About
I built the setup I now want to help others build.
Twenty years in product, almost nine at Booking.com. My career taught me that teams rarely lack talent. They lack the system: clear strategy, lean structures, customer data, capacity, coaching, evidence-led leaders and a culture to test, fail and learn.
That is what Convergent Tribes builds. Deliberately small: a few clients at a time, so each one gets my full attention.
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Maarten Wolters
Founder, Convergent Tribes
Track record.
Scale and scope.
Head of Product in Booking.com’s fast-scaling FinTech unit. Led one department across Amsterdam and Bangalore, and built its teams in Bangalore.
From delivery to value.
Took every PM through a customer-centricity program. Highest people-manager score in FinTech (2023); reports promoted to Senior and Group PM.
AI in operations.
Led one of the first AI initiatives in Booking.com’s FinTech unit. Far exceeded its workload-reduction target and won multiple internal awards.
Recognized beyond the team.
Ranked the number one manager in FinTech in the 2023 employee survey. Recognized by the CFO and SVP FinTech for the finance transformation, and by FinTech leadership as “a manager who provides guidance and a sense of security and direction. Even in times of storm.”
Developing people.
Weekly one-to-one development with every product manager. Reports promoted to Senior Product Manager, through a full committee review, and to Group Product Manager.
Teaching the craft.
Product mentor at the Product Department (2020–2025). Designed its product training together with product leaders from organizations such as Eneco and KLM, and trained a mixed group of professionals and a team at Nationale-Nederlanden.
Beyond work. Alongside my career, I did voluntary work for fifteen years, out of social commitment: chair of PANN for eight years and later a member of its grants committee, co-founder of the foundation behind the EuroGames closing festival, and roles for Roze Zaterdag and CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality. For this work on LGBT emancipation I received the Bob Angelo Medal and a nomination for the Jos Brink Award (2009).
What others say.
“He led his product managers through a real shift from a delivery-first mindset to a much more customer and value-driven way of working.”
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I had the chance to work closely with Maarten for several years at Booking.com, first as a peer and later as his manager.
What stood out most was his ability to take a complex, unclear problem and turn it into a strategy the rest of the teams could run with on their own, without needing me involved in every decision. He led his product managers through a real shift from a delivery-first mindset to a much more customer and value-driven way of working, and did it by modelling that behaviour himself rather than just asking for it.
He also has a strong track record of developing the people on his team, several of whom went on to grow into senior roles of their own. I’d recommend Maarten to any organisation that needs someone to bring real clarity and follow-through to a product organisation in transition.
“One of the managers who set the bar for what a well-led, high-performing product organisation looked like.”
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Maarten and I ran parallel product organisations within FinTech at Booking.com, and our teams were called out together in the same company-wide review for their exceptionally strong engagement scores. I always saw Maarten as one of the managers who set the bar for what a well-led, high-performing product organisation looked like, someone other managers pointed to, not just his own team. That kind of peer-level recognition is harder to come by than recognition from your own reports, and it’s stuck with me since.
“Under his leadership we shipped our team’s first AI-driven product in FinTech. It worked because of the trust and structure he’d built around us.”
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I joined Booking.com onto Maarten’s team, and it shaped how I think about product. He gives real autonomy, thinks across product tracks, and keeps a sharp focus on outcome-led product management.
He regularly pulled me into refining our track’s vision and strategy, which stretched me then and still guides me now. He also backed me through the promotion to Senior Product Manager, a process that involved a full committee review, not just his call.
Under his leadership we shipped our team’s first AI-driven product in FinTech. It worked because of the trust and structure he’d built around us. Through it all, he held onto the fundamentals: on-time, experiment-led delivery and strong relationships.
“Maarten genuinely coached me. He asked tough questions, challenged me to think beyond the immediate problem and consider what was right for our users and the company.”
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I started my Product Manager journey in Maarten’s team, and he had a huge influence on how I developed as a PM.
Maarten genuinely coached me in a 1-1 set up. He asked tough questions, challenged me to think beyond the immediate problem and consider what was right for our users and the company. A lot of the fundamentals I still use today (how I approach problems, think about product strategy and stakeholder alignment etc.) were shaped during those years working with him.
I’d happily recommend Maarten to any product organisation looking for a leader who genuinely invests in developing people.
Recommendations published on LinkedIn.
Career.
- 2017–2025
Booking.com
Product Manager, Senior Product Manager, Head of Product, FinTech
The Order-to-Cash value stream, from worldwide payments to billing, tax and financial support for millions of B2B customers, at multi-billion-euro scale.
- 2020–2025
Product Department
Product mentor and trainer
- 2008–2017
Rabobank
Last role: Product Owner Online Banking
- 1999–2008
KPN and Tiscali
KPN 2007–2008 · Tiscali 1999–2007
Why Convergent Tribes.
I started Convergent Tribes to help product organizations create maximum value, and make it visible. That matters more than ever, now that budgets follow value you can show. We steer to value, strengthen the organization, multiply with AI and measure the value. Over nine months, we work toward a goal we agree together. Part of our fee depends on results.
A real case, anonymizedA revenue collection application at a global e-commerce company. Leadership saw a cost line. The team showed its value, and leadership kept it as an investment with a return.Read the case
- The question. In the yearly budget cycle, leadership singled the application out as a cost line: “An outside vendor can do this better.”
- The comparison. The team compared the internal application with vendor alternatives on value. The internal application delivered more. It combined unique data with business logic that no vendor had.
- The wider view. Instead of chasing late payers, the team looked into why they paid late. Knowing each customer’s risk made flexible payment terms possible. More customers survived and kept generating revenue on the platform. Risk went down.
- The investment. The risk logic also let AI handle more collection conversations. Other teams wanted to use the same risk model. Leadership now saw the application as an investment with a return, not a cost.
“We should have shown this value from day one. Because we didn’t, a decision from above nearly traded away the option with the most value.”The product lead at the time
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