • Identity & authentication
  • Accounts & transactions
  • Payments & checkout
  • Catalog & search
  • Ratings & reviews
  • Notifications
  • IoT alarms & events
  • Data storage & access
  • Subscriptions & entitlements
What keeps them alive
  • Product strategy & roadmap
  • Governance & design standards
  • Developer experience
  • Documentation & onboarding
  • Versioning & deprecation
  • Service levels & support
  • Pricing & packaging
  • Adoption & usage metering
  • Community & advocacy

What I do

Find the product inside the capability

Most of what a company sells as a service was first something it built for itself. I am good at spotting which internal capability has a market, who would pay for it, and what has to be true before it does.

Build for both sides of the interface

Consumer experience and developer experience are the same discipline applied to different users. I have owned banking and commerce journeys used by millions, and the APIs that other teams and partners build on.

Run it like a product, not a project

Projects end. Platforms have to keep earning the teams that depend on them, which means versioning, deprecation, service levels and a roadmap negotiated rather than announced.

Build the business case, not just the product

A good product with no business case is an expensive hobby. Someone has to ask who pays for this, what for, and why now before anything is built, so the platform can always say what it is worth and to whom.

Work

Four domains, eight platforms, one repeated move: take a capability locked inside a company, turn it into a service others can build on, and run it as a product: priced, supported and evolved.

4+ years2022–present

Data as a Service

Schneider Electric · Global

Energy data monetized as products that customers, partners and internal teams subscribe to. Federated by design: every business unit keeps its own data model, and semantics and ontologies carry the interoperability between them, opening the way to agentic access.

Projects
  • Federated API management
  • Platform developer portal
  • Third-party cloud data ingestion
  • Data products, streams & data APIs
  • Subscriptions & entitlements
  • Platform notifications
  • IoT alarm management
4 years2018–2022

Commerce as a Service

Nespresso · 35+ markets

A monolithic ecommerce platform transformed into a headless, API-based one, with the governance, developer portal and ownership model that let separate teams ship against it. The closest thing to an internal developer platform in my record.

Projects
  • eCommerce as a Service
  • API openness & ownership program
  • Next Generation eCommerce
  • Developer portal & API governance
  • Identity, cart, checkout & catalogue APIs
  • Ratings & reviews
8 years2010–2018

Banking as a Service

Paraguay · Saudi Arabia · Mexico · UK

Eight years opening bank cores to the digital world. From the first banking APIs and mobile apps in Paraguay to an entire digital bank defined from scratch for top-tier banks across three continents.

Projects
  • White-label banking API
  • Itaú banking API
  • Mobile banking: iOS, Android, BlackBerry
  • Corporate mobile banking
  • USSD banking & remote account opening
  • Digital banking for Saudi banks
  • New digital bank in Mexico
  • New mobile banking in the UK
4 years2006–2010

Library as a Service

Paraguay

Search and cataloguing built once and delivered as a product to libraries nationwide. Where it started, and the same problem in its smallest form: one system, many institutions, none of them able to run it alone.

Projects
  • Library catalogue system
  • Information search portals
All career details on LinkedIn

Blog

How platforms are actually run: intake, ownership, governance, and the parts of product management that only show up at scale.

Platform strategy

Why platform initiatives fail to deliver impact

The recurring anti-patterns: building the portal before the API layer, treating the platform as a set of services instead of a product, and measuring adoption instead of outcomes.

All posts on Substack