Design & Refine Your Organization
Being a CTO can be a lonely job. Many people depend on you, on the decisions you make that end up shaping the day-to-day reality of how they experience their work, their motivation, their ability to contribute to something that’s worth their energy.
Who do you turn to when you are uncertain about how to proceed? Sure, there are lots of smart people at your company who could at least act as a sounding board, but each of their perspectives is inescapably colored by their particular position in the organization. The more people you talk to, the more complicated it gets.
What if you had access to a peer, someone who understands the mechanics and psychology of engineering organizations? Someone who has the luxury of not being overly invested in the way things are at the moment, who can nudge you to do what’s necessary to shift things in the right direction.
What if you had a collaborator?
What I offer
Short-term Collaboration
A few hours or days
290€/hour
You know you could use some help, but can’t plan ahead very much? Then this is your best option.
Let's just start talking.
You and me, and a whiteboard.
Together we’ll get clarity on goals, transform big, fuzzy topics into clear objectives, and make sure to reach crucial insights early in the process to set you off in the right direction.
Mid-term Collaboration
Weeks to months
You tell me what your budget is and I tell you how we can work together.
There's only so much you can get done in a meeting or two. Especially when dealing with organizational issues, what matters is execution:
Pitching the desired state and transition plan to diverse audiences via memorable, easily graspable visualizations and metaphors.
Bringing together perspectives and expertise across roles, levels, and company divisions, getting buy-in and turning complexity into clarity, a strategy, and decisions.
Regularly reviewing our progress, gaining deeper insights, and making adjustments.
Book an intro call
I’m excited to meet you and hear about what bothers you, what excites you, and what you want to collaborate on.
My backstory
Over the past 20 years, I've worked in various interconnected roles, motivated by the desire to experience first-person how all the parts add up: software engineering and management, user research and design, product and communication strategy, together with all the invisible walls and wires that make up an organization.
Some things can only be seen if you perceive the whole and all its parts together. If you have a mind that enjoys zooming in and out while constructing analogies and models, systemic issues and their corresponding solutions have a tendency to become crisp and clear.
At SoundCloud as well as in my 10 years at Ableton, I was known for discovering gaps that needed to be filled, first of a technical nature, later organizational.
I recognized a gap in SoundCloud’s Insights team: they needed reliable infrastructure for running dependent jobs to create reports. So I joined them as the first Insights Engineer.
When Ableton’s product leadership was bottlenecked, I was the first to take on as well as help define the responsibilities and the salary range of a new role for distributed product decision-making.
Later, when I had moved into engineering management, I took the lead on extending and refining the engineering levels to guide engineers towards taking on more responsibility on a strategic and company level.
Perhaps it was inevitable that eventually I would zoom out even more: to the level of companies of different stages and sizes, with different histories, purposes, and structures, and zoom in: to the details of your specific situation.
Contact me
Prefer text communication over an intro call?
That’s fine, too. Drop me a line and I’ll get back to you within 48 hours.