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About UBench
A B2B platform with strong roots and growing ambitions
UBench is a communication and workflow platform serving the automotive claims industry. When a car is damaged and enters the repair process, UBench connects all the stakeholders involved (drivers, body shops, leasing companies, and insurers) to orchestrate a smooth, efficient experience on all sides.
The company has been active for over 20 years, operates across six countries, and counts some of the largest leasing and insurance players in the market among its clients. Its value lies in reducing friction at every step of a complex, multi-party process.
When Manuel Medinger joined as CEO, UBench had strong client relationships and deep domain expertise. What it lacked was a product organisation that could translate that knowledge into scalable, strategy-led growth.
"We claimed to be a SaaS company, but in essence we were building very custom solutions for our enterprise clients. We were working very reactively." - Manuel Medinger, CEO at UBench
Mission
dualoop stepped in to give UBench's leadership and teams a clear picture of their product organisation, the clarity needed to make the right structural decisions and move confidently toward a product-led model.
The challenge
Capable people. A system not built for the next stage.
UBench had the talent and the ambition. What they lacked was structure, and it showed up in specific, recurring patterns.
1. A service reflex that overrode strategy
Enterprise clients came with detailed specifications and the team built them. This had worked well for years, but as the company grew, this pattern started constraining rather than enabling progress. Without a clear product vision or roadmap, the organisation had no counterweight to customer demand. Every request became a priority, and nothing could be deprioritised confidently.
"Customers came with problems and already solutions, of course, and we just implemented them. We didn't have a strategy apart from: listen to the customer and build what they ask." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
2. Roles that reinforced reactive behaviour
Project Managers sat between customers and the product organisation, handling everything from support to new requests. Over time, that blurred what product management was actually there to do. Discovery happened in isolation, sales and customer success passed feature requests rather than problems, and engineering received unclear tickets late in the process.
3. Custom development without control
Custom work had slowly become the norm. Untracked and unmanaged, it had grown hard to tell apart from genuine product investment. This drained capacity, slowed strategic work, and made it harder to build the scalable platform UBench wanted to become.
Together, these patterns created an organisation that was busy but not building leverage.
Why dualoop
An outside perspective, grounded in operational reality
Jonas had been sharing product management books with his team for over a year, he was familiar with the theory. What UBench needed was someone who could look at their specific organisation, name what was actually happening, and propose a concrete path forward.
The first conversation with Timoté, CEO at dualoop, confirmed the fit.
"The standard practices of product development, you can get them from books. But how dualoop tackles it, combining training with the snapshot, creates a more operational, concrete plan for what you have to do." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
Manuel brought the same instinct: he was not looking for a list of abstract recommendations. He wanted an external assessment that would give the organisation evidence to act on and enough credibility to make internal change feel grounded rather than imposed.
"I always said: what's needed is an outside-in perspective. Not to put salt into the wound, but to make it very obvious where we have certainties and where we don't." - Manuel Medinger, CEO at Ubench
The engagement
Snapshot and training: giving the organisation the picture it needed
dualoop ran a snapshot, a structured assessment of UBench's product organisation across people, practices, and organisational design, combined with a PM training programme delivered in parallel. The two were intentionally paired so UBench could find its own path forward. The training gave the team a common vocabulary and raised the baseline across functions. The snapshot gave them the picture.
The snapshot draws on three sources of signal:
- Semi-guided interviews with a cross-section of stakeholders (in UBench's case, twelve people spanning leadership, product, engineering, sales, customer success, and operations)
- A review of existing artefacts
- A competence assessment across six axes
The findings confirmed what leadership suspected, but gave that suspicion a specificity that made it actionable. This was the turning point.
"There were not really any surprises, but a few things were put on paper more drastically than we would have done it ourselves. And that makes them actionable." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
The snapshot concluded with a sequenced 90-day transformation roadmap covering three phases: a focus reset in the first 30 days, a structural reinforcement through day 60, and culture and capability embedding by day 90. From that point, implementation was UBench's to own.
Follow-up session
Roughly a year after the initial engagement, dualoop and UBench reconnected in a structured session to assess where the organisation had landed and identify what remained. The goal to take a read on the distance travelled and get a clear view of the next horizon.
What changed
1. Deliberate choices, organisational shift
UBench did not implement the transformation roadmap as a checklist. What the snapshot provided was a foundation: a picture of the present state and a credible argument for what needed to shift first. From that foundation, Manuel and Jonas made deliberate choices.
2. The Project Manager role was sunsetted
This was the recommendation with the clearest organisational rationale, and it was acted on quickly.
The people stayed, but their responsibilities were redefined:
- Implementation Managers took ownership of onboarding, configuration, and client adoption
- Customer Success Managers focused on commercial relationship management
- Product Managers were freed from coordination overhead and could begin operating as strategic owners
The transition took slightly longer to feel stable than expected, as people who had held broad ownership of client relationships needed time to settle into more defined roles, but the direction was never in doubt.
3. Product strategy became a company-wide document
One of the snapshot's clearest findings was that strategy existed in leadership's heads but was not operational for teams. UBench responded by building and sharing a company-level product strategy with clear themes, linking those themes to roadmap initiatives, and introducing regular forums where Product, Sales, and CS reviewed priorities together.
"We needed a product strategy that was carried by everyone in the company, not just a few people with a gut feeling about the right direction." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
4. Engineering teams were reorganised around a strategic focus
Roughly a year into the transformation, UBench restructured its development teams into three dedicated tracks:
- Two teams own specific product strategy pillars and operate with clear mandates and customer input:
- One focused on AI-enabled workflows
- One on core platform development
- A third team handles customer-specific requests, creating an explicit separation between strategic product investment and client-specific delivery.
4. Discovery rituals were installed between product and commercial teams
One of the clearest gaps in the snapshot was the distance between what customers were telling sales and CS teams and what actually reached Product in a usable form. UBench introduced regular sessions where insights from customer conversations were structured, shared, and prioritised together.
"What was missing is that the product team was not able to challenge the ideas from the market because they didn't know the market well enough. We got closer in the collaboration between the commercial and product sides." - Manuel Medinger, CEO at UBench
Outcomes
A company that now owns its narrative
The most visible shift is in how UBench engages with customers. Where conversations previously orbited around requests and specifications, they are now driven by UBench's own product narrative.
"Conversations with customers are now really our narrative. We can use the same story across our entire client base, and our customers appreciate it. It also really helps with pricing, negotiation and value selling." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
Product Managers now own problem definition, maintain clearer boundaries with commercial teams, and have the organisational backing to validate before building. The combination of training and structural change made the difference: the concepts landed because the structure was ready to support them.
The changes that stuck were the ones UBench designed itself, informed by the engagement, but owned internally. The dual-track engineering structure, the discovery rituals, the strategy work flowing through the CS team: none of that came lifted from a report, but from an organisation that finally had the language and the shared picture to have those conversations.
"It helped us to substantiate and set the right target for the next level of a product-led organisation, including both organisational and process changes." - Manuel Medinger, CEO at UBench
Lessons learned
What this engagement taught us
- The mirror matters as much as the map.
When Jonas and Manuel saw the findings in the snapshot, it finally clicked. It wasn’t that the information was a total surprise, but having an outside perspective turned their gut feelings into clear convictions. Sometimes you just need a mirror to confirm what you already suspect.
- Capability gaps are often system gaps.
The team at UBench was talented, but they were stuck in a structure that made strategic work hard. The training raised the baseline, but the structural changes (sunsetting the PM role, reorganising engineering tracks, installing discovery rituals) were what made the capability stick.
- Implementation owned internally is more durable.
The most lasting changes were the ones UBench built themselves. dualoop provided the roadmap, but because they owned the implementation, the new way of working genuinely stuck long after the engagement ended.
Conclusion
The right system for the ambition you already have
UBench did not need to redesign its entire business to move toward a product-led model. It needed clarity: on where effort was being lost, which roles were creating friction, and what strategy actually meant for the people doing the daily work. The snapshot provided that clarity, and the training built the capability to act on it.
The real question wasn't about talent, but whether the system was designed for the goals they had. Once the system matched their ambition, everything else fell into place.
"The biggest differentiator of dualoop is the collaboration. It feels like a genuine partnership. Timoté is personally involved and really wants to see eye to eye, not just act as a consultancy selling people." - Jonas Seuntjens, CPTO at UBench
Thinking about what it would take to move your product organisation to the next stage? A snapshot gives you the outside-in clarity to know where to start.
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