Waldo Vanderhaeghen
I'm Waldo Vanderhaeghen, a product manager in Berlin. As Senior PM at Kleinanzeigen, Germany's largest classifieds marketplace, I took the Retail Media product from inception to launch.
The part of product work I keep coming back to is coordination. You have smart people with different context about what's real and what matters: engineers, analysts, designers, stakeholders. Getting them to move together on something that ships takes more deliberate effort than any roadmap document captures. I've spent a lot of my career on that part. It's the most interesting problem in the work, and the one I enjoy most.
Outside Kleinanzeigen, I build things. I build for friends and for businesses I'm involved in. These things start because I get curious about whether they're possible. Most of them are still quietly running somewhere.
I'm also interested in where AI tooling works versus where it only looks like it works. Finding the right place for a model, the right place for a hard rule, the right way to know which is which: that's most of what I think about when building. A lot of what's on this site is trying to figure that out in practice.
I write here because it forces me to understand what I did. Explaining something properly is how I know whether I understood it. And occasionally it saves someone else a few hours, which feels worth the time too.
I also work with a small number of clients on product strategy and AI implementation, currently Glastrix. And I'm open to senior product roles: let’s talk.
Where I come from
Ten years across marketplaces, B2B SaaS platforms and AI systems: search and ranking, ad tech, agentic AI, product leadership and building from zero to one. Hover any node to explore.
What ties it together: step back, find the actual problem, build a system open to learning, measure and iterate.
What I’m interested in right now
Current focuses: AI as an operating system for work, signals-to-workflows automation, flow building, collaborative learning, creative data visualization and systems thinking.
Common questions
- What do you do at Kleinanzeigen?
- Senior PM for the Retail Media product. Took from inception to launch: a two-sided advertising marketplace where businesses configure their campaigns, and we optimize which ads to surface to Kleinanzeigen users through search and relevancy signals.
- How do you use AI in your work?
- Claude Code is my main tool — I use it for everything from building full applications to automating reporting pipelines. My approach is spec-driven: every task gets a ticket with acceptance criteria before the model touches any code. It prevents drift and keeps outputs auditable. I've written about how I run my agent team and spec-driven development if you want the detail.
- Are you available for consulting?
- Yes. I work with small teams on product strategy, AI tooling architecture and production-grade automation, a few engagements at a time. Book a 45-minute call and tell me what you're working on.
- Are you open to a full-time role?
- Yes, for senior product roles. My background is on this page; let’s talk.
- What's the difference between AI that works and AI that just looks like it works?
- Mostly: is the output auditable? Can a human check it? Demo AI produces plausible output in a frictionless flow. Production AI produces output that can be verified, overridden, and traced back to a decision. The hard part is building the harness, not prompting the model. I wrote about why the model doesn't decide.
- What have you built outside of work?
- The main ones: NfcPress — a white-label NFC business card platform for a Berlin print shop, running in production since 2026. A Smoobu-to-Sheets sync for managing short-term rental bookings. An AI invoice pipeline for processing German tax documents from Google Drive. Most are still running.
Current tool stack
Claude CodeMCP serversGoogle Gemini GemsLangChain / RAGDatabricksQuickSightPostHogJiraNotionObsidiann8nMiroSlackGitHubVercelSupabaseStripeCloudflareVS Code
The Claude Code skills I work with are free to copy on the skills page.
Get in touch
Book a call, write an email or send a message: it’s all on the contact page.