What a product chief in building software has to understand

Our customers report on their buildings to several audiences at once: national energy-label rules, investors' and lenders' sustainability questionnaires, and their own renovation plans. In the Netherlands most offices have needed an energy label of C or better since January 2023, and the recast EU directive on the energy performance of buildings, adopted in 2024, is moving member states towards minimum standards for the worst-performing non-residential stock. A label is calculated by a registered adviser from the building's fabric and installations; it is not read from the meters. My product rule is that we never issue or predict a label. We show measured consumption per square metre beside the figure the label assumes, explain the gap, and export drawings, equipment lists and meter history to the accredited adviser. That gap between calculated and measured performance is now the central figure on our platform, and it is where most renovation conversations with landlords begin.

The landlord is our customer, but in a multi-let office the tenants decide much of what the building consumes. Our occupier product does three things only: a tenant can report that a room is too warm or too cold, report a fault, and see its own consumption beside anonymised comparisons with similar floors. We removed an events calendar, a community feed and a local-services marketplace that two large landlords had requested, because almost nobody used them. Every tenant page meets WCAG 2.1 level AA, and the comfort and fault reports work from a code beside the lift without an app. Comfort reports have become our best fault signal: when forty people on one floor say it is too warm on Tuesday afternoons and the cooling valve shows full position, the cause is found in a day. Across buildings where the occupier product is installed, 46 per cent of tenants were still active a year later in 2026.

In a multi-let building much of the consumption a landlord wants to report sits on tenants' own connections. The network operator holds that meter data and, in the Netherlands as in many European countries, releases it to a third party only with the authorisation of whoever holds the connection. Sub-meters the landlord owns are easier to read, but a tenant's consumption still reveals working hours and headcount, and where the tenant is a sole trader the General Data Protection Regulation applies. Since 2023 our platform ingests no tenant consumption without a consent the tenant has seen and can change. The consent names the meters, the purposes, who will see the data and how long we keep it, and each purpose can be granted or withdrawn separately. Where landlords use it, coverage reached 78 per cent of tenant floor area, against 52 per cent where they relied on lease clauses alone.

Pricing decides how much of a building a customer will connect, so I treat it as a product decision. Until 2023 we charged per connected data point, which led landlords to leave out the sub-meters and room sensors our fault detection needed. We now price per square metre of lettable area, varied by building type and module: about €2.80 a year for an office on the full platform and €0.70 for a logistics building on the basic module, with a minimum fee per building. The rate card is published, so procurement teams can compare us in tenders without estimating points. I have declined shared-savings pricing because it turns every contract into an argument about the baseline. Multi-year contracts carry annual indexation capped in the contract. The change cost €2.3 million of recurring revenue at the time and has since raised net revenue retention to 111 per cent.

A building outlasts several generations of software, so the owner must be able to change vendors without reconnecting the plant room. Until 2024 we connected every building through our own gateway hardware. We now read controllers and meters through the open building-automation protocols most equipment already supports, using certified third-party gateways only where a building needs one. Each customer's building model, the list of equipment, points and their relationships, is described in an open, community-maintained vocabulary, and a customer can export it with its full measurement history at any time. I spent six years at a controls maker that resisted open protocols to protect its own bus, so I know what the alternative costs owners. The change took our median connection time from 19 days to 6 and helped us win nine of the fourteen tenders in 2025 that carried open-data clauses.