Hello

I'm Tobias Schröder

(Dr. rer. nat. , né Krauthoff)

Head Of Customer Deail & Account Management • Conference Speaker

I am a business leader in sales with more than 10 years of experience in leadership, strategy, product discovery & delivery as well as engineering incl. Gen AI. After finishing my PhD in computer science with the working title of dialog-based online argumentation, I started in METRO in the mid of 2018. Since then, I continuously improve METRO's customer wholesale experience. My passion is to bring the customer needs into the triangle of Business, UX and Tech to create products which customers really need and still work for the business. I love to cook, run and spend time with my family.

Experience & Education

This timeline is only a very short summary of my CV. You can find more
details about the responsibilities and achievements on my LinkedIn-profile.

Oct 2025 - now

Head Of

Business, process and technical ownership of METRO’s CRM Deal & Account Management squads, driving outcomes across lifecycle, costs, and measurable business impact, owning and steering processes for +6.000 salesforce employees across 18 countries, providing strategic product leadership by translating business needs into actionable squad strategies and value-driven roadmaps aligned with METRO’s goals, enabling high-performance (disciplinary) team leadership that fosters empowerment, cross-functional collaboration and proactive problem-solving, ensuring stakeholder alignment and dependency management as primary contact for resolving cross-squad and platform challenges while securing seamless delivery, and exercising people leadership and talent development by line managing Business Experts, guiding career growth and strengthening squad capabilities through hiring and coaching.

April 2024 - Sep 2025

Senior Product Manager

I am responsible for our CRM web platform. It's the home base of our 8000+ users of the sales force organisation wo work with all of METROs customers, calculate their profitability, update agreements, set individual prices and many more, incl. pipelines of the selling processes.

Dec 2021 - Sep 2025

Apprentice Instructor

Coaching, knowledge sharing and helping others to grow is very important to me. I've started to supervise and coach students already during my PhD studies. This is why I am an official IHK certified apprentice instructor and responsible for apprenticesship at METRO.digital. Currently I'm supervising 5 apprentices (08/23).

Dec 2020 - March 2024

Senior Product Manager

As a product manager I am responsible for product vision and strategy in close collaboration with my product team. We steer the personalized web touchpoints of all METRO e-commerce websites in more than 20 countries.

Top 3 Success Stories:

  • Targeting 20% of anonymous users as HoReCa with ML to drive the business
  • Increase the rate of personalized sessions by 6.1% (last OKR cycle)
  • Integrate new marketing channel to boost sessions share by 50%

Feb 2020 - Nov 2020

Product Owner

METRONOM was sold to an external IT provider. METRO.digital was founded and the most important products have been moved to the new company. Description of this role can be found in the section of METRO.digital

Jul 2018 - Jan 2020

Full Stack Developer

After I finished my PhD in computer science, I started as a passionate full stack developer at METRONOM, the internal product service company of the METRO AG. In my everyday job I designed and implemented software, talked to stakeholders or business experts. I participated in technical interviews for new colleagues, started giving workshops on agile principles or public speaking.

Dec 2014 - Jun 2018

Research Assistant & Phd Student

During my PhD I was a member of the PhD programme "Online Participation" as well as a board member of the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy. My thesis was about "Dialog-Based Online Argumentation" - that's a novel prototype for bringing structured offline discussions into the web. Thats was the start of my career as a full stack developer. I defended my thesis with magna cum laude in January of 2018.

Oct 2012 - Nov 2014

Master of Science Degree in Computer Science

I finished my Masters Degree with an average degree of 1.1 in December of 2014. My focus was on computer networks, network security, mobile communications as well as peer-to-peer networks. This was also a reason way I got the job for the gematik service. In my Masters thesis I implemented and tested an algorithm for the measuring the end-to-end throughput capacity of mobile networks without having any information from the providers as well as without so called self-induced congestions.

Dec 2013

Freelancer

I had the possiblity to design and implement a prototype for a gematik specification-compliant access service. Gematik lays the foundation for a secure data network with the telematics infrastructure and the introduction of the electronic health card in Germany.

Talks

Podcasts

Books

Short summary of the latest books I read
Author Title Rating
Marty Caygan Transformed ★★★☆☆
Melissa Perri Escaping the Build Trap ★★★★☆
Roman Pichler Strategize ★★★☆☆
Roman Pichler How to Lead in Product Management ★★★★★
Teresa Torres Continuous Discovery ★★★☆☆
Jack Phillips ROI in Marketing ★★★★★
Frederic Laloux Reinventing Organizations ★★★★☆
James Clear Atomic Habits ★★★☆☆
Chris Bailey Hyperfocus ★★★★★
Dan Ward F.I.R.E. ★★★★☆
Olivia Fox Cabanen The Charisma Myth ★★★☆☆
Marty Cagan Empowered ★★★★★
Nir Eyal Hooked ★★★★★
Eric Ries The Lean Startup ★★★★☆
Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad - Poor Dad ★★★☆☆
Chris Anderson TED Talks ★★★★★
Dale Carnegie How to win friends and influence people ★★★☆☆
Mary Albright 101 Biggest Mistakes Managers Make and How to Avoid them ★★☆☆☆
Marty Cagan Inspired ★★★★★
Kim Scott Radical Candor ★★★★☆
Dale Carnegie The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking ★★★☆☆

Publications

Thesis
Scientific Papers & Articles

Some Skills

Trainer for:
 Best Practices of Product Management
Feedback Skills based on Radical Candor
Agile Leadership Principles
Public Speaking

Some Programming Languages & Tools
Skillset

Strategy ○ Gen AI ○ Product Management ○ Product Discovery ○ Stakeholder-Management ○ People Management ○ Full-Life-Cycle-Recruiting ○ Feedback ○ Coaching ○ Labour Law ○ Conference Speaking ○ E-Commerce ○ Leadership ○ Customer Experience ○ Data Analysis ○ Content Management Systems ○ Business-to-Business (B2B) ○ B2B-Marketing ○ Digitales Marketing ○ Full-Stack-Development ○ Research ○ Architecture ○ Frontend ○ Backend ○ CI/CD ○ DevOps

Certifications

  • Seminar zum Themenbereich Karriere und Persönlichkeit (University of Düsseldorf, 2013)
  • Seminar der Hochschuldidaktik (University of Düsseldorf, 2012)
  • Recht für Informatiker (University of Düsseldorf, 2012)
  • Grundlagen wissenschaftlichen Schreibens (University of Düsseldorf, 2011)
  • Linux und open-Source-Software nutzen (University of Düsseldorf, 2011)