Europe lags North America and Asia in launching and scaling platform businesses. But this does not mean that Europe lacks interesting platform career opportunities. Platform professionals are in demand across Europe for roles in platform startups, foreign platform companies operating in Europe as well as incumbent European companies that are increasingly setting their sights on platform strategies.
In this article, I review 10 platform positions with active searches currently underway in Europe. It is not a comprehensive list. There are many more platform professional roles currently open. However, the sample illustrates the diversity of positions that are available.
Platform professional defined
Before turning to the open positions, let’s define what we mean by platform professional. A platform professional is a person who has achieved specialized education, training, or on-the-job experience to serve a variety of roles required to develop and successfully run a platform business. This may be a stand-alone platform or one or more platforms that are part of a larger enterprise.
Platform professionals make up the managers that set strategy and manage the day-to-day platform operations. As a result, they play a very different role than operate to freelancers or gig workers, which have received most of the attention associated with the rise of the platform economy.
In his classic work on management, Henry Mintzberg created a framework that identifies the key function that managers play. He defined these roles as figurehead, leader, liaison, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson, entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator. He further argued that these roles could be further divided into three operational activities: interpersonal, informational, and decisional.1
To date, there has been relatively little research on the role of platform leadership and management.2 Still, there is every reason to believe that Mintzberg’s categories apply to platform professionals, at least in general terms.
Open Platform Positions in Europe
A sample of ten open positions in Europe illustrates the diversity of professional platform roles that are available. One characteristic that becomes quickly apparent is geographic diversity. These open positions are not only concentrated in London, Paris and Berlin, which have become important hubs for platform professionals. These positions are also located in Dublin, Helsinki, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Braunschweig, Milan and Barcelona. They also cut across many sectors including retail, automotive, travel, consulting, coaching, gaming, fashion, music, and gig work. The levels of the positions also vary significantly. Some are Associate and Mid-Senior Level roles. Others are seeking director-level and executive roles.
Let’s now look at each role and highlight the key requirements that the companies in this group are looking for.
Company: LVMH
Position: Innovation manager, Web3 & Metaverse
Level: Associate
City: Paris
A growing number of companies are positioning for web3. LVMH is no exception. The 340 billion EUR luxury goods conglomerate has an open position for Innovation manager, Web3 & Metaverse. The goal of this position is to grow LVMH’s network of Web3 and metaverse partners. It is also to identify and vet start-ups and platforms for potential projects.
LVMH’s management team wants to establish a portfolio of short-term projects and long-term transformation initiatives across its brands. To do this, the winning candidate is expected to work collaboratively with other team members, especially within omnichannel, digital transformation and IT. In addition to project management, he or she will be expected to develop strategic insights developed through quantitative and qualitative research and analysis of the Web3, and metaverse considering opportunities and risks. He or she will be expected to draw on these insights to shape strategic priorities into actionable recommendations, setting KPIs and success metrics. Since a successful Web3 project will center on building or engaging with platforms—Metaverse worlds, crypto exchanges and NFT marketplaces—a strong grounding in the economics and management of platforms will be advantageous for this role.
Company: Accenture
Position: Software & Platforms Industry Consultant
Level: Mid-Senior Level
City: Amsterdam
Accenture is a global professional services consultancy, with 710,000 people delivering soliutions to clients in over 120 countries. The company has a role open in its Amsterdam office for a Software & Platforms Industry Consultant. This role is responsible for driving profitable growth in Accenture’s Strategy & Consulting practice. This practice helps platform clients plan for growth by delivering comprehensive and innovative solutions.
For this role, Accenture is seeking a person with a Master’s degree in technology and business, plus 5 or more years of experience working in the software and platforms industry. Due to their strong growth potential for consulting, industry experience in the following growth areas is particularly relevant: B2B software as service, B2B sales and customer service, marketplace, food delivery, and ride-sharing platforms. Accenture is investing in virtual reality, augmented reality, and the Metaverse so experience and skills in this area will be an advantage.
Company: Luxoft Automotive
Position: Head of In-vehicle Platforms
Level: Mid-Senior Level
City: Braunschweig
Luxoft Automotive is a subsidiary of US-based DXC Technology an American multinational information technology 130,000 employees. Luxoft Automotive provides software engineering and consulting to automobile manufacturers focused on the large-scale shift to more personalized, interactive digital vehicles and telematics. The global automotive software market is expected to grow from USD 24.61 billion in 2021 to USD 105.13 billion by 2030.
Luxoft is currently seeing a "Head of In-Vehicle Platforms". This role, part of the company’s Solutions Organization, will have responsibility for global growth, driving technical advancement, identifying reusable assets and IP, and building partnerships related to the company’s in-vehicle platform offering. Strong track record of leadership in Embedded Software Development. Strong hands-on work experience in Automotive Domain ECU SW Development, safety critical like ADAS/AD, Vehicle Control, IVI, Telematics, etc. This role requires deep expertise in practical knowledge on “Automotive Platform SW, Classic & Adaptive AUTOSAR, SW Architecture, SW Development Methods, Tools & Processes, Automotive graded OS.” It also requires a strong knowledge of automotive standards like ISO26262, ASPICE, CyberSecurity(ISO/SAE 21434) and various automotive SoC hardware platforms.
The Luxoft Head of In-vehicle Platforms role reflects the transformation of the auto industry. Hardware-defined cars are rapidly giving way to software-defined digitally connect transportation platforms.3 As a result, leaders that combine technical industry expertise with an appreciation of the platform business models are increasingly favored.
Company: Expedia Group
Position: Principal Program Manager, Platform
Level: Mid-Senior level
City: London
Expedia Group is a $16 billion American online travel platform. The company’s assets include many travel-related aggregation and matching platforms, such as Hotels.com, Vrbo, trivago, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Wotif, ebookers, CheapTickets, Expedia Group, Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert, CarRentals.com, and Expedia Cruises.
Expedia Services is an internal function that provides technical strategy and underlying platform, leading data, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, payments, partner experience, developer experience, as well as the company’s conversational and messaging platforms. This internally facing group is looking for a Senior Program Manager to support the group’s core functions. This includes conceptualizing, designing, and building foundational technical capabilities for Expedia’s platform assets. It also includes establishing the standards and processes for the company’s overall next-generation API, SDK, developer hub, and tools.
The role expects 10 or more years of professional experience and strong program management capabilities. The successful candidate will be required to lead coordination across multiple platform assets, technical and product functions, and teams. He or she will need to be an evangelist and own communications regarding technical delivery, vision, strategy, and roadmaps. As a leading global platform company in the travel industry, this role requires a sophisticated understanding of platform strategy and operations. As the job post states, “Our global impact ensures that every interaction creates network effects making the experience more valuable for the next traveler, partner, and developer.”
Company: GetYourGuide
Position: Global Head of Localization
Level: Mid-Senior level
City: Berlin
In addition to orchestrating the exchange of goods and services, platforms can also match the supply and demand of experiences. The Berlin-based, GetYourGuide is a good example of an experience platform. The company does not provide its own experiences but rather matches buyers with experience providers. Since it was founded in 2008, it has grown to offer over 60,000 experiences in 150 countries, 22 languages, and 40 currencies.
GetYourGuide is looking for an experienced platform professional to lead its Localization Teams. This person will be in charge of defining the team strategy, expansion plans, and big bets (incl. scope, structure, KPIs, and targets for the team) as well as ensuring cross-departmental collaboration. He or she must be a localization advocate and build partnerships with key stakeholders across the company’s departments including content, product, marketing, engineering, sales, business development, and customer care.
The position requires 5 or more years of proven experience with scaling and developing teams and topics in a fast-growing environment, preferably e-commerce. It also requires experience working with translation vendors technical background in localization tech, TMS systems, CAT tools, and machine translation solutions. This role is a unique opportunity for platform professionals keen to work at the intersection of platforms and experiences at a global level.
Company: Sisal
Position: Platform Development & CVM Associate Manager
Level: Mid-Senior level
City: Mila
Sisal is a betting, gaming and lottery platform headquartered in Milan. The company was recently acquired by Flutter Entertainment a global sports betting, gaming and entertainment serving over 18 million customers worldwide.
Sisal is looking for a CVM Platform Associate Manager. The position lies within the area of International Online Development which works for the development and improvement of Sisal’s international online gaming market. The CVM Platform Associate Manager will work on those activities and projects related to the company’s customer value development strategy and customer satisfaction. They will define the product roadmap & the product backlog. They will be expected to coordinate with product teams to define and plan the launch of new games. He or she will manage the roadmap and developments of all platforms (Web, app, back-end system, and promotional engine) used by the international online markets, with the support of a team of product owners.
Sisal is asking for candidates with a Master’s degree in economics, management, or engineering. The company is also requiring 5 years of experience as a business analyst/project manager/product manager working with customer-facing digital products.
Company: Spotify
Position: Director, Product Design - Partner & Platform Experiences
Level: Director
City: Helsinki
Spotify, the music streaming platform founded in Stockholm has a market cap of $23 billion and employs over 6,500 people worldwide. Spotify had 182 million premium subscribers, which is more than doubled since early 2017. In February 2021, the company adopted a new work policy called “Work From Anywhere.” Employees can determine how often they work from the office and where they work, as long as the company has an operation in that general location.4
Spotify’s Platform & Partner Experience team has a search underway for undertaken a search for an experienced product design manager. The platform professional will be responsible for enhancing the core mobile experience across multiple contexts and device ecosystems, including native desktop, tablets, web player, automobiles, wearables, televisions, speakers, software integrations. The position will involve close collaboration with internal product, insights and tech counterparts and external platform partners such as Google and Apple.
The Spotify job posting does not identify specific academic credentials or number of years of experience. However, he or she will be expected to have practical management experience with designers in agile product development environment. They will be expected to foster and grow a culture in cross-functional teams through advocacy. Candidates that apply should have experience working with b2b partnerships, ideally with major platform companies like Google and Apple. As one of Europe’s largest and most well-known platforms, this will be an exciting opportunity for the right platform professional.
Company: CoachHub
Position: Director of Sales DACH
Level: Director
City: Dublin
CoachHub is a leading global talent development platform that enables organizations to create a personalized, measurable, and scalable coaching program for the entire workforce. On the supply side, the platform now has over 3,500 certified business coaches in 90 countries with coaching sessions available in over 60 languages.
The director will report to the VP of Sales for DACH and focus on building new business and growing existing accounts of clients with up to 10,000 employees. The successful candidate is expected to become a passionate ambassador for CoachHub’s platform and be able to build a strong sales culture. They will need to take responsibility for owning the sales forecast and associated analytics tools to assess performance, identify opportunities and risks, and implement corrective actions. In short, they must own the management of client accounts and participate in the closing of strategic opportunities.
The role requires 6 or more years of experience in sales management and/or operations. It also requires experience managing a team of at least 8 people. To secure this position, a platform sales professional much demonstrate that they can strengthen CoachHub’s position as Europe’s digital coaching platform.
Company: Rover.com
Position: Leader of International Platform Growth
Level: Director
City: Barcelona
Rover.com is an American company that operates an online marketplace for people to buy and sell pet care services including pet sitting, dog boarding, and dog walking. The company has helped more than 2 million pet owners book services with more than 500,000 pet care providers.
To advance its global growth ambitions, Rover seeking a Leader of International Platform Growth who will be based in the company’s Barcelona office. The role requires a platform professional with the experience and temperament to scale new and repeat customers. This must be done in the context of the company’s marketplace business model. The role will report to the VP & GM of International and hold responsibility for the international revenue model and monthly international revenue forecasts. This leader will be responsible for both demand (owner) and supply (sitter) side investment recommendations, including securing alignment on those bets across teams and ensuring cross-organizational delivery.
This position requires 10 or more years of experience building and leading high-performing revenue growth, business management, or product strategy teams. Rover has a strong preference for a person with marketplace experience. Rover is a data-driven company so the ability to navigate complex data to narrate insights and make business recommendations/solve business problems will be expected.
Company: Amazon
Position: Head of ESM, EU Marketplace Expansion
Level: Executive
City: Luxembourg
Amazon generates over 51 billion euros from its European division, which is headquartered and registered in Luxembourg. The European division is looking for a leader to join as Head of the Existing Seller Management team, which is part of EU Marketplace Expansion organization. This Leader will have responsibility for successfully launching and growing out-of-country selling partners in new emerging stores. The objective is to reach selection and coverage parity faster than EU-established stores.
The focus of this position will be four emerging stores in the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. Each of these stores has different levels of maturity but each one is slated to further scale in 2022. The role requires the ability to manage a large team of 30+ account managers, including six direct reports team leaders. It also requires responsibility for all recruitment activities for the EU Emerging stores.
The successful candidate will be a manager with a strong track record of hiring and developing top-performing teams and managing aggressive cross boarder expansion targets. He or she will own progress reviews with senior business leaders and will build a recruitment playbook from scratch. Further, this leader will systematically interact with and influence multiple organizations, including Retail, CN Global Selling, US2WW Expansion Team, and EU AMPS.
Conclusion
As these ten roles illustrate there are diverse opportunities to grow a career as a platform professional in Europe. Some of these opportunities are with European platform companies while others are foreign platforms seeking to expand their European operations. Although the job postings often do not highlight the importance of understanding platform business models and platform strategy, candidates that have this experience and academic grounding will be better positioned to succeed.
Footnotes
An exception is: Evans, Peter C. and Parker, Geoffrey and Van Alstyne, Marshall W. and Finkhousen, Dyan, Platform Leadership: Staffing and Training the Inverted Firm (June 22, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3871971 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3871971