Jeroen Janssen
01/About Amsterdam · MIT · Forbes Technology Council

At the intersection of organisations, environments and capital

Experience is not soft. It is causal. The work sits where the systems people live inside are decided: the org chart, the plan, the model.

02/The claim Experience is causal
Jeroen Janssen, Amsterdam
Amsterdam · 2026

Experience is not soft. It is causal. How people feel, decide, recover and perform is shaped by the systems they operate inside.

Organisational, spatial and behavioural systems quietly determine whether strategies succeed or stall.

For years I worked inside large organisations, leading customer and experience practices at Capgemini, Jumbo and Unilever, where one pattern kept repeating: we invest heavily in plans, structures and assets, while underestimating the lived reality required to make them work over time. That gap is where risk accumulates.

Today my work sits at the intersection of organisations, environments and capital. I work with founders, developers, investors and boards to assess whether the systems they build can actually carry the ambitions placed upon them. Increasingly, this work focuses on housing and living environments, because the home is the most repeated environment in a person's life. It shapes behaviour, focus, recovery and wellbeing every single day, and small systemic decisions there compound into large outcomes over decades.

In this context, experience is not branding. It is not decoration. It is not methodology. It is infrastructure.

Through advisory work, experience architecture (REDE), the XD diagnostic and residential development through Liven World, I focus on one question: how do we build places where people can actually live well over time?

03/Bridge Retail · Hospitality · Housing

From the hour, to the day, to the decade

Three categories. One craft. The time horizon changes the stakes, and where the lived experience finally lands.

~1 hour · Retail

Retail

Stores, aisles, checkouts: where experience has to land within a single visit or never. Years inside Jumbo, Unilever and Capgemini, leading customer and experience practices across categories. The period where the pattern that defines the current practice first became visible.

Jumbo · Unilever · Capgemini
~3 nights · Hospitality

Hospitality

Hotels, short-stay, hybrid stays that blur into months. Lead experience work with hybrid hospitality brands like The Social Hub, where the room becomes a residency and the residency becomes something close to a tenure. The first category where housing started speaking in.

The Social Hub · hybrid hospitality
~30 years · Housing

Housing

Districts, tenure, living infrastructure. Lead experience partner for area development at NEOM. Co-founder of Liven World. Where the practice now mostly operates, because home is the environment people repeat most often, and where small systemic decisions compound the hardest.

NEOM · Liven World · the practice lines

A better retail experience: good. A better hospitality experience: better. But the real impact lives where people spend the most time: at home.

04/Practical Where · How · With whom

Where, how, with whom

Based

Amsterdam

Working from the Amsterdam Area, primarily in EU markets.

Working with

Founders, developers, investors, boards

Selectively in housing and adjacent place-making.

Education

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Affiliation

Forbes Technology Council

Member of the invitation-only community for senior technology executives and advisors.

Speaking

Closed sessions

IC briefings, board sessions, public-sector convenings, industry stages. Formerly User-Centered Real Estate; now booked under this name via the speaking page.

Media

In conversation

"How can we build cities where people connect?" A podcast conversation with Jeroen Janssen of Liven World, on Spotify.

05/Trajectory A short CV

A short CV

2025 →

Co-Founder, Liven World

Residential development. Designing next-generation residential environments around how people actually live.

Amsterdam. livenworld.nl
Oct 2025 →

Founder, REDE · Resident Experience Design

The experience-architecture practice: experience as system architecture, under its own studio name.

Built around lives, not just buildings. rede.design
Oct 2025 →

Keynote Speaker · formerly User-Centered Real Estate

Keynotes for developers, investors and public-sector leaders, now folded into this site.

Ongoing

Forbes Technology Council · Member

Invitation-only advisory community for senior technology executives. Contributing perspectives on housing, lived experience and systems.

Earlier

Lead experience partner · area development at NEOM

Leading the experience work for one of the most ambitious area-development programmes underway. Where the housing thesis met its largest scale, and where the four-system framework was first applied across the full vehicle of an entire region.

Saudi Arabia · Programme-scale gebiedsontwikkeling.
Earlier

Hybrid hospitality · The Social Hub and others

Lead experience work with hybrid hospitality brands where the room blurs into a residency and the residency into something close to a tenure. The category that built the bridge from hospitality experience to residential infrastructure.

The Social Hub · hybrid hotel + residency operators.
Earlier

Inside large organisations

Experience Director Europe at Unilever. CX Director at Jumbo. Practice Head CX at Capgemini. Years across sectors and categories, where the pattern that defines the current practice first became visible.

Educated at MIT. Based in Amsterdam.
06/Next jeroen-janssen.com

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