Technical Debt Experts in Berlin

CRM and revenue platform managing billing and subscription workflows.

• Scaled payments infrastructure across data products, direct debit expansion and automated abuse prevention, generating $416K in annualized operational savings ($8K/week) by eliminating redundant gateway calls.
• Owned backlog and sprint execution for autonomous checkout abuse detection pipelines, designing real-time risk guardrails and velocity heuristics that blocked card testing attacks.
• Architected enterprise billing migrator user stories and data reconciliation mechanisms, achieving zero-downtime subscription state transitions and cutting $60K in infrastructure overhead.
• Expanded European direct debit (SEPA) payment capabilities, managing cross-squad API dependencies and automated webhook error-handling to eliminate checkout friction.

Assessment of the product, delivery, and AI organization with a realignment of operational excellence, target architecture, and AI-first operating model

Situation: The product and delivery organization showed structural weaknesses in efficiency, control, and collaboration. In addition, there was no clear target architecture for AI-driven product and organizational development. At leadership level, there was limited transparency regarding roles, responsibilities, and operational performance.

Responsibility & approach:

• Analysis of the existing product, delivery, and organizational structures in terms of processes, governance, and controllability
• Evaluation of architecture and platform with regard to scalability, future readiness, and AI integration
• Development of a target picture for an AI-first product and delivery operating model
• Derivation of concrete measures to improve operational excellence and collaboration
• Sparring with the leadership team on structured organizational development

Results & impact:

• Creation of transparency regarding structural bottlenecks, performance, and decision-making logic
• Development of a target structure for a scalable AI-first product and delivery setup
• Improvement of decision-making capability and control at leadership level
• Creation of a solid basis for downstream transformation measures
• Definition of concrete levers to improve efficiency, collaboration, and time-to-market

Following the Vaillant engagement, established independent practice focused on senior SAP advisory and building ASTRA — a methodology, not a tool. ASTRA is independent and unbiased: the same four pillars serve CIO / Business Leadership, SI / SAP Practice, and Programme Director / Principal with equal weight. No audience is primary.

ASTRA serves three audiences with equal weight — CIO / Business Leadership · SI / SAP Practice · Programme Director / Principal. ASTRA is independent and unbiased — it does not sit inside any SI practice and does not serve any single audience as primary customer. Each audience receives a role-calibrated output from the same analysis.

One methodology, two outcomes:

OUTCOME 1 — SAP TRANSFORMATION GOVERNANCE:

Any active SAP programme: ECC→S/4HANA Greenfield, Brownfield, Global Rollout, AMS. The four pillars answer the four questions that determine whether a transformation succeeds — for any of the three audiences.

• Are business requirements clean — or is the SI building what SAP standard already covers? (Functional Auditor → all three audiences)
• Is the custom object inventory healthy — or accumulating debt that blocks upgrades? (RICEFW Auditor → Director and CIO)
• Is the SteerCo reporting accurate — or is leadership seeing a Watermelon? (Truth Engine → CIO and Director)
• Are people ready for the system they are receiving? (Human Signal → CIO and Director)

OUTCOME 2 — AUTONOMOUS ENTERPRISE READINESS:

Any programme deploying Joule, pursuing RISE, or planning an AE migration. The same four pillars answer the questions SAP does not — again, calibrated per audience.

• Which custom objects block the 224 Joule AI agents? (RICEFW Auditor → SI gets remediation paths, Director gets verdicts, CIO gets financial impact)
• Is the Fiori deployment complete enough to activate Joule? (Truth Engine → all three audiences)
• Is the workforce trained for AI-native working? (Human Signal → CIO and Director)

Four pillars (each serves all three audiences):

• Functional Auditor: Clean Core Score 0–100. Section A (CIO): KG fidelity risk in €. Section B (Director): SI challenge questions, man-day saving. Section C (SI): Language Translation Ledger, SAP alternatives.
• RICEFW Auditor: Joule API Pathway Audit, Clean Core Level A–D, Technical Debt Index 1–10. Section A: financial impact of blocked AI agents. Section B: RETIRE/MIGRATE/REDESIGN/KEEP verdicts. Section C: BTP remediation paths.
• Truth Engine: Watermelon Detection, Fiori Deployment check, Programme Truth Score 0–100. Section A: 3 SteerCo questions. Section B: 48-hour action list. Section C: vendor friction map.
• Human Signal: three-stage Fiori adoption model, HITL Policy readiness, Human Signal Score 0–100. Section A: GUI training weight, AE adoption financial risk. Section B: go-live recommendation, stakeholder resistance map.

On-Demand SAP Advisory:

• SAP Programme Management — end-to-end governance, factory management, multi-stream delivery, vendor oversight, SteerCo reporting for Greenfield, Brownfield, Rollout and AMS programmes.
• Delivery Management — RICEFW oversight, Data Migration governance, Release & Cutover management, Hypercare, SLA/KPI management.
• Due Diligence & Landscape Assessment — SAP landscape review, AS-IS/TO-BE roadmap, RFP structuring, SI selection advisory.
• IT Strategy & CIO Advisory — transformation roadmap, Clean Core strategy, Autonomous Enterprise readiness planning.
• Programme Recovery — distressed programme assessment, rapid governance setup, escalation resolution.

Operating through senior professional networks across EMEA.

• Moss is a spend-management platform for SMEs that bundles corporate cards, web-based applications and reimbursements, AP/procurement and advanced accounting in one place.
• Splits time across Accounting, Spending and Growth tribes, handling requirements gathering, public product design, coding, testing, debugging and internal apps.
• Participates in development and maintenance of the design system/UI kit and supports tooling, documentation and developer experience.
• Builds form-heavy UIs, drawer-based editing, high-density/resilient tables with server-side filters, pagination, column configurations, CSV/Excel export and bulk operations, all wired for permissions and auditability.
• Works with complex cross-entity relationships without a single-schema solution.
• Uses React, Redux Toolkit, styled-components, react-hook-form, React PDF, Vite, Lokalise, React Testing Library and Playwright.

• Building independent projects in the AI/developer tools space.
• Experimenting with product ideas, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market validation.
• Designing AI-native operating model—leveraging agentic pipelines, living context schemas, and rigorous eval harnesses to multiply individual contributor leverage and eliminate implementation bottlenecks.

• Savills is one of the world's leading property advisors with 700+ offices worldwide. In Berlin, I built core digital solutions for the valuation business, replacing legacy Access-based workflows with an enterprise-grade web app built on Vue.js.
• Frontend Architecture & Scalability: Designed scalable Vue + TypeScript frontend architecture for internal enterprise applications, integrating a Symfony backend and interactive maps.
• Legacy Modernization: Led the modernization of legacy jQuery-based systems into maintainable Vue-driven applications, improving performance, maintainability, and efficiency across business workflows.
• PDF Report Workflow Automation: Engineered Twig-based automated PDF generation pipelines that reduced manual report preparation time by ~80%, saving approximately 12h per analyst/month.
• Design System & Frontend: Built a scalable SASS-based design system using mixins, maps, functions, and reusable UI patterns for consistency and long-term maintainability.

• Developed and implemented organization-wide discovery framework based on Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation; enabled 7 Product Owners to systematically identify and quantify unrealized value through shared outcome language and opportunity scoring methodology
• Transformed Product Owner role from backlog clerks to strategic experimenters; established dedicated time budget for autonomous hypothesis testing and discovery activities
• Rebuilt customer journey maps to start at actual user need (tool selection phase) instead of platform entry point; eliminated manual data aggregation work previously done by project teams
• Implemented OKR framework across 4 product teams; defined quarterly objectives with measurable key results (e.g., 40% reduction in manual integration effort, self-service adoption increase)
• Unified 3 separate platform roadmaps through cross-team dependency mapping and shared service agreements
• Supported enterprise sales cycle with ROI modeling and technical due diligence for automotive and defense customers

• Built a JTBD-based prioritization framework for 3,000+ accumulated feature requests, identified 27 broker jobs, validated 8 through 25 user interviews, and used the resulting job map as a live prioritization filter for all incoming channels (Upvoty, CSAT, consulting tickets).
• Responsible for the Scout24 Lighthouse initiative: Document Intelligence with full RAG architecture (semantic chunking, bge-m3 embeddings, pgvector, BM25+Dense hybrid retrieval).
• Reduced lead time of customer feature requests to 3.1 days through code analysis, ticket specification, and independent implementation using a coding agent (Codex).
• Developed an LLM-based support agent (GPT-4o mini, Codex-generated merge requests) that reduced 3rd-level escalations from 40% to 5% of all monthly tickets.
• Integrated six partners through technical coordination, specification, backlog and release management, and led seven full stack developers.
• Eliminated regulatory exposure for brokers in six weeks through risk analysis (BGH ruling on distance selling/GDPR), new audit features, and coordination with legal and data protection officers.

Java 21 · Spring Boot 3 · Keycloak · PostgreSQL · Docker · Nginx · GitHub Actions · DigitalOcean · React 18 · TypeScript · Plasmo

• Architected and shipped a production-ready Job Application Tracker end-to-end: REST API with 5-stage workflow, pagination, sorting, and dynamic filtering — full ownership from design to live cloud deployment on DigitalOcean.
• Implemented production-grade identity management: OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect / JWT / RBAC via Keycloak, applying Hexagonal Architecture and DDD principles.
• Built automated CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions); containerised with Docker; Nginx reverse proxy with path-based routing and SSL termination.
• Developed a Chrome Extension (Plasmo framework, Manifest V3) that auto-fills job applications directly from LinkedIn into the tracker — demonstrates full product thinking across backend API and browser client.

• Frontend modernization (multiple client engagements): Angular version upgrades, architecture refactoring, performance optimization, state management restructuring, and UI library consolidation resulting in faster load times and improved end-user experience across all projects.
• Web development: High-performance landing pages and company websites for SMB clients built with Next.js, SvelteKit, PayloadCMS, and TailwindCSS optimized for speed, SEO, and conversion.
• SaaS product development: Architecting and building an AI-powered platform for photography studio operators (PoC phase) with full-stack TypeScript: Angular frontend, NestJS backend, PostgreSQL, LLM integration (Gemini/Claude) for intelligent workflow automation.
• AI integration: Developed a PoC for AI-generated podcast avatars using the Gemini API for content production workflows.
• Angular deep dive workshops: Delivered 20+ workshops (3–5 days each, 8–10 participants) in a hands-on format where participants build a demo application modeled after their real business domain.

• Reporting directly to the CEO.
• Responsible for all things in the engineering space including software engineering, architecture and quality assurance.
• Led a team of around 25 cross functional team members including frontend, backend and fullstack engineers.
• Aligned engineering strategies with organisation strategy through clearly identifiable OKRs.
• Introduced Team Topologies and Scrum, ensuring less hand-offs between teams and improving their efficiencies which resulted in more impactful solutions for our customers.
• Lead the technology due diligence process for an M&A decision.
• Spearheaded the re-architecture of our product from monolith to microservices, reducing technical debt and enabling expansion into new markets.
• Managed a budget of around €2m, optimising costs by introducing SaaS solutions and replacing homegrown systems.
• Negotiated vendor contracts, reducing costs by at least 10% and improving service delivery.
• Set clear expectations and goals for engineers ensuring their continued growth within the organisation.
• Technology stacks included React, Node.js, MongoDB and GCP.

Led product strategy, cross-functional delivery, and the evolution of the platform and operating model at a VC-backed B2B SaaS company (~60 FTE at peak) operating a multi-sided enforcement platform — connecting brand owners, marketplace operators, and enforcement workflows — scaling from founding-stage concept to commercially validated product.

PRODUCT STRATEGY & BUSINESS IMPACT

• Defined and iterated product strategy aligned to ICP refinement, competitive positioning, and long-term revenue growth
• Refined segment focus to concentrate capacity on highest-value enforcement use cases, improving customer retention and average contract value
• Redesigned pricing and packaging after identifying that a modular, feature-based model was enabling customer cherry-picking and creating confusion at the point of sale. Collapsed a multi-page pricing structure into a single-page, outcome-based model — anchored on what the customer actually wanted to protect, not which modules they selected. Contributed directly to a 10× ACV increase on a key account (€500 → €5,000/month)
• Replaced ad-hoc stakeholder-driven prioritisation with a structured decision framework — coupling OKR alignment, ICE scoring, and a fixed roadmap split (50% strategic initiatives / 30% customer feedback / 20% tech debt) — ending a pattern where sales requests and leadership interventions routinely displaced planned work mid-quarter
• Redesigned the customer onboarding process after identifying a recurring failure pattern: misaligned sales commitments, missing customer-side inputs, and siloed handoffs between sales, CS, and product were routinely delaying time-to-value. Introduced structured pre-onboarding requirements and cross-functional handoff protocols — ensuring customers arrived with the data needed to go live, and internal teams operated from a shared baseline

LEADERSHIP, DELIVERY & OPERATING MODEL

• Built and led a 20-person cross-functional organisation spanning product management, engineering, design, and operations
• Introduced OKR-driven planning and quarterly review cadences, providing consistent strategic alignment across functions and seniority levels
• Built decision-routing frameworks that pushed operational and product decisions down to team level — replacing a pattern where analysts and PMs escalated routine calls (e.g. enforcement actions, edge-case handling) to leadership by default. Defined clear ownership boundaries and decision criteria so the team could act independently on the vast majority of cases, freeing leadership capacity for genuinely non-standard situations

AI-ENABLED PRODUCT & WORKFLOW TRANSFORMATION

• Led the development of an AI-enabled website detection system that replaced much of a previously manual review process, reducing analyst workload by 70–90%
• Redesigned key operational workflows to incorporate AI-enabled classification and decision routing, increasing detection throughput 20× without linear cost growth
• Defined AI product KPIs covering coverage, accuracy, and false positive rate — embedding measurable quality standards into the development cycle
• Defined where automation should replace, support, or escalate human decisions, balancing scale, quality, and customer-facing risk

Led backend engineering across core domains (main backend, notifications, medical knowledge base, results processing), owning delivery quality, team growth, and engineering standards.

Signature Outcomes

Shipped a flexible, no-code membership platform (pricing, packages, duration), enabling commercial changes without engineering involvement and keeping membership tiers coherent over time.

Built a high-impact backend team through mentorship, coaching engineers into independent contributors and establishing onboarding documentation that enabled fast ramp-up.

Scaled the team from 2 → 5 engineers while maintaining delivery cadence and code quality; owned hiring pipelines and onboarding.

Partnered closely with Product during design to assess feasibility, sequence work, and make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, tech debt, and long-term maintainability.

Institutionalized testing and simplicity as defaults, enforcing high test coverage and a “simple-first” architecture approach.

Tech & Practices

Stack: Node.js (TypeScript), Express, PostgreSQL; microservices (Node & Go); event-driven async jobs.

Practices: Testing as a release gate, lightweight design reviews, iterative delivery, documentation-driven onboarding.

Compliance & Security: Led implementation of Privacy Officer recommendations (GDPR and German healthcare regulations).

• Participated as a public speaker regarding leadership and transformational topics at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress with 15 thousand visitors.