Most of the work is asking the right questions.

Approach

Turning the crank

Asking questions. Then more of them.

Who is the customer? What is the product? What problem does the product solve for the customer? The questions are obvious ones, mostly.

Unglamorous work, and the part most engagements skip in favour of arriving with an answer. But by the time the questions run out, the team usually knows what to do. The recommendation writes itself. The work was making the room think clearly enough to see it.

Consulting

CTO as a Service

Building the right thing. Building it right.

Plenty of teams ship steadily for years without anyone asking whether the direction still makes sense. Not because nobody could – because nobody in the room is independent enough to. That gap is what this is for.

• Fractional CTO on a monthly retainer. A fixed amount of senior attention every month: is the architecture carrying the product or holding it back, is the roadmap real, is the team pointed at what matters?
• Modernisation. Teams standing on decades-old foundations – Fortran, DB2, and their descendants – need a way off them that doesn't stop the business for two years.
• Mentoring for engineering leads growing into the job – the part that outlasts the engagement.

Behind it: decades of shipping software. Developer tools, virtual and augmented reality platforms, creative applications, large-scale backends. Software companies in Germany and the United States, on products used by millions of people. Teams of up to fifty.

A degree in computer science from the University of Würzburg, 1995, specialising in artificial intelligence – which at the time meant Lisp and expert systems, not GPUs.

Availability is limited. A few engagements at a time.