Independent product-management consultancy
Ontamo helps technology scale-ups and enterprises create empowered product teams with a deeper understanding of their customers, clearer priorities and the autonomy to build products people love.
Based in Antwerp · Working with teams across Belgium and Europe
When Ontamo can help
Product organisations often become less effective as the company grows. More ideas, stakeholders and dependencies can lead to unclear priorities, backlog-driven work and teams that execute without fully understanding the customer problem. Ontamo helps organisations address the underlying product-management challenges rather than adding another layer of process.
The founder holds much of the product vision and customer knowledge, but can no longer remain involved in every product decision. Ontamo helps transfer that knowledge into a clear product direction, stronger team ownership and a sustainable way of working.
Teams are working hard, but priorities are largely driven by stakeholder pressure, sales requests or the loudest voice in the room. Ontamo helps connect customer needs, company goals and product opportunities to a deliberate roadmap.
Product roles are focused on writing tickets and coordinating delivery, while discovery, customer understanding and strategic decisions remain elsewhere. Ontamo helps teams move toward broader, outcome-driven product management.
The company is adding teams, products or markets, but roles, responsibilities and decision-making have not evolved with it. Ontamo helps define a product model that creates alignment without removing team autonomy.
Product management, reconsidered
Traditional Product Owner models often place one person between the business and the delivery team, translating requests into tickets. Ontamo takes a broader view. A strong product manager should help the entire team understand its customers, create the conditions for cross-functional collaboration and provide enough focus for the most valuable opportunities to be addressed first.
Help the whole product team develop a shared and continuously improving understanding of customers, their context and the problems worth solving.
Give designers, engineers and product professionals the context and autonomy to define solutions together rather than simply executing predefined instructions.
Connect product work to customer and business outcomes so the team can make deliberate trade-offs and prioritise the opportunities that matter most.
Services
Every engagement is shaped around the organisation's situation. Ontamo can help establish a product approach, strengthen an existing team or temporarily take ownership of product leadership and execution.
Ontamo helps define and implement a practical product methodology that connects customer discovery, strategic priorities and delivery. The objective is not to copy a standard framework. It is to create a shared way of working that supports the company's goals, structure and stage of growth.
Typical areas of work
Outcome
A product approach that helps teams make clearer decisions, communicate priorities and adapt as the organisation grows.
Ontamo helps organisations define product roles, build the right capabilities and coach product professionals to operate with greater autonomy and customer focus. This can support a newly forming product function or an established team that wants to mature its practices.
Typical areas of work
Outcome
A stronger product team that understands what is expected, has the skills to make decisions and does not rely on constant direction from senior leadership.
Ontamo can step into an interim product-management or product-leadership role during a transition, period of growth or temporary capability gap. The engagement combines strategic direction with practical ownership of product work.
Typical areas of work
Outcome
Continued product momentum, clearer priorities and a stronger foundation for the permanent team or product leader who follows.
Ways of working together
A focused engagement around a particular product challenge, decision or operating-model question.
A structured assignment that produces a defined organisational or product outcome.
Embedded product leadership for a defined period.
How I work
Talk to customers, team members and stakeholders. Review the product, roadmap, organisation and existing way of working. The purpose is to understand the real problem rather than respond only to the visible symptoms.
Create a shared view of the customer needs, company objectives, constraints and decisions that matter. Make trade-offs explicit and clarify what success should look like.
Translate the direction into a practical product methodology, roadmap, team model, coaching plan or set of product decisions. Build the solution together with the people who will use it.
Help the team apply the new approach in real work. The aim is to create lasting capability rather than a report that is forgotten after the engagement.
The objective is not to introduce more process. It is to help teams understand customers, make better decisions and take greater ownership of the outcome.
Selected experience
Ontamo has experience with B2B software, platforms, IoT, operational technology and regulated environments. The following case studies are anonymised.
Maritime technology, IoT and operational systems
Challenge. A growing technology company needed a stronger connection between business strategy, regulatory requirements, customer needs and a broad suite of hardware and software products.
Result. Greater clarity across the product portfolio and stronger alignment between leadership, product development, operations and external stakeholders.
Contribution
Product strategy and portfolio structure · Customer and stakeholder discovery · Roadmap development · Product-team practices · Operational tooling…
B2B software and technical platforms
Challenge. An organisation needed to evolve a fragmented set of customer integrations into a more reusable, maintainable and scalable platform approach.
Result. A clearer product and platform direction, supported by practical principles and a phased migration programme.
Contribution
Current-state assessment · Product and platform principles · Stakeholder workshops · Requirements definition · Modularisation strategy…
Product teams and professional services
Challenge. Teams were experimenting with AI tools but lacked a structured way to identify valuable use cases and integrate them into their daily work.
Result. A shift from isolated experimentation toward practical and repeatable workflows connected to real business needs.
Contribution
Workflow mapping · AI opportunity identification · Hands-on workshops · Context and prompt design · Reusable routines and skills…
Why Ontamo
Clients work directly with Pieter rather than handing the assignment to a junior delivery team after the initial sales conversation.
Ontamo can help define the direction and remain involved while it is applied to actual products, teams and decisions.
Recommendations are based on the organisation's needs rather than a preferred framework, software platform or implementation partner.
A successful engagement should reduce dependency on external support by giving the internal team greater capability, clarity and confidence.
About Ontamo
Ontamo is the independent product-management consultancy of Pieter Helsen, based in Antwerp.
I work with founders, leadership teams and product professionals who need greater clarity, stronger product practices or experienced support during a period of growth or change.
My work often begins where company strategy, customer needs and day-to-day product decisions have become disconnected. I help teams understand the real problems, define where to focus and build a way of working that gives people greater ownership of the solution.
Depending on the engagement, that can mean setting up a product methodology, interviewing customers, restructuring a roadmap, coaching product professionals or temporarily stepping into a product-leadership role.
I am particularly comfortable in technically complex B2B environments where software, hardware, operations, regulation or multiple stakeholder groups come together.
The goal is not to make the organisation dependent on a consultant. It is to leave behind a stronger product team that can continue making good decisions independently.
Expertise
The name Ontamo comes from the Quenya word for a mason or sculptor.
Like a sculptor working with stone, I help organisations shape the structure, skills and focus their product teams need to create products customers love.
The best product organisations are not copied from a standard framework. They are shaped around the people, customers, ambitions and constraints of the company.
Contact
Tell me where your product organisation is today, what is changing and where you feel the greatest friction. We can start with an informal conversation to understand the challenge and determine whether Ontamo is the right fit.
Direct
hello@ontamo.beBased in Antwerp. Working with teams across Belgium and Europe.
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