I cannot recommend him highly enough and I would work with him again in a heartbeat if offered the opportunity.
―Matt Colebourne, CEO Searchmetrics
About
Hands-on technical leadership. Agile process expert. Bridging product and development teams. Business minded.
I enjoy leading IT projects and excel when it comes to challenging assignments: changing organizations from waterfall to a lean and agile culture, building up in-house IT capabilities from scratch, and turnaround management for projects in crisis mode (Case-Studies). My goal is to foster a fearless culture that leads to highly motivated teams and great business results.
The truth is that I am a deeply passionate about people and technology. I am author of the books “Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook” and “Effective SCRUM”, and lead open source projects like Ninja (1900 Github stars).
References
I successfully completed projects for companies like Zalando, Springer, Zanox, Searchmetrics, Macmillan, Nature and Holtzbrinck, spanning industries as diverse as publishing, e-commerce and advertising (Projects).
Education
Computer Science
My primary studies were in Computer Science and Psychology (minor) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin which I completed with a German Diplom (equivalent to the English Master’s title).
Computer Science + Biology = PhD
I love all things computer, but it’s sometimes even better to combine Computer Science with something “real”. In my case I developed a huge interest in Bioinformatics, which combines Biology and Computer Science. Luckily I was granted a fellowship at the International Graduate School: Genomics and Systems Biology of Molecular Networks (Berlin, Boston, Kyoto).The coolest part of my PhD thesis was an algorithm that was able to compare and find similarities in RNA structures. That was really something novel at that time. It was big fun evaluating the algorithm and publishing the results. In 2009 I successfully defended my PhD thesis in Bioinformatics at the Free University Berlin.
MBA for fun and profit
Another interest of mine is economics. Why are some societies rich, but some are not? What does scarcity have to do with prices? And what does all that mean for us as a society? And because I am also interested in organizations and companies and finance I applied and was granted entry to the international MBA programme of the University of London / Royal Holloway College.
After many remote and onsite sessions with cool professors, many nerdy discussions with my fellow students and countless exams I was awarded an MBA in international management in 2016.
The MBA not only introduced me to economics in a structured way - but it’s also a big help when consulting for big corporations. If you got an MBA you simply speak the business language of the decision makers and can accomplish challenges inside organizations more easily.
