Proactive and self-motivated leader with global experience.
I hold a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark, including a research stay in
the University of Oxford. I have been working for the financial industry in producing software and technology
solutions.
My experience spans:
- leading engineering managers, team-level leaders, and teams-of-teams (up to 64 employees in 9 scrum teams during 2021) within software product development
- building and growing teams, and teams-of-teams (including DevOps, SRE, SaaS, BI, Full-Stack, Framework, Cloud Transformation teams)
- agile leadership, transformation, scaling/descaling, product development
- coaching, mentoring, and facilitation (including distributed, multinational, polyglot teams; towards manager, software engineer, scrum master, product owner, data engineer roles; practicing OKR, KPI, SMART goals)
- human side of product development (psychological safety, feedback, candor, intrinsic motivation)
- people management (as of November 2023: 144 different direct reports, 43 of them my own hires, located in 5 different countries)
My key areas of expertise.
On the side, you can read about my key areas of expertise. By clicking the link below, you can view all my work areas including relevant publications, talks, etc.
Leading Leaders
As the organizations scale up, leading a team of leaders become an essential part of leading an organization. Fine tuning a good level of autonomy, delegation and empowerment as well as leading by example, coaching, and inspiring define my key ingredients to success.
Growing Individuals and Teams
Great teams are grown, not hired! Maintaining a psychologically safe and inclusive environment, providing challenges to help reaching potentials, finding the right soil for growth, pairing with mentors and sponsors, in a supportive and trusting approach are among the principles and practices I employ.
Agile
Having roots in software development, agile approaches have the ability to respond better to change, and succeed in uncertainity. It is a collection of values and principles, and serves as the basis or an umbrella for certain frameworks such as Scrum and Scaled Agile as well as certain practices such as pair programming and test-driven development. Agile is one of my core strengths.
Organizational Design
Shaping the way organizations are structured and run has a significant effect on the products that are created by the organizations. Team constellations (or topologies), lines of reporting, communication channels (reminding the Conway's Law) have high impact on the organization's efficiency. Scaling up for growth also calls for experience within organizational design.
Recruitment
Especially in the technology areas, classical approaches to recruitment fail to help organizational needs. Even before the pandemic, the talent was scarce and geographically distributed, the time to completing hiring processes were getting shorter and shorter with the competition, and providing a decent candidate experience made the difference on a company's reputation and talent attraction power. I recruited more than 40 professionals in various positions, locations, and seniority levels at first hand; and helped recruitment of many others.
I have had the pleasure of giving talks in these organizations.
Sharing knowledge and experience in public, and giving back to the community, is something I am delighted to do since my academician times. Between 2005 and 2013, I have presented my scientific work in academic conferences. Then I started to share my experience from the industry, in professional conferences as well as in guest lectures at universities. My favorite topics are agile software development, agile organizations, leadership, learning, psychology, and recruitment. You can access the slides of most of my talks by following the link on the side.
