About

I know what a great engineering culture feels like from the inside, because I spent seven years inside one of the best. Most of my work since has been about whether you can build that deliberately, somewhere it doesn't yet exist.

I started out as an engineer and moved into management on purpose, because the problems that pulled me in weren't in the code. They were in how teams are structured, how people grow past their current ceiling, and why good decisions are so much harder to reach than they should be.

I've been building in that direction since 2015. At maxdome I grew an engineering org from ten to thirty-three people across six teams and wrote the career framework that gave them a shared sense of what progress meant. That carried into nearly seven years at Spotify, where I led client engineering across Desktop and Web Player, managed engineering managers, with teams spanning the EU and US, and co-authored the career frameworks for engineers and for the engineering management track, from first-line manager up to VP. Later I co-wrote a platform strategy for Spotify's web clients and started building the teams to deliver it.

Since Spotify I've worked at opposite ends of the spectrum, a small startup and a large established institution, and found the same thing waiting in both: the cultural foundation wasn't yet what the organization needed. The work, in each case, was finding the right leverage points and applying change at the right level, whether that meant building practices from scratch or shifting patterns that had quietly settled into the wrong defaults.

How I work

you have to trust people, and treat them as adults, in every situation

The thing I believe most: you have to trust people, and treat them as adults, in every situation. Assume good intentions, trust that they want to do good work. Not only the people who've obviously earned it, but as a first principle. That trust comes to light in the hard moments more than the easy ones. In how you run a reorg. In how you give difficult feedback. And in what you do when you don't have the answer yet. Sharing half-formed thinking instead of waiting for certainty is an invitation to collaborate, and it's how a team grows together rather than waiting to be handed conclusions.

That asks something of leaders: you have to be willing to be visible while you're still figuring it out. When the questions come raining down, you weather them. You do your homework, form a real opinion, and explain your thinking patiently, as many times as it takes. Strong opinions, loosely held. The openness is what makes people comfortable to contribute, whereas the conviction behind it earns the respect to drive real change. One without the other is just... activity.

Most of this runs on transparency, and on doing more of your thinking out in the open than might feel comfortable. When the work is visible, anyone can contribute to it, not just a chosen few. A lightweight process like an RFC taps the judgment of the whole organization instead of a small group deciding behind a closed door, and it sharpens your own arguments before you ever have to pitch them. It also quietly fights perfectionism: put something half-formed where people can see it and improve it, and you start aiming for good and viable rather than flawless and late. In the open, everyone levels up.

The same trust is what lets a team take bets. You can't build a culture of experimentation out of process; it comes from people believing it's safe to be wrong out loud. You try things, you treat a failed bet as data rather than a verdict, and you don't let the detractors talk you out of the next attempt. The scientific method works, especially paired with real openness.

The last piece is strategy, the most misunderstood word on this list. It isn't tactics, and it isn't a plan to have everything at once; it's a hard choice between real, viable alternatives, and what you choose to optimize for is what sets you apart. At Spotify I co-authored the platform strategy for our web clients: the why, the path, and the timeframe, written to be executed rather than admired. The leaders who can't make that kind of call fade into irrelevance, though the good news is you can course-correct if you catch it early.

What I care about

I'm based in Munich, with an international mindset and a European heart. What pulls me now is where this work can point: I want to spend it on the questions that carry weight. Renewable energy, European technological sovereignty, ethical AI, education and health, the security of open societies. The places where good engineering, built on a cultural substrate that can sustain it, has a real chance to matter.