Jacob Groote

Head of Product Management B2B, KPN

Speaker Bio

I’ve joined KPN’s Research lab in 1990, after finishing my PhD in Physics. How to use Artificial Intelligence tools within network and service management as well as how to improve billing and customer services within KPN, were my main research topics. Later I’ve held several management positions within different departments. They ranged from being responsible for process and system development and implementation of the newly formed Business Unit Carrier Services to being the head architecture development and implementation in the department of Fixed Operations.  


My career continued as member of the board of Division Fixed where I was responsible for all IT projects as CIO of this division. After these more staff oriented functions I moved to different positions within operational departments and serving especially enterprise customers of KPN. 


April 2012 I became responsible for Mobile Operations, which included the quality management of all mobile services as well as new service development and the roll-out of new technologies. In April 2014 I’ve finished the roll-out of our nationwide 4G network, which we completed in 15 months. Later I was head of the department of Service Platforms, being responsible for overall quality, technical product management and innovation of KPN’s services including TV, VOLTE, Roaming, etc. 


After several years in operations I moved to the commercial part of KPN. Since January 2017 I’m heading the department of product management for our B2B business. Main focus in this role was to rationalize the product portfolio, improving the quality of the remaining products and innovating the portfolio to state of the art. I combined my knowledge of mobile networks and product management to lead the commercial introduction of 5G for KPN in the Netherlands. The introduction consisted of 3 Value Added Services on top of the basic connectivity, with 6 Fieldlabs for customer trials. This attracted the attention of many companies and they called this the most innovative 5G network of the Netherlands.  


Currently I drive strategic innovations based on several partnerships as part of KPN’s Strategy team. Jointly with the business we develop the 5-year plans for innovating our portfolio (B2C, B2B and Wholesale) which will bring extra growth to KPN.  


Specific topics that always draw my attention are customer benefits, value creation, operations, outsourcing, converging of IT and network architectures, integration of fixed and mobile network architectures, change management and quality management. 


I’m married and have two kids studying at university.