Cape Town Product Meetup

We’ve got two awesome talks lined up - one on levelling up your product discovery game, and another on how the product role changes from startup to corporate.

From bootstrapped to scale-up to corporate and everything in-between
What does it really mean to “do product” in a startup vs. a scale-up vs. a corporate? In this talk, Martin will unpack how the role of product shifts across different types of companies - from skills that transfer well to those that can cause chaos. He’ll explore how team structures and processes need to adapt to different stages of a business. And he’ll unpack the question - is there a personality type best suited to each type of company, or can product leaders flex across them all?

Supercharging Discovery & Experimentation for Product Success
Thijan will dive into how teams can systematically de-risk innovation through rigorous experimentation and a sharper focus on the assumptions behind their ideas. He’ll share practical ways to embed discovery habits that help teams build products that truly resonate - and avoid costly missteps.

Speakers
Martin Vogdt
Martin Vogdt is an experienced product leader who specialises in the intersection of technology, finance, and social impact. With a strong track record in scaling high-impact companies and building cross-functional teams, Martin has worked across Europe, Asia and Africa. His career has been largely focused on venture-backed scale-ups operating in underserved markets, where he’s developed a deep understanding of how to deliver meaningful products in complex environments. More recently, he has been exploring both ends of the spectrum - building a bootstrapped startup while also driving innovation within a large corporate structure.

Martin is the Co-Founder of Ridge, a European investment platform, and currently serves as Chief Product Officer at Sanlam Fintech. Prior to this, he was CPO at JUMO, and earlier in his career held leadership roles in large e-commerce startups across Africa and Asia.

Thijan Dippenaar
Thijan is a seasoned product and venture leader with deep experience in launching and scaling new products. He co-built an international platform that raised $30M in funding and has learned equally valuable lessons from ventures that didn’t go as planned - underscoring the need for robust validation. Having worked with over 80 startup teams, he now leads Hubble, a company reimagining supply chain software. Thijan is passionate about using systematic discovery and experimentation to drive sustainable growth.