Your roadmap
is fiction
( and everybody knows it)
You built a good team. You have paying clients. You're spread thinner than Nutella.
Everything needs your attention. I can fix that. That's my job.
Is this you?
You have a product. You have engineers. And somehow you're still the bottleneck for every decision that matters.
You tried to fix it. You reorganised the backlog. You bought a tool. You hired someone promising. Three months later you're back in the same standup, wondering why nothing feels different.
"200 items in the backlog. I couldn't tell you which 5 matter."
"Half my week is checking whether the right things are moving. They're not."
"I promised a client March. It's May. Nobody told me it slipped."
The worst part isn't the chaos. It's the suspicion that you caused it.
You didn't. And neither did your team. The people are not the problem. The system is. You just don't have someone whose only job is making sure the right things get built, in the right order, without it all depending on one person.
How this actually works
I do not send you a roadmap. I join the team, three days a week, for three to six months.
I build the habits and structures that make good product decisions possible. By the end, someone on your team is running the planning sessions. They have the backing to push back on the wrong work. Users are part of the conversation, not an afterthought. Product decisions happen without you in the room.
That is when I leave. Some engagements end with someone on your team stepping into the role. Some end with you knowing exactly who to hire next. Either way, I am not a permanent cost.
How it starts: 30 minutes. You tell me where it hurts, I tell you if I can help. No pitch, no deck.
Not the decision maker? Share this with someone who is.
What the work actually looks like
I talk to your customers
Before we build, during, and after. I find out what your users actually need, test ideas early, and validate that what shipped actually solved the problem.
I get your team shipping
Clear priorities, the right team structure, short rituals. Your people know what to build, how to build it, and who is responsible for what. No more waiting for you to decide.
I prove it works
Building the right thing means nothing if nobody sees it. SEO, analytics, conversion tracking. Whatever it takes to close the loop between what you ship and what your customers experience.
I've done this across SaaS products, marketplaces, and industrial software.
Companies I’ve worked with along the way
What actually happened
Factry
Factory operating system for industrial clients. ~12 people, bootstrapped, Ghent.
Their previous client implementation took 18 months and nearly broke the team. A new client was coming.
Here's what I didn't do: rewrite the product strategy. Redesign the architecture. Run a two-day offsite with sticky notes.
Here's what I did: I went to the factory floor. I sat with the machine operators who would actually use the system. I built rough prototypes, walked them back through those same operators, and refined the designs before a single line of production code was written.
On the team side, I turned a one-hour daily standup into 15 minutes. Made sure critical knowledge was not locked in one person's head. Got developers answers to blocking questions in hours instead of days.
The next comparable implementation took 6 months. Three times faster. Not because of a new framework or a better tool.
Spotto
Belgian real estate marketplace for CIB, the federation of real estate agents. First product hire.
CIB had tried to build this platform before. It hadn't worked. The team was shipping, but there was no structured way to check whether any of it matched what users actually needed.
I added one thing that was missing: regular contact with the people actually using the product. Conversations, surveys, data. Whatever it took to replace opinions with evidence.
Decisions stopped being about who had the strongest opinion and started being about what users actually needed. Everything followed from there. The team built the right things. People could find them. The platform grew from 10,000 to over 100,000 monthly visitors.
Two years later, Spotto was a recognised name in Belgian real estate. Not because we moved faster. Because we stopped building the wrong things.
They said it better
“I can't write a single line of code and I don't understand a word the development team says. But thanks to Bart, everyone knows what's being built, why, and when it's ready.”
— Jantien Vanderbeke, Marketing lead, Spotto“"He took the time to understand our complex environment and our constraints to propose the best solution for us.”
— Jennifer Imbert Podgorski, Industrial Operations Manager, Lesaffre“He sees the unique strengths of his colleagues, helps them grow, and brings them together around shared goals in a way that feels natural. Not just a strong professional, but a genuinely great colleague to work with.”
— Els Cornelis, Customer success lead, SpottoPricing
I work in two ways.
Sparring - € 150 per session
For people making product decisions alone.
You're choosing what to build, what to cut, and what to tell the client, and you're doing it with no one to push back on your thinking. You don't need someone embedded. You need one hour with someone who's been in the seat and will tell you what they actually think.
60 minutes. Video or in person. Follow-up notes with anything we discussed.
Book when you need one. Cancel when you don't.
Most founders start here. Some realise after a session or two that they need someone in the room, not just on a call. That's what the embedded option is for, and we always start with a short test run.
You're already spending more than €150 in lost time every week your team builds the wrong thing. This is the cost of one bad lunch meeting, except this one actually changes something.
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Embedded - € 9,000 per month
For teams that need someone in the room doing the work, not just advising on it.
There's no product function, or the one you have isn't working yet. You need someone alongside the team, in the standups, in the client calls, in the planning sessions. Someone building the habits that make your team run without them.
This is what I did at Factry and Spotto.
3 days per week, in your standups, your rituals, your rhythm. The work itself: user research, prototyping, backlog restructuring, team coaching. A defined transition when the team is ready.
Start with a 3-day test run for €2,500 to see if it's the right fit. Most engagements run 3 to 6 months.
For context: Five engineers without clear direction for six months costs you €300,000.. My job is to make sure that doesn't happen. Three months with me costs less than one bad quarter of building blind.
When to look elsewhere
I’m not the right fit for everyone. And that’s fine.
I don't have an MBA framework. I don't have a proprietary method with a trademarked name. If that's what you're looking for, there are plenty of people who will sell you one.
What I have is something closer to what your grandmother would call boerenverstand — common sense, but the stubborn kind. Talk to the people doing the work. Find out what's actually going wrong. Fix it. Don't make it more complicated than it is.
If you need someone to attend steering committees and write reports nobody reads, I'm not your person. I'd rather spend that hour talking to your customers.
If you need extra hands to build something that's already validated and prioritised, you need a developer, not me.
Who I am
I started as a developer. I know what it feels like to sit in a standup with no clarity on why you're building what you're building. I know what it feels like when the priorities change every week and nobody explains why.
That frustration pushed me into product work. Not to manage people, but to build the kind of environment where a team can actually focus. I did this for almost 10 years in companies like Factry and Spotto, on the boundary between product and delivery where most things fall apart.
At some point I realised I didn't want to do this in one company anymore. I wanted to help more teams fix what's broken. Not by telling them what to do, but by building the environment where they can figure it out themselves.
I'm based in Ghent. When I'm not doing this, I'm probably outside walking my Weimaraner, da Vinci. Want to join? Hit me up on LinkedIn.
Let’s talk
You've scrolled past Nutella, two case studies, and a pricing section. If you're still here, it's not because you're bored.
30 minutes. No pitch. Just the honest version of what's going on and whether I can help.
I work with a small number of clients at a time, so availability changes. If nothing fits your schedule, drop me a mail at bart.pinnock@nimflex.be and we'll figure it out.
Know someone who needs this? Send them this page.
Questions I hear in every first conversation
How do I know if this is the kind of problem you solve?
If your team is building but you can't explain what actually moved forward this quarter, you're probably in the right place. The pattern I see most: capable engineers, real revenue, and a founder who's still the bottleneck for every product decision. I work on the boundary between product and delivery — the place where most things fall apart.
What happens to my existing team?
They get better. I don't replace anyone. I build the structure that makes your people more effective. Someone on the team usually grows into a product role by the time I leave. Most people I work with tell me they finally understand why they're building what they're building.
Will this disrupt the team?
Usually the opposite. I don't introduce new frameworks or add process for the sake of it. Most changes happen inside the team's existing rhythm. Within a few weeks, meetings get shorter, decisions start sticking, and you stop getting pulled into conversations that shouldn't need you. The goal is a team that runs better, not one that depends on me.
Why not just hire someone full-time?
You might. And I'll help you do that when the time is right. But hiring into a chaotic product setup is how you burn €30,000 on a recruiter, onboard someone for three months, and watch them leave because the role was unworkable. My job is to make the system stable enough that the next hire actually succeeds.
What if it's not the right fit?
We start with a 3-day test run for €2,500. Enough to understand the situation and see whether the work is useful. If it's not helping, we stop. No long commitments, no complicated contracts.