I am the CTO of Conversy. I push the limits of what small, exceptionally well-designed teams of ordinary people can accomplish sustainably.
Conversy builds speech-AI tools that turn spoken audio into actionable information for security-critical applications. When I joined in 2023, the developers had the will to become great, and we were few enough that organisational inertia would not get in our way.
We comfortably release several times per developer per day, both features and security fixes. This works because I have pushed for direct communication with our customers and between ourselves, combined with a fully automated test and deployment infrastructure. Code assistants help our juniors reason about their code and our seniors handle mundane tasks.
Nextory provides an unlimited digital book subscription service. I spent seven years there tackling the same topic on a larger scale as Product Owner and Head of Engineering.
I started with a dozen engineers and fewer than 2 000 customers and we grew to 70 engineers servicing 200 000 customers. With a much smaller budget than our competitors, we still had great staff satisfaction and many return hires.
My focus was on building effective product teams at scale. Even with engineers spread across continents and technologies, we reorganised ourselves into cohesive vertical product teams that helped people find books that they loved.
Great teams need a customer problem to solve. As technical sales support for MATLAB, the computing platform for engineers and scientists, I talked to customers every day.
I supported the National Supercomputing Centre in their first-of-its-kind setup where all Swedish university staff could access MATLAB on their supercomputers.
I quickly learned that what the customer asks is a good starting point, but a much better solution for them is usually only a few well-selected questions away.
Understanding the customer challenge is half the battle. Delivering a solid engineering solution is the other half. I was a hardware engineer at Perimed, a medical device company measuring blood flow in tissue.
I brought multiple products from the lab to production, and was lead engineer for one product that is still being sold decades later. I was also part of the project to introduce agile development into the highly regulated world of medical devices.
I learned the hard way that design decisions have consequences in production and service.
A single person can do much, but great results are achieved by teams. As a scout leader and troop chief I got to see first-hand what a team of ordinary individuals can achieve.
It started with a group of pre-teens building a fully functioning kitchen using only sticks and rope. It ended at an international scout camp with a staff kitchen run entirely by untrained volunteers serving 10 000 people three meals per day, where I was in charge of washing the dishes.
