A short list of past talks and a longer list of topics on which I take invitations. The pattern on both sides: technical depth meets organisational leadership, in safety-critical contexts where neither part is optional.
A guest lecture at Hochschule Reutlingen on leading Agile inside an industrial organisation, plus earlier conference work on process tomography. Different topics, same engineering instincts: signals, systems, noise, feedback, instrumentation, now applied at the organisational layer.
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.
Presented at the 7th World Congress on Industrial Process Tomography. The talk covered the replacement of legacy DAQ and controller hardware with a National Instruments sbRIO and a LabVIEW-based architecture, achieving 1000 frames per second over TCP/IP and moving the system toward a fully open-source implementation. The same instincts that drove that work, taking a tangled engineering setup and turning it into something documented, replicable, and serviceable, now drive how I think about scaled engineering programmes.
These are the things I have lived through at the solution-train level and have something concrete to say about. None of them are theoretical positions. They come from current programmes, the patterns the RTE/STE Guild discusses, and the chapters of the book.
Most SAFe writing assumes web-scale software. Automotive E/E development carries different constraints: ASIL safety cases, AUTOSAR interfaces, multi-year platform commitments, supplier ecosystems. The framework still applies, but parts of it have to be rewritten on the way in. This talk is about which parts, why, and what the cost of skipping the rewrite looks like in practice.
Backlog management in scaled Agile is largely an interface problem dressed up as a coordination problem. AUTOSAR enforces a discipline at the boundaries between software components that most Agile setups never quite manage at the boundaries between teams. This talk takes the parallel seriously: what an interface contract actually looks like at the team level, why story-level dependencies are a symptom of weak ones, and what changes when teams treat their slice of the backlog as an exported API.
Programmes that span Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Mexico, and the USA expose every weak assumption in an Agile setup. PI planning, retro formats, escalation paths, decision protocols, all of it has to be re-examined when half the room is on a different continent and a different working week. This talk is about which Agile patterns survive that pressure, which ones quietly stop working, and what to put in their place.
The STE role is one of the most under-described in the SAFe corpus. The framework documents say the role coordinates trains; in practice it is closer to running a mid-sized engineering programme, with budget exposure, vendor decisions, capacity allocation, and a lived dependency on a leadership style most coordinator-titled roles don't get to use. This talk is for organisations standing up their first Solution Train and the people taking the role on without a clear playbook.
A career-shape talk for engineers thinking about the path from technical lead to programme leadership. Some things travel well across that move (systems thinking, people-and-budget responsibility, comfort with ambiguity); others don't (positional authority, technical hands-on as the primary value created). This talk is honest about which skills are genuinely transferable, which ones have to be built fresh, and what a useful five-year horizon looks like from the middle of that move.
Conference keynote or session talk, 30 to 60 minutes plus Q&A. Presented in English or German.
Internal leadership session for engineering organisations going through scaled-Agile adoption. Half-day or full-day, working format.
Podcast or panel appearance on engineering leadership, scaled Agile, or distributed engineering.
The fastest path is email. A short note about the audience, the format, the date, and what you would like the talk to do for the room is enough to get a clear yes, no, or counter-proposal back within a week.
Available in English and German. Based in Bönnigheim, Baden-Württemberg; travel within DACH and Europe is straightforward. Other regions case by case.