Two decades leading product, technology and P&L: taking physical products through the transition to connected, data-driven platform and service businesses with recurring revenue, and building the organisations that deliver it.
This site is a portfolio: selected work, the domains I operate in, and the convictions that came out of both.
A selection of measurable results from leading product organisations and transformation programmes. From enterprise software through connected devices to electromechanical hardware.
Four fields that rarely sit with one person. I own them together, from strategy through delivery to the business result.
The full lifecycle of strategy, roadmap, launch and phase-out. Plus the commercial outcome: revenue, profitability, pricing and competitiveness.
Bring software into the physical world. Products become connected platforms of data, cloud and sensing. On top of them sit the recurring-revenue business models.
Rebuilding a grown portfolio without putting the running business at risk. AI-first ways of working, modern product development, measurable throughput.
Grow high-performance, KPI-driven product teams across sites and countries. And develop the next layer of leaders.
Sixteen years of product ownership for electronics-based systems in two companies. In between, two years on the operator side, running a serialisation programme across 20+ plants. Since 2023, the same work on the software side. Confidential clients are described by sector. Detail and references available on request.
Built a connected, data-driven product business out of a pure device business. Four lines from zero: sensing with analysis in an app, an AIoT solution with voice control, embedded and cloud, a production-maintenance solution with ERP integration for medical and furniture manufacturing, plus an after-sales business in the US for connected beds. Carried by multi-year agreements with manufacturers rather than one-off sales. What held the cost line was a platform: fixed electronics building blocks and drive elements reused across product families, so a new variant no longer meant new electronics.
Led a connected hardware-electronics-software business unit across Germany and China. Built sensor-based patient-monitoring and asset-management products: multi-principle sensing, firmware and API, data-to-app logic. Development ran incrementally, together with the customer. The monitoring product was run as a Class IIa medical device under MDR, software as a medical device under Rule 11: classification, technical documentation, risk analysis and clinical studies with German hospitals. I owned the technology transfer into the group’s China operations. There the solution went into clinical use.
Product strategy, roadmap and portfolio for two software product lines inside a global software group. Development in Germany, an own nearshore unit in Bulgaria, development partners in Romania, North Macedonia and Pakistan.
Portfolio governance across two platforms at once: phase-in of the new one, phase-out of the old one, investment priorities in between. The hardest question in a move like this is not the target architecture. It is the order in which things come out of the legacy platform.
Moving grown platforms to cloud-native development meant building a platform team and a cloud/DevOps team inside my remit, staffed with new hires and people from the legacy side. That is where the product knowledge sits. The people who built the old system are the ones who have to replace it.
Alongside that, the AI-first transformation from strategy into delivery: spec-driven development, where the specification is the leading artefact and code is generated and verified from it with AI. And an LLM-agnostic architecture that turns switching AI provider into a configuration decision rather than a product rebuild.
Ran an item-level identification and track-and-trace programme across 20+ plants and 200+ lines: coding, marking, reading and aggregation from the shop floor into enterprise and government systems, under EU regulation. Multiple system vendors for coding, marking and reading technology, plus complex retrofits to production and packaging machinery. Delivered over several years without stopping production. The same traceability is now the foundation for eco-design and the digital product passport.
International projects in camera-based vision, laser inspection and inline ink-jet marking, for FMCG and packaging and for makers of speciality and security paper. The scope was never the camera system alone but the complete installation: machine frames, unwind systems carrying the inspection heads, marking systems, control cabinets with operator stations, integrated into existing production lines and their safety concept. And the whole path there, from technical clarification with the customer through contract review and internal acceptance to leading the installation team on site, customer acceptance and operator training. Standing at the machine in a customer plant changes how you decide about products later.
Took a complete drive system into series production: not only the drives, but wiring, RF hand controls and control electronics, plus certification, test runs, releases and quality assurance. Manufacturing and series ramp-up in China, built and steered together with suppliers, from supplier selection through first-article approvals to documentation. Added a stage-gate process from idea to series and a cross-site control process for international development requests. The remit was development and transfer into series, not revenue. This is the base the connected business was later built on.
Because that is where the interesting mistakes happen. Software teams underestimate what series production, tolerance and site acceptance actually mean. Hardware teams underestimate what release cycles and data models do to a business model. Both sides are right, and they talk past each other. I have worked on both sides of that misunderstanding, first on machines, then on electronics, then on software. I stayed because little releases as much value as a product that finally does both. This is not enthusiasm for technology. It is the appeal of getting a translation right that nobody else takes on.
Each of them cost me time or money before it became clear. And each is visible in the work above.
They fail at the business model. Recurring revenue demands different pricing logic, different service, different sales incentives and a different org design. Adding a cloud connection changes nothing on its own.
Handing out licences is the easy part. The difference appears where decision rights, quality gates and throughput measurement get redesigned. Otherwise it stays a collection of pilots.
The hardest margin gains almost never came from the next feature. They came from disciplined phase-outs, platforming and Design-to-Cost. From the willingness to stop things.
MDR, EU serialisation, energy-market rules, the Cyber Resilience Act. In three companies I have built portfolios against deadlines nobody can move. Delegate that to legal and you find out too late that the requirement sits in the design, not in the contract. The date belongs in the roadmap. The evidence duty belongs in engineering hygiene.
Short pieces from practice. Plus a monthly “Signal”: three developments that actually change something for product leaders, with my read on them.
Most AI-first programmes are run as tooling projects. The part that actually changes the economics sits somewhere else entirely.
ReadAlmost every hardware company I have seen from the inside lost its subscription business at the same point — and it was never the technology.
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Based in the Hamburg region, Germany · working internationally, in German and English (both to negotiation level).
MBA NORDAKADEMIE · Engineering degree in electrical engineering and information technology · Harris Executive VP Certification
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