Anthony Theunissen

Product & Growth Leader

Plan with purpose. Lead with clarity. Learn from outcomes.

I thrive where product strategy, growth and customer experience meet, grounded in twenty years of UX and design practice.

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Portrait of Anthony Theunissen

Product Strategy · Growth · Customer Experience · UX & Design Thinking Cape Town, South Africa · Hybrid / Remote

The approach

Bringing simplicity and clarity to complexity.

  1. Plan

    Understand the problem, opportunity and choices before deciding what to do.

  2. Purpose

    Keep the customer need and the business reason connected to the work.

  3. Outcome

    Look at what changed, learn from it and adjust when the evidence says to.

Evidence

Let the work make the claim.

  • growth

    400k 1.2m

    Paying subscribers

    A licensing model change that grew the paying base past a million and beat the revenue target.

    Vodacom · Switch On Benefits+20% revenue vs target

  • conversion

    30% 60%

    Checkout conversion

    Conversion was being treated as a marketing and traffic problem rather than an experience problem. I defined and led the product design and UX strategy across the whole customer journey, from discovery and sign-up through to checkout.

    Kalahari.com · Head of Design & UXBest Website Usability · eCommerce Awards 2013

  • scale

    1M+

    Transactions

    A global QR payments roadmap across 13 markets with genuinely different payment behaviour, and features that are still in the app a decade later.

    Zapper · 13 countries

  • leadership

    10+ yrs

    Product & Design leadership

    Throughout my career, I've been trusted to build and transform Product and Design capabilities, from establishing new capabilities and operating models to rebuilding teams and embedding customer-centric ways of working that improve customer outcomes and business performance.

    Kalahari 2012 → Transaction Junction, Aug 2026Ten Product & Design leadership roles

Built products at

Transaction Junction · Ozow · Truevo Payments · SnapScan · UBU International · Vodacom · Clickatell · Zapper · PriceCheck · Kalahari.com

Growth in practice

Growth across the product lifecycle.

  1. Acquire Growing the base of people and businesses who choose the product. Vodacom
  2. Convert Removing the friction between intent and completed payment. Kalahari.com

Selected work

Context. Choices. Outcomes.

Transaction Junction Product Ops Head of Product

Transformed a technically focused Product & Design team into a customer-centric organisation

Context
Led Product, Customer Experience and Design across Transaction Junction's omnichannel payments platform, transforming a technically focused Product & Design team into a customer-centric organisation by introducing Product Operations, Design Operations, customer discovery and AI-enabled ways of working.
Choices
Established Product Operations centred around customer insight, product analytics, governance and outcome-based planning.
Outcome
  • Built Product and Design team within six months

Evidence

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Outcome in full

  • Built and scaled the Product & Design organisation within six months, establishing governance, operating rhythms and clear ownership across the product portfolio.
  • Partnered with Executive Leadership to shape product strategy, commercial priorities and investment decisions across the payments ecosystem.
  • Established Design Operations practices that strengthened design systems, collaboration and consistency across product delivery.
  • Embedded customer discovery and evidence-based decision-making into roadmap planning and prioritisation.
  • Product Operations
  • Design Operations
  • Governance
  • Customer discovery
  • Product strategy
Vodacom · Switch On Benefits Growth Head of Digital Vouchering & Loyalty

400k to 1.2m paying subscribers in six months

Context
The digital vouchering and loyalty platform behind Switch On Benefits, providing vouchering, loyalty and deal acquisition under the Vodacom Advertising umbrella.
Choices
The platform served consumers directly but was not packaged in a way that let other enterprises license and monetise it against their own audiences.
Outcome
  • 400k → 1.2m paying subscribers
  • +20% revenue vs target

Evidence

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Choices in full

The platform served consumers directly but was not packaged in a way that let other enterprises license and monetise it against their own audiences. I led development and delivery of the platform, managing internal teams and external technology partners while interfacing with sales, marketing, product and finance.

Outcome in full

  • Free customer base grew to over 6 million.
  • Paying subscriber base grew from 400,000 to 1.2 million.
  • Revenue target exceeded by 20%.
  • Enterprise SaaS
  • Loyalty and rewards
  • Vouchering
  • Licensing
Clickatell AI Director of Products

Conversational commerce, before AI became the product conversation

Context
Touch was a full-stack, self-serve AI platform for chat commerce: intent, sentiment and entity recognition, channel orchestration, a workflow builder, an automation framework, a 360-degree customer view, chat forwarding and multi-agent chat.
Choices
I led product objectives and the internal and external teams behind the Touch offering, compiling a strategic roadmap against user, business and technical needs, and working with teams across multiple regions.
Outcome
  • Machine learning · Workflow automation · WhatsApp Commerce
  • Touch Go grew to roughly 1,500 small and medium businesses, then was sunset

Evidence

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Choices in full

Enterprises wanted to serve and sell to customers inside the chat apps their customers already used, but had no way to run that at scale with the controls a large business needs. I led product objectives and the internal and external teams behind the Touch offering, compiling a strategic roadmap against user, business and technical needs, and working with teams across multiple regions.

Outcome in full

  • MTN became the first South African client to run chat commerce over WhatsApp at scale on Touch.
  • Touch Go grew to roughly 1,500 small and medium businesses.
  • The business changed strategy and Touch Go was sunset.

Learning

Do not get emotionally attached to your product. If sunsetting is right for the bigger picture you have to be able to let it go, and do it cleanly. Being right about a market is not the same as it being the right thing for the business to fund at that moment.

  • Conversational commerce
  • AI platforms
  • WhatsApp
  • Enterprise SaaS
  • Product sunset
PriceCheck Experience Head of Product & UX

From a legacy ecommerce experience to a user-centred product organisation

Context
PriceCheck had seen little significant UI improvement in more than five years, with no formal UX design, research or product development process.
Choices
Built the UX and Product capability around a mobile-first, responsive strategy.
Outcome
  • Introduced a formal, user-centred product development process
  • Team won BlackBerry App of the Year
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Context in full

PriceCheck had seen little significant UI improvement in more than five years, with no formal UX design, research or product development process. Requirements moved directly from the business to developers.

Choices in full

Built the UX and Product capability around a mobile-first, responsive strategy. Introduced customer journey mapping, user testing, cross-functional discovery, product governance and transparent prioritisation — using incremental delivery where possible and a rebuild where legacy architecture made it necessary.

Outcome in full

  • Introduced a formal, user-centred product development process
  • Made UX an integral part of how the organisation built product
  • Delivered complete mobile-first platform redesign.
  • Implemented omnichannel retail proof of concept with Pargo and SnapScan.
  • Team won BlackBerry App of the Year
  • eCommerce
  • Mobile-first
  • Product discovery
  • Product governance
  • Team building
Kalahari Experience Head of Design & UX, previously Visual Design Lead

Checkout conversion from 30% to 60%

Context
One of South Africa's largest eCommerce businesses at the time, part of the Naspers group. The checkout was leaking badly, and the cost of that leak showed up in revenue every day.
Choices
Conversion was being treated as a marketing and traffic problem rather than an experience problem. I defined and led the product design and UX strategy across the whole customer journey, from discovery and sign-up through to checkout.
Outcome
  • 30% → 60% checkout conversion
  • Best Website Usability · eCommerce Awards 2013

Evidence

  • Award Best Website Usability · eCommerce Awards 2013
Explore the case Show less

Choices in full

Conversion was being treated as a marketing and traffic problem rather than an experience problem. Every squad was also rebuilding the same interface components slightly differently, which made each fix local and temporary. I defined and led the product design and UX strategy across the whole customer journey, from discovery and sign-up through to checkout. I led a team of seven designers, two developers and a UX researcher, working alongside product managers, front-end engineers and business analysts.

Outcome in full

  • Checkout conversion moved from 30% to 60%.
  • Best Website Usability, eCommerce Awards 2013.
  • A design system that outlasted individual campaigns and stopped repeated rework.

Learning

This is where I learned that the design conversation and the commercial conversation are the same conversation, and that keeping them in separate rooms is what makes design look like decoration. It is the foundation of how I have led product ever since.

  • eCommerce
  • Conversion
  • Design systems
  • UX research

All work, including Truevo, Zapper, Ozow, SnapScan and UBU →

The journey

How I got here, and how I lead

Each stage added another way of seeing the problem, and another level of responsibility. Customer experience isn't something I picked up after becoming a product leader.

  1. Design

    How it looks and feels, and why that changes behaviour.

  2. UX

    What people actually do, rather than what we assumed.

  3. Product

    Which problems are worth solving, and what the business needs from them.

  4. Leadership

    Creating the conditions for other people to do this well.

Influence over authority
I don't need to own every decision. I need to create the conditions for good decisions.
Evidence over opinion
I'd rather a team argue me out of a decision with evidence than execute one they don't believe in.
Ownership & accountability
When something goes wrong, it's not a blame problem, it's an alignment problem. The useful question is: what can we learn and change?
Clarity over complexity
People do better work when they understand the purpose, the choices and what they own.
Kindness is not a weakness
Being straight with people about the work and being decent to them are not in conflict.

AI, thoughtfully applied

From customer insight to action

The useful applications so far have been synthesis and speed: pulling themes out of research faster, pressure-testing a strategy before it reaches an exec team, and moving from idea to working prototype in hours rather than sprints.

I believe great products start with understanding customers. AI can help us move faster from insight to action, but it doesn't replace the understanding that made the insight valuable in the first place.

Let's talk

Open to senior product leadership roles. Payments and fintech are where I am deepest, but product leadership is the focus and I am open beyond it.