Operations for regulated technology businesses

The mechanism: decision cadence. A 300+ person transportation-technology business line where product, program, and engineering ran on different clocks — sprint execution told one story, contract performance told another, so leadership ended up managing through slide decks instead of the underlying commitments. By the time a risk showed up in a report, the window to act on it had closed. Built an integrated EVMS + Agile operating framework translating sprint execution directly into contract-aligned performance, put bid governance and delivery-commitment routines on one cadence, and extended executive visibility through Power BI. Leadership now manages commitments, not decks.

The mechanism: evidence. A $150M cloud-native command-and-control program under CENELEC SIL2, 18 Agile workstreams, and objectives that all needed to become governed, verification-ready requirements. In a SIL2 program, writing correct software isn’t the hard part — proving it was built correctly is. Put 2,500 requirements under configuration control with process controls and KPIs, built progress governance that surfaced schedule, integration, safety, and quality risk early. Customers and executives saw risk while there was still time to act on it.

The mechanism: supplier. A 600-person avionics organization and a $20M outsourcing portfolio, with engineering, procurement, finance, and 100+ contractors operating with no shared governance. Cost and delivery accountability were fragmented, with no forum where decisions actually got made. Built and scaled a 68-engineer Bangalore competency center and institutionalized the engineering–procurement operating model across 100+ contractor and offshore resources. Had already proven the same mechanism at smaller scale — rebuilding the customer acceptance operation and standing up a $2.5M managed-services model at 98% on-time acceptance across $15M in annual volume.

The mechanism: cadence, at portfolio scale. An €80M self-funded R&D portfolio and a 3,000-engineer international community, each country planning against its own assumptions with no shared cadence. Ran the annual technology and product-strategy cycle from the CTO office and chaired the quarterly executive strategy council. Earlier, as Director of Systems Engineering across Stuttgart, Berlin, and Bucharest, applied the same discipline at execution level — cutting new-customer project cost 20% and simulator development effort 33% through component reuse.

The mechanism at its rawest: contract. Before any of this: systems engineer and test manager on railway-control safety projects in Israel, Luxembourg, and Romania — a safety-relevant network-protocol behavior that had to hold up in front of an independent assessor and the German railway authority, not just in the lab. Designed it; it was approved. Everything above is the same instinct at larger scale.