Since 2016 I have been working at Gomibo, where my work centers around Gomibo Platforms, the telecom commerce SaaS that enables telecom providers in Europe to run their digital journeys. As Growth Manager at Gomibo Platforms I help telcos use our software so customers can search, compare and buy mobile products and services more easily. Every day millions of people move through journeys that run on our platform, often without noticing anything special, and that is exactly the point.
On some of our pages customers can compare tens of millions of combinations of devices, plans and add-ons in real time. Pages still have to load quickly, prices must always be correct and the journey needs to guide each visitor to a choice that fits their usage. What looks like a simple comparison tool on the surface is in reality a very advanced commerce engine that has to get a lot of things right at once.
Our software has to work for consumers, for callcenter agents and store employees and for the marketing and IT teams of our partners. Bringing that together in one configurable stack that can run in different countries, brands and channels is challenging, but it is also what makes the work so interesting.
Gomibo is a tech company built by telco commerce experts and headquartered in the Netherlands. We focus exclusively on the telecom industry. Over 20 years ago, we started building our own commerce platform from scratch, because we saw that telco-specific solutions simply did not exist. Throughout the years we have experienced all the complexities of offering telecom products and customer journeys, and have optimised these along the way.
From the very beginning the platform has powered our landmark customer, part of the Gomibo Group. Every change and optimisation we make is used there in real journeys, selling more than 1 million telecom products per year in over 30 countries and 13 native languages, with end customers rating the experience 9.4 out of 10 based on tens of thousands of reviews.
Today that work has evolved into the telco-specific commerce SaaS behind Gomibo Platforms. It is a SaaS layer that sits at the edge of a telco IT stack and supports the commercial journey across web, app, stores and customer care. Instead of replacing existing systems we connect through standard APIs and focus on one commerce back end that serves every channel. We build on four pillars that run through our organisation: focus on technology, customer centricity, hyper efficiency and a digital first approach. The experience we gained inside Gomibo Group now flows directly into the software we proudly offer to telcos around the world.
What makes the work here unique is that everything you build has direct impact. Our own teams use the same tools every day, and so do the employees and customers of telecom companies that run on our platform. When we adjust how we show offers, change the checkout or improve internal tooling we quickly see in the data what this does to conversion, customer satisfaction and workload.
Think of the tool a marketer uses to put a banner live on the homepage within minutes instead of days, or the scanning interface that tells a warehouse colleague which device to pack next. Even a small improvement in front end performance can make pages noticeably faster and increase the number of customers who complete their order on a mobile connection. All of that is built on the same commerce core that we provide as a service to telcos.
Because we depend on this software ourselves we notice problems very quickly. We often try improvements first in our own environment, learn what works and then roll them out more broadly to software clients. Where many software companies release a few times per year, we ship changes many times per week. That pace forces us to think in small steps and to focus on the most important part of a solution first, while keeping room for improvement along the way.
Product development around a platform like this is never a solo job. You work with many different links in the chain. Engineers ensure the platform remains stable and scalable. Designers make journeys intuitive. Internal users across the organisation have to be able to work with new tools. Commercial and IT teams at our partners need to understand how they can use new capabilities in their own processes. A decision about something that looks small on a screen almost always affects several groups at once.
You do not just look at what is technically possible. You also think about processes, about the practical consequences for users and about what this means for our partners. Choices we make influence colleagues in logistics, marketing and customer service, and consumers who simply want to arrange a good mobile deal quickly. If you do something right you see it back in practice very fast. If something does not work, you hear about it just as quickly, which keeps you sharp.
I regularly speak with telecom companies from other countries that want to improve their digital sales and service journeys. The underlying challenges often turn out to be very similar: they struggle to get their device journeys right, with fragmented stacks, channels that behave differently and complex product portfolios that customers do not understand. Being able to show concrete examples of how we tackled those issues in live partner projects makes those conversations not only fun, but also very substantive.
One project I look back on with particular pride is the launch of our first external software client in Germany. This was a telecom provider that wanted to modernise its online shop and sell more devices + subscriptions. Technically the implementation went very fast. Our engineers had the platform connected and ready for live traffic within about two months. Because the integration relied on existing APIs we could keep the rest of their landscape largely intact.
Precisely because the technical part was ready so quickly, we saw clearly where the real challenges lay. They were not in the code. They were in communication, scoping and aligning expectations between all the parties involved. In that first project we ran into requirements that were not sharp enough at the start, assumptions about responsibilities that later turned out to be different and a way of working that did not always give everyone the same view of progress. That is simply what happens when many teams work together on something new.
The positive side is that we learned a lot from this project. Together with the client we sharpened how we structure discovery and scoping, how we document responsibilities, how we organise decision making and how we communicate along the way. We also improved parts of the platform itself to make future implementations even smoother. Every telco we now work with benefits from those lessons because they are built into our standard playbook and into the product.
What keeps me here is the mix of intellectual challenge, freedom and visible impact. I have room to come up with ideas and explore new opportunities with telecom providers, but also the responsibility to base those ideas on data and on a clear story. You are not just closing tickets; you constantly contribute to decisions and improvements.
The best moments are when you see that something really works. For example when a new level of automation saves teams hours of manual work, when a complex device launch in several countries runs smoothly or when a telecom client tells us that our platform simply converts better than what they used before.
Over the years I have also become more critical about the why behind ideas. Why do we want this change, what exact problem does it solve, can we achieve the same result in a simpler or more scalable way. Working through those questions with colleagues and partners keeps the work intellectually strong and I still get a lot of enjoyment out of it.
I am really looking forward to providing our next software clients with a great platform and helping more telcos modernise their digital journeys with our commerce SaaS.