Consulting

As a highly experienced consultant and CTO, I excel at providing strategic guidance and technical expertise to help businesses achieve their goals. With a focus on prototyping foundations that optimize through iterative improvement and close collaboration with management, I have a proven track record of success in building and refining products and business models.

My scopes of work include:

  1. Development of the technical vision and pitch it to investors and stakeholders.
  2. Building a product’s first version and initial architecture by myself, if necessary.
  3. Staffing the team, onboarding the team members, and ensuring they can work happily and productively in a modern development environment.
  4. Owning the process that optimizes the (technical) processes: Up to product engineering org.
  5. Finding a successor and handing over the team to someone permanent at a certain point.

Whether you’re an agency, SME, or startup, I can help you achieve your goals by providing a range of services that are tailored to your specific needs. My ultimate goal is to establish a strong social connection with the non-technical parts of the company, ensuring that everyone is aligned and working towards a shared vision of success. If you’re interested in learning more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected] .

Now: what am I currently doing?

2019 – Now Ray Sono AG : Technology Principal & Tech Lead for IIot products (freelance)

Ray Sono is a digital product development agency. Working with Ray Sono, I especially like strategic understanding and user-centric thinking. What exactly do I do there? As a Technology Principal, I am involved in projects from the initial conceptual brainstorming to the eventual implementation (with internal or external resources). In larger projects, I lead a development team as Tech Lead. I do this on-site with the Berlin team or remotely with an international team of developers.

As Technical Lead at Hydro Pocket, the first end-customer product of the industrial company Voith, I introduced the Shape Up method to effectively manage the technical team. Hydro Pocket is a leading provider of solutions for hydropower plants, offering innovative technologies to prevent outages and optimize the performance of hydropower plants through actionable real-time data.

Past: What have I already done?

Here are some of the highlights of my 12year+ track record. But that is not all. Many more, primarily minor projects, are not mentioned here.

2010 – 2015 buddybrand GmbH : Founder and managing technical director – digital agency

Right out of university, I started building Facebook apps as a freelancer with my co-founders – just at the right time. Even before I could hand in my bachelor thesis, we had earned enough money to start a GmbH. In the next 3 years alone, we built several hundred Facebook apps and grew from cash flow to 30+ employees. Nowadays, buddybrand is a full-service digital creative agency these days.

(bootstrapped, 40 FTE)

2016 – 2018 BuzzBird GmbH : Founder and Chief Technology & Product Officer – Influencer Marketplace

We started with the goal of making social media influencers bookable programmatically – like Google Ads. However, we underestimated how many sensitivities and non-deterministic requirements are imposed by both Supply and Demand. Now the developed software is mainly used internally to map the influencer process smoothly and fully digitized – an “Influencer Agency on Steroids.”

(venture-backed, 25 FTE)

2018 – 2019 Fotando GmbH: Founder and Chief Prototyping Officer – E-commerce

We had noticed that most photo printing vendors always send their customers to ugly, bloated, slow native apps, which in turn also always had ugly ad conversions as they sent users to the AppStore. So the challenge was clear: we need a customer journey where the user can upload, crop, and edit their photo in the mobile browser and then (after delivery) hang it on the wall (claim: from hand to the wall!). Technically, it worked great that way, too. However, at that time, the company slid into the first Corona wave shortly before it was financed. In retrospect: Pretty stupid – for all parties.

2016 – 2019 Native Studios UG : Technical Evangelist – SaaS

I built several iterations of a prototype for the founders in 2016 and 2017 until they could convince backers and first customers with it.

Afterward, I was Tech Lead for product development and Technical Evangelist to convince customers of the startup’s technology and capabilities.