Today we’re spotlighting Vivek Kumar, our Product Management Lead in the Marketplace domain. With a deep passion for mobility, data, and building systems that serve both riders and drivers, Vivek brings a rare combination of strategic thinking and grounded optimism to his work. His journey has taken him from India’s fast-paced startup world to Berlin’s tech scene. Let’s get to know him!
We’d love to get to know you beyond the work side. What’s something unique or unexpected about you that most people wouldn’t guess?
One thing most people don’t know about me is my lifelong obsession with football, and more specifically, Manchester United. Growing up in India, where cricket is practically a religion, I was that one kid secretly streaming Champions League matches at 3 or 4 a.m., pretending to study. Somehow, I’d still show up to school the next morning—half asleep, but spiritually recharged after a Cristiano Ronaldo screamer.
Even two decades later, the ritual lives on, except now it’s at a neighbourhood pub in Berlin, where I never miss a game. When people ask me why I moved from India to Germany, I joke that it was so that I could finally watch football at a normal hour.
Tell us about your journey into Product Management. What’s your background and what led you to FREENOW?
My professional journey began in India’s fast-paced startup ecosystem, where I held various growth roles across the travel and mobility sector. One of the most rewarding experiences was helping launch and scale the carpooling market from the ground up, a high-impact, high-learning environment that shaped my understanding of user behavior, product thinking, and supply-demand dynamics.
When COVID brought carpooling to a halt, I saw it as an opportunity to seek a new challenge aligned with my passion for mobility and data-driven growth. That led me to FREENOW in 2021, where I joined the Growth team as a Growth Manager. Since then, it’s been an exciting journey, working across incentives and pricing, and now leading Product for the Marketplace domain, where I focus on optimising pricing and dispatch to deliver the best possible user experience.
What makes leading the Product side of the Marketplace domain especially exciting or complex?
The Marketplace domain in a ride-hailing context presents many exciting and complex challenges. You constantly try to balance supply and demand in real time, often in unpredictable environments. One of the things I find most fascinating is how even minor tweaks - whether in pricing, dispatch logic, or driver incentives - can have a huge ripple effect across the entire ecosystem.
What makes it uniquely challenging is that you're not just optimizing for a single user; you're designing systems that must work for drivers and passengers, often with conflicting interests. Add to that the constraints of real-time performance, fairness, and operational scalability, and you have a vibrant problem space. But that's also what makes it rewarding. It’s a domain where product, data, and engineering must be deeply aligned, and I enjoy working at that intersection.
What’s something you genuinely enjoy about working at FREENOW?
It has to be the people and the culture at FREENOW. I genuinely owe my team for everything I’ve accomplished here! They’ll challenge your thinking, back your decisions and make sure you’re laughing through the tough sprints. Finding a place where you can solve complex problems and still have fun doing it is rare. As someone once said, 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.' That sums up what it feels like to work here.
What advice would you share with someone considering joining FREENOW, especially in Product or Tech?
Be ready to step out of your comfort zone, get challenged, and grow professionally and personally. At FREENOW, you’ll work on real, impactful problems with smart, driven people who push you to think deeper and move faster. And with the pace at which technology, especially artificial intelligence, is evolving, it’s a fascinating time to be here. You'll thrive if you're curious, adaptable, and excited by change.