The longer view: the path from instrumentation research to running scaled engineering programmes, the scope of the work, the principles under it, and the record behind it.
A career built on understanding how things actually work, from embedded systems to human systems.
As Solution Train Engineer, I coordinate across four ARTs to deliver a unified EE Solution: aligning strategy, managing dependencies, and keeping the whole thing moving.
What's coordinated, what's direct, and what's owned. Worth being precise about, since these distinctions matter.
Six principles, drawn from the forthcoming book Leading Agile When No One Agrees. These are what stay constant across roles, programmes, and organisations.
The gap between what an organisation says it does and what it does is the system to manage, not the system to deny.
When work routes around the official process, the process has stopped meeting the need. Closing the side door without fixing what opened it just hides the traffic.
When honest information costs more than a clean status, reporting becomes a presentation skill. Making truth survivable is the first leadership move, not the last.
The moment a measurement becomes a goal, it stops measuring. Improvement protected by the manager survives; improvement left to compete with delivery does not.
Knowing what is happening and dictating what should happen are different leadership moves. Most matrix dysfunction is the second one costumed as the first.
Concentrated knowledge is operational risk wearing a productivity disguise. The role I leave should be ready for whoever follows on the day I leave it.
From the forthcoming book Leading Agile When No One Agrees · Kyle Hauslaib · 2026
The intersection of technical depth and organisational leadership is where I operate best.
Solution Train Engineer overseeing four ARTs. RTE for multiple trains. Leader of the RTE/STE Guild. I know what alignment looks like, and what it costs.
Mechatronics degree, published research, years of software development. I speak the language of the teams I lead. I've been on both sides of the standup.
From embedded control systems to organisational dynamics, I see feedback loops, bottlenecks, and emergent behaviour wherever I look. It's the same physics.
Born in South Africa, based in Germany, fluent in English and German. I've led teams across cultures and time zones, the human layer of distributed systems.
Home automation, networking, IoT, embedded systems. I stay hands-on because credibility as a technical leader requires more than slide decks.
I write about what doesn't work because I've tried to fix it. The book, the guild, the daily work. It's all the same mission: making Agile real.
Two written references from different chapters of my career: an interim reference (Zwischenzeugnis) from Robert Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH, August 2023, and a reference letter from the University of Cape Town, December 2017.
Mr Hauslaib’s performance consistently and in every respect earns our highest recognition. His personal conduct toward superiors and colleagues is exemplary at all times.Robert Bosch Automotive Steering GmbH · HR Department · August 2023 Grade 1 / sehr gut
Reference letter from Hilton Heydenrych, Senior Lecturer (Academic Development), Department of Chemical Engineering. Covers my time leading the engineering team in the Electronics Laboratory at UCT (2013 to 2017).
He transformed the outlook of his service group from one in which an ad-hoc approach prevailed to that of a professional outfit suitable for the servicing of a broad department with a high demand.Hilton Heydenrych · Senior Lecturer · University of Cape Town · December 2017
Certifications, publications, and talks that back up the experience. Browse the badges below, then continue to the papers and conference material further down this page.
Verified certifications across Scaled Agile, project management, and engineering leadership, each one earned through assessment, not awarded for attendance.
View all badges →Past talks, the topics I will accept invitations on, and how to invite me. Scaled Agile in safety-critical engineering, AUTOSAR and Agile, distributed engineering across six countries.
View talks →Where issued, verified badges are on Credly.
Recent leadership essays on Medium and Substack, a guest lecture at Hochschule Reutlingen on Leading Agile in Industry, three process-tomography publications from the University of Cape Town, and the Kraków 2013 conference presentation. The earlier work sits at the technical foundation of how I still think today: signals, systems, noise, feedback, instrumentation. The newer pieces apply the same engineering lens to scaled Agile leadership.
Published May 2026. Two hundred and ninety-seven messages, a delegation framework that gave itself away, and a year of small refusals. An honest account of becoming the bottleneck in scaled engineering leadership, why the standard fix makes it slightly worse before it makes it better, and the diagnostic question that finally got me to look at it.
Published May 2026. The framework at the spine of the forthcoming book Leading Agile When No One Agrees: every organisation runs two systems at the same time, the Stated and the Lived, and the distance between them is what leadership has to read rather than try to close.
Published April 2026 on Medium. A reckoning with the question ‘how can I help?’ Why it shifts diagnosis onto the team without naming the move, and what to ask yourself instead before walking into the next cadence event.
Published April 2026 on Medium. Argues that backlog management in scaled Agile is largely an interface problem disguised as a coordination problem, and that the discipline AUTOSAR enforces in safety-critical software is exactly what most Agile setups are missing at the boundaries between teams.
A guest lecture for engineering students at Hochschule Reutlingen on what Agile leadership actually looks like inside an industrial organisation: the gap between the framework as written and the framework as lived, the dependencies and constraints that frameworks rarely surface, and the kinds of decisions that fall to engineering leaders once a programme is at scale. Drawn directly from current solution-train practice in safety-critical automotive E/E development.
Authored with E.W. Randall for the 7th World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography in Kraków, Poland. The paper focuses on replacing legacy DAQ and controller components with a National Instruments sbRIO and LabVIEW-based architecture, enabling transmission at 1000 frames per second over TCP/IP and moving the system toward a complete open-source implementation.
Slide deck accompanying the WCIPT7 paper above, presented in Kraków in September 2013. Walks through the sbRIO / LabVIEW architecture, data flow, capture performance, and reconstructed frames.
Co-authored with E.W. Randall and O. Adetunji for the 6th International Symposium on Process Tomography in Cape Town. The paper describes a low-cost, high-speed Electrical Resistance Tomography system built around practical hardware simplification, real-time capture, and engineering usability.
Co-authored with E.W. Randall, A.J. Wilkinson, T.M. Long and K.E. Duggin for the 6th World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography in Beijing. This publication details a more complete and replicable system architecture for current-pulse ERT, including instrumentation design choices, acquisition speed, and implementation trade-offs.
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