Sven Hoffmann (DE)

  • VP of Product

  • Engineer turned product leader, who grew with Haiilo from a startup of around 10 people into a scale-up serving more than 1,000 customers

  • Based in Hamburg, Germany

About Sven Hoffmann

Sven is VP of Product at Haiilo and part of its senior leadership team, leading 13 product managers and UX designers. He believes product teams don’t need more ideas; they need direction and the courage to say no to most of them. At heart he is still a product manager who wants to build products that are simple, useful and enjoyable to use. Today he is driving Haiilo’s shift from a classic intranet to an AI-native platform. He also established Shape Up as the company’s operating cadence and builds with Claude Code himself, rolling out AI skills across his team.

Sven spent nine years developing software before moving into product in 2017. He worked as a web developer on the ARD Mediathek, as a software engineer at a CMS vendor and as a creative technologist at an agency. He then joined Haiilo as one of around ten employees and grew with it into a scale-up of around 200 people. Along the way it went through a private equity investment, a three-company merger and the move from on-premises software to SaaS. That background still shapes how he works: close to the teams, and allergic to complexity nobody asked for.

Blog posts with Sven