Basel, Switzerland
Daven Thill — Product Owner in Basel
Product Owner in Basel, Switzerland, focused on data-driven and AI-powered B2B e-commerce products
I'm a Product Owner based in Basel, Switzerland, with more than five years of experience leading data-driven digital products in B2B and industrial environments. I currently own the Products section of endress.com at Endress+Hauser, where I lead a cross-functional squad and have shipped AI-powered features including a sales-data-driven cross-selling engine and a relevance-based product sorting model. I hold a Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) certification and previously worked in product and project management roles at MediaMarkt Switzerland and Manor AG.
Current role
Product Owner at Endress+Hauser Group
November 2023 to present · Reinach, Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland
Owns the Products section of endress.com, leading a cross-functional squad and driving data and AI powered improvements to the B2B e-commerce experience.
- Initiated and led an AI-powered cross-selling project, replacing manually curated cross-selling logic with a calculation model grounded in real sales data to surface genuinely complementary product recommendations.
- Owns product-level metadata management and led the migration of product specification data from a legacy DAM to a new PIM system, defining how data is structured and consumed on endress.com and by AI tools.
- Enhanced endress.com's onsite search (Elasticsearch) with a business-tuned boost layer on top of its native relevance algorithm, factoring in business signals like availability and product lifecycle to surface the most relevant listings first.
- Designed and launched an MVP feature plus supporting data management process to show market-level stock availability on the website, including which configuration variants are available.
Team leadership
Not just backlog ownership — real team leadership
For around four years, I've built and led a cross-functional squad of business owners, UX, and IT — embedding agile ways of working into how we operate day to day, not running ceremonies for their own sake. Beyond my own squad, I help raise the bar across the wider organization's squads as an active member of a cross-squad Agile Guild.
- Run retrospectives and continuously reassess ways of working — agile ceremonies as a living practice, not a box to tick.
- Bridge a multi-national, multi-background team so everyone pulls in the same direction.
- Actively develop people — helping team members grow, not just assigning tickets.
- Facilitate the cross-squad Agile Guild: co-organizing offsites and All-Hands, and leading Squad Health Checks to raise agile practice across every squad, not just my own.
Case studies
Data and AI driven product work
An AI-powered cross-selling engine built on real sales data
Replacing manually curated cross-selling logic with a data model that recommends genuinely complementary products.
Read case study →Migrating product data to a modern PIM, with AI consumption in mind
Leading a full data migration from a legacy DAM to a PIM system, and defining how product data should be structured for both the website and AI tools.
Read case study →Search Relevance Tuning: Elasticsearch + Business Logic
How I tuned search relevance: a business-logic boost layer on top of Elasticsearch, without replacing its relevance engine.
Read case study →Market-level stock visibility, down to the configuration
An MVP feature and supporting data process that shows customers, per market, whether a product and its specific configuration are in stock.
Read case study →This website as a product: how I scoped, built, and maintain daventhill.ch
Treating my own portfolio as a real product — a data-driven architecture, an SEO/AEO layer, and an AI-assisted workflow I use to keep it current.
Read case study →Knowledge base
Explainers grounded in what I've actually built and led
What is a PIM? Why AI-ready product data starts with clean structure
A practical explainer on what a PIM (Product Information Management) system does, why legacy DAMs fall short for AI consumption, and how I structured a PIM migration with both a website and AI tools in mind.
How to enhance Elasticsearch's relevance algorithm with business logic
A practical explainer on layering business-driven boosting on top of Elasticsearch's native relevance scoring, without replacing it.
What is a Squad? How cross-functional squads work in product teams
A short explainer on the squad model in agile product organizations, and how I've built and led one in a B2B product organization.
FAQ
Common questions
- What does a Product Owner in Basel do?
- A Product Owner in Basel typically owns the roadmap and backlog for a digital product, working across business, UX, and IT to turn requirements into shipped features. In B2B and industrial contexts, like Basel's life sciences and industrial technology cluster, that also means grounding decisions in real data rather than assumptions.
- Why work with Daven Thill?
- Because I bring both the technical and the people side of product ownership. I currently own the Products section of endress.com at Endress+Hauser, where I've built and led a cross-functional squad for around four years — running retrospectives, continuously adjusting our ways of working, and bridging a multi-national team — while also shipping AI-powered features like a sales-data-driven cross-selling engine and a relevance-based product sorting model. I'm a certified Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) and previously worked in product and project management roles at MediaMarkt Switzerland and Manor AG.
- Does Daven Thill work with AI-powered product features?
- Yes. At Endress+Hauser I've initiated and led AI and data driven features including a sales-data-based cross-selling engine, a relevance ranking model for product listings, and a PIM data migration designed with AI consumption in mind.
- Can a website be maintained with an AI-assisted, multi-agent workflow?
- Yes. You can run a site's upkeep as a loop of specialized AI agents — content, UX, and SEO/AEO — each proposing focused changes, with a human orchestrator prioritizing and approving before anything ships. I built and run this site that way; the 'building this site' case study breaks down the full workflow.
- What is answer engine optimization (AEO), and how do you build for it?
- AEO is structuring a site so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can cite it — through schema.org structured data, an llms.txt endpoint for AI crawlers, and question-based FAQ content that answers directly. It sits on top of traditional SEO, and this whole site is built to be both ranked and quoted.
Let's talk about your product
Based in Basel and open to both full-time Product Owner roles and freelance or interim engagements across Basel-Landschaft and Switzerland.
Contact Daven