About

Martin Labuschin is a Product Manager based in Cologne with 19+ years in SaaS. He built his career in e-commerce and digital trust at Trusted Shops, and now works in the digital trust and identity space at G+D Netcetera. Working across both engineering and product gave him a close view of how organizations actually function — and how often they get in their own way.

Martin has been in SaaS since 2006, when he helped build Germany’s second-largest social bookmarking platform, with one million monthly visitors. Back then, he cared about building products for everyone and advocated for web accessibility before it was anything close to mainstream — today it’s EU law.

Afterwards, Martin spent 15 years at Trusted Shops SE in Cologne, progressing from Product Developer and UX Designer to Enterprise Software Engineer, IT Project Manager, and ultimately Product Manager. In that role, he owned the company’s core review collection product — a platform processing over 1.5 million reviews per month for 30,000+ clients across Europe and Asia, serving enterprise accounts such as Volkswagen.

With 12 years in software engineering before moving into product, he doesn’t rely on dashboards alone — he digs into databases, reads code, and understands what’s actually feasible. That changes how he makes decisions and what he writes about.

Martin now works at G+D Netcetera, a digital security company. Among other things, G+D Netcetera operates as a Qualified Trust Service Provider (QTSP) under eIDAS — the European Union’s legal framework for digital signatures and online identity. His work covers products in digital identity, qualified electronic signatures (QES), and PKI infrastructure across regulated European markets.

This journal is for mid-to-senior PMs who work inside real organizations with structural challenges. No methodology basics, no career advice — every article assumes you already operate in a product org and recognize problematic patterns.

The writing is direct and opinionated, grounded in first-person experience rather than frameworks. You are in the right place if you have enough seniority to diagnose what is broken but not enough authority to fix it top-down — and you are looking for concrete ways to navigate that gap.

This website is independent — built with Ruby on Rails and SQLite, self-hosted on a Hetzner server. The public site loads zero JavaScript. No web fonts, no external requests. There are no analytics, no cookies, no tracking scripts. This journal is about expression, not validation.

Get in touch

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: Martin Labuschin