Georg Lenzen, VP of product at LTN tells TVBEurope about the importance of patience and long-term thinkingBy Matthew Corrigan
Published: February 7, 2025 Updated: February 10, 2025
Georg Lenzen, VP of product at LTN tells TVBEurope about the importance of patience and long-term thinking
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Talk us through an average day in your role. As VP of product, my days at LTN are always dynamic and versatile, working closely with my team to achieve our goals and address potential challenges. After my usual morning meetings, I dive into a mixture of tasks like refining new features and updates, conducting market research and workflow testing to explore competitor products, and staying in close contact with our customers. Problem-solving is a key focus in my role because I have to collaborate with the team to assess whether the solution lies in a technical fix, a conceptual change, or a combination of both, and make the decision as to how we can ensure the best outcomes.
Georg Lenzen, VP of product, LTN Collaboration drives much of my day, whether working with quality assurance, planning deployments with development, and infrastructure, or updating and discussing the product roadmap or the next release together with my product team colleagues. I also partner with sales and marketing to align strategies and prepare presentations.
With products always evolving, and customers always having different needs, my role offers great variety - from strategy and problem-solving to teamwork. It makes every day engaging and rewarding.
How did you get started in the media industry? My journey began in the 90s when I was a digital media software developer. I was fascinated by integrating audio and video into interactive media and I was creating multimedia experiences for formats like discs, CDs, and later DVDs for both Mac and Windows platforms. As the internet grew and became more accessible, it opened up new possibilities for multimedia content and myself.
As my career progressed, I found myself gravitating toward project management. While I still enjoyed development, I became increasingly focused on coordinating development teams and managing smaller and larger projects for a range of clients. This shift coincided with my education where I earned a bachelor's degree in media engineering from ICC Cologne. That mix of academic learning and practical experience helped me take on my first CTO role in 2004 where I worked for a growing internet community platform. I played a key role in scaling the company from 250,000 users to 1.5 million.
Since then, I've had the opportunity to work as CTO, COO, and VP of product across multiple companies, gaining extensive experience in agile development and team leadership. Those early days of integrating media and experimenting with evolving technologies laid a strong foundation for everything I've done since.
What training did you have before entering the industry? I have always been interested in technology and have been lucky to be in the midst of its rapid development throughout my life. I remember at school when I would produce low-budget short movies with my friends, developing and organising all the equipment and technology required for that.
As I became a developer in a multimedia company, it provided me with good training on how to concept things so that I could deliver them on time and within the customer's budget. Together with what I learned at university, it gave me the tools to apply these skills to the evolving media industry, where I could offer a fresh point of view on how things will change and ensure that we are ahead of it.
Why do you enjoy working in the industry? I enjoy working in this industry because it's always progressing and expanding beyond our imaginations. Even today, workflows are shifting. They're becoming more automated and adapting to a market that has become increasingly fragmented by changing viewing habits and customer preferences. This dynamic keeps things exciting and challenges me to stay innovative.
What I love most is taking an idea and turning it together with my team into something that people actively use. There's something rewarding about seeing a concept come to life and knowing it's making a difference for the customers who rely on it. It fills me with pride when I see these products and services working effectively in the real world.
I also enjoy being deeply involved in shaping this process. Being part of the journey from beginning to end is a great experience. In my native German, the word for profession, beruf, comes from berufung, meaning vocation or calling. For me, that connection feels very real. Working in this industry isn't just a job; it is something I feel truly called to do.
What advice would you give someone considering a role similar to yours? My advice for anyone considering a career in this industry comes from a lesson I learned early in my career: trust your ideas and have the confidence to pursue them, even if others doubt you.
When I worked on my first live broadcasting project around 2006, I felt strongly that there was a shift towards consuming content online - particularly live sports. Many experienced experts told me that it would never work. They couldn't imagine millions of people watching Bundesliga football online. But instead of giving up, I turned to the right experts-people from the internet infrastructure world, like a manager at Frankfurt's DE-CIX. His perspective was different: It's just a matter of need and demand. We don't enhance infrastructure u
