NS Go
From a strong idea to a sharper product
NS Go started with a clear ambition: make mobility simpler for both employees and employers. My role was to help shape that direction, so the product would not only work, but also be ready to scale and be presented in a clear, consistent way.
By the numbers
NS Go entered the Dutch market in 2021 and grew to 100,000+ active users and 70+ business customers.
What was already in place
When I joined, the fundamentals were already there: a clear problem statement, a working MVP and an ambitious mission. Mobility, company policy and regulation were becoming more complex. HR teams were dealing with too much manual work, while employees faced too much administrative friction. NS Go had to take that burden away.
The challenge was not a lack of potential. The challenge was that the story was not yet consistent, the product direction was not made explicit and many decisions were still being made reactively.
A product shaped by requests
The issue was not the product itself. It was how the product was evolving. Sales often set the direction, features emerged from individual client requests and there was no sharp end state to work toward.
That made it harder to explain what NS Go really was, harder to prioritize and harder to scale without adding complexity. There was momentum, but not yet a clear course.
From sales-led to product-led
The core of my work sat exactly there. Not in building something entirely new, but in developing a product vision and making the destination explicit. We moved from a collection of features to a coherent product system.
We defined a clear product vision, translated that vision into principles and used those principles to guide decisions. The most important shift was simple: we stopped building whatever was asked for and started building what made sense within the whole.
A vision that forces choices
We reduced the product to one central idea and a set of firm principles:
Invisible where it should be, visible where it matters.
Policy as leverage.
Integration that works for you.
Targeted interaction where it counts.
These principles made consistent choices possible across teams. Not just about what we would do, but especially about what we would not do.
Making the story make sense
A good product without a clear story is hard to sell. A large part of my role was to sharpen the NS Go narrative, help sales tell it consistently and create internal clarity around what NS Go actually was.
The positioning shifted from a generic “MaaS travel portal” to a platform that brings mobility, policy and payroll together. That distinction mattered, because it gave customers and internal teams a clearer mental model of the product.
From vision to execution
Vision without execution is useless. We set up ways of working that made the strategy real: tighter collaboration between product, design and engineering, a roadmap driven by product strategy and a stronger connection between business, technology and customer needs.
One of the most important effects was that engineering could make better decisions independently, because the direction had become clear.
Impact
The impact was not in one single feature. It was in the product as a whole becoming more coherent and more scalable.
The product story became clearer for customers. Teams were better aligned. Product development became more consistent. Ad-hoc decision-making decreased. The result was a product that became more predictable, and therefore easier to scale.
Cases
Always open to share ideas or talk product.