Sergio Visinoni

I provide you with better Engineering Leadership via the following services:

* Fractional CTO
* Technical Advisory
* Leadership Mentoring and Coaching

Founder

Pullpo (PV 23-1)

Helping Pullpo build better products for engineering teams, one conversation at a time.

Member of the Technical Advisory Board

Volumio

I'm supporting Volumio as a Fractional CTO.
We have something big cooking, stay tuned

Fractional CTO

Grupo OLX

I'm having a blast working closely with the CEO and the tech leadership team to help Grupo OLX succeed during a critical transition period.

Tech Advisor and Coach

Lidr.co | Training great Tech Leaders

I'm a Mentor for LIDR, where I share my experience with aspiring, new and current Engineering Leaders that are looking to level up their professional skills.

Mentor

Nansen

I advise the newly minted VP of Engineering at Nansen

Technical Advisor

Aa VP of Engineering for Nansen since October 2023 I managed to achieve the following results:

* We launched Nansen 2 which improves dashboard load time by a factor of 10x to 100x, while significantly reducing costs
* Despite going through a layoff of 30% of the staff in June 2023, productivity has improved by all visible measures
* Introduced engineering metrics that are helping all our Engineering Managers have insights on potential areas for improvement in their teams
* Introduced the notion of SLOs and therefore improved reliability of our systems.
* Improved security by establishing stronger controls and processes to proactively handle vulnerabilities
* Reduced the overall cloud bill by approximately 30% when comparing the same month YoY.
* Set up an organisation that is in a much better position to deliver the next years of value thanks to better clarity in roles, responsibilities and processes
* Managed to identify and groom a successor that will take over from me starting from January 2024

VP of Engineering

NA-KD.com

With the exit of the former Chief Growth Officer who was leading the Product organisation, I was asked to take on the CPTO role. It was my decision to take this role on an interim bases since we were and are in the process of reviewing the overall company strategy, and I wanted to make sure we had clear expectations for the role(s) in Product and Engineering once that will be completed.

The key focus in the first few months is and will be around:
* Establishing clear career ladders for Product Managers and Product Designers, replicating the work done with the Engineering organisation in the previous months (WIP)
* Make sure the Product Strategy and tactics are fully aligned with the most pressing business needs that have arisen in the past few months, following significant changes in the organisation
* Focus on improving our approach around experimentation and validating hypothesis, that will ideally lead us to implement a framework such as ICE to structure our prioritisation process and discussions (WIP)

Interim Chief Product and Technology Officer

NA-KD is a direct to consumer online fashion brand that leverages technology to fuel its impressive growth. I joined NA-KD as CTO and during the first 6 months in office I focused on the following areas:

* Establish clear expectations for members of the engineering organisation by implementing an engineering career ladder framework. This framework is used to align expectation with current team members, develop personalised development plans and hire the right skills for the right job
* Develop and socialise the first ever NA-KD Tech Strategy, helping the team going from a reactive mindset of "build what you're told" to proactively manage the evolution of the tech stack
* Introduced concepts around the accelerate metrics, and helped reduce significantly Change Fail Rate in an attempt to create a stable base to then increase deployment frequency and reduce lead time for change
* Established structured processes around OKRs, goal settings and follow-up with all our empowered teams to enable autonomy within the boundaries of clearly set priorities

Chief Technology Officer

willhaben internet service GmbH & Co KG

As a board member for Willhaben I played a key role to make sure that key topics such as investment in technical capabilities and resources were deeply understood and appreciated for their strategic element in the board and in the management team.
That being my key focus, I took part to all conversations about how the overall business is operated. All in all this has been a greatly formative experience to learn how a board operates, how partners sometimes fight and often cooperate, and how the board should be there to support the Management team and not only to make unreasonable requests :)

Board Member

Adevinta

At some point I was offered to take on the responsibility of Product in addition to Engineering.

In this position, I've added the following key focus areas to my role, while delegating most of the engineering specific topics to my Director of Engineering:

* Ensure that our CPOs in each of our markets had support in defining and executing their product strategy, acting as both a sounding board and facilitator whenever such discussions required additional budget or a significant change of priorities

* Build and leverage a small team of strong product leaders that were deployed to work in collaboration with our marketplaces, helping them in two main ways: product leadership to deliver key initiatives, such as the transactional transition in Subito.it, and/or support on improving practices around product development, with a strong focus in balancing delivery with discovery work, outcome focused initiatives and the use of data for prioritising and deciding on investments.

VP of Product and Engineering for Global Markets and New Models

After the spinoff of Adevinta from Schibsted my role continued, and I was able to add more engineering resources to the team to offer dedicated support to our markets in terms of competent teams and resources deployed to help them "do the right thing".

These teams focused on two main areas:

* Backend refactoring, helping our markets moving towards an event driven architecture with a key focus around the "ad management" domain
* Frontend Enablers that helped some of our markets moving towards a modern frontend stack leveraging advanced frameworks (React, NextJS) and modern architectural patterns such as micro-frontends

All this while continuing all of the initiatives started previously

VP of Engineering for Global Markets and New Models

Schibsted Media Group

After an internal reorganisation, Growth Markets became Global Markets, with the addition of all small to medium sized markets across the Schibsted portfolio. This included Italy, Hungary, Austria and Colombia.

With the increase in size and the portfolio I started to scale up a team of experts reporting directly to me to support me run some key initiatives around the following areas:

* Tech Maturity: We developed, deployed and managed a framework aimed at assessing the maturity of each one of our assets. This was heavily influenced by the work done by the DORA institute and the Accelerate books around key tech metrics. The program was extremely successful in creating awareness around the need to invest in technology and engineering capabilities in most of our markets, with some of them - namely Subito.it in Italy and Willhaben.at in Austria - making significant improvements towards becoming High Performing organisations

* Data Convergence: we led a program so start collecting data from all our assets in a central platform that served multiple purposes, ranging from executive reporting to providing a data platform to small markets to easing the integration with smart components built centrally that needed to leverage data in order to train customised models

All this with continuing the initiatives that started with Growth Markets

VP of Engineering for Global Markets and New Models at Schibsted Marketplaces

As VP of Engineering for Global Markets and New Models in Adevinta I had focus my energy and contributions around the following areas:

* Supporting the CTOs of all the Growth Markets, which included Mexico, Chile, Morocco, Belarus, Tunisia and Dominican Republic as well as our Shpock app operating across multiple countries in Europe. The support was focused on helping them define a clear direction and strategy as well as supporting them on daily challenges
* Participate in the overall decisions regarding the business direction of the entire portfolio
* Support the New Models branch to run due diligence on prospect investments in the tech / marketplace space

VP of Engineering for Growth Marketplaces and New Models at Schibsted Marketplaces

This has been very much a one of a kind experience.
At the time when I was offered the role Schibsted was heavily investing in building up central product and tech capabilities, in a company that had historically been focused on having local teams only.
The push towards centralisation was driven by a need to increase efficiency, remove duplication of work and provide more sophisticated capabilities that would need teams of deeply specialised talents to be achieved.

During the transition, it was identified the need to setup an internal "DevRel" function to help smoothen the interactions between central teams that were building services and APIs and local teams that were supposed to leverage them within their products and brands. This represented a very unique challenge given that typical DevRel functions are outward facing and interact with the public developer community.

The role has been both challenging and rewarding, despite the fact that it disappeared one year later due to a further reorganisation in Schibsted.

The key achievement during that period was something we called "The Reboarding Program". This is a program I designed, implemented and executed with the support of many members of the organisation as well as external consultants.

The program consisted of a one week of intense sessions held in one of our offices in Barcelona. The target population were all the Engineers, Designers and Product Managers coming from our "Emerging Markets". These markets where the fist wave of companies that were supposed to adopt a new marketplace platform that was being built in our tech hubs across Europe. This represented a total population of about 250 employees and was executed in less than 6 months, leading to great results.

Engagement metrics were super high, and I got plenty of reports from local leaders on the lasting impact that the training had on the people that went through it.

Director of Engineering - Developer Relations

I help companies and individual improving the ROI of their engineering teams.

These are the problems I will help you with:

❌ Lack of strong leadership in the engineering team
❌ Unclear structures and roles in your team
❌ Unclear strategy and direction for your engineering team
❌ Lack of business alignment
❌ Low productivity
❌ High Technical debt 
❌ Lots of incidents and outages
❌ Frictions between the engineering team and other areas
❌ Lack of clear career paths for members of your team
❌ Need for mentoring and coaching of individuals in the management and leadership journey.

As I've been in the tech industry for more than 20+, 15 of which in leadership positions, I've learnt a great deal about how to solve such common problems in engineering teams in both big and small companies.

I offer my services as:

✅ Business minded Technical Advisor 
✅ Consultant on specific projects
✅ Fractional CTO for companies in need for a part-time expert
✅ Coach for individual leaders who want to accelerate their career growth

I can work both with companies that need help to improve the value generated by their engineering teams as well as individuals that want to become better leaders and managers.

📝 I share generously my expertise both via LinkedIn and via my newsletter "Sudo Make Me a CTO" that invite you to join.

📲 If you have problems with your engineering teams, or with your own career journey please reach out.

📅 I'd be delighted to have an initial complimentary 30 minutes call to get a better understanding of your situation and come up with a tailored offer to help you see visible improvements in a reasonable time frame.

🤝 Let's connect!

I finally sat down and tried something I’d been avoiding for far too long: creating my first real 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽.

I wasn’t expecting it to teach me so much, not just about the technique, but about my own business. And honestly, if you’ve been curious about 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 but never dared to start, this might be exactly what you need.

I just published a new article where I share 𝗺𝘆 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀 into Wardley Mapping, not the polished, theoretical version you see everywhere, but the actual process I followed to understand it, mistakes and all.

👉 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/dHz4DdRw

This whole journey started thanks to Susanne Kaiser’s latest book, Architecture for Flow, which introduced me to the approach.

From there, I jumped into the work of Simon Wardley, watched his excellent intro videos, and explored the practical angle through Ben Mosior’s “Minimum Viable Map” perspective.

𝗜𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲, 𝗜 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻:
 ✨ the resources that genuinely helped me progress
 🛠️ how I moved from “I should try this one day” to actually drawing my first maps
 🔍 why mapping my own business revealed things I didn’t expect
 ➡️ what I’m planning to explore next with this practice

If you're curious about strategy or want a behind-the-scenes look at someone learning in public, this one might resonate with you.

And if you already practice Wardley Mapping, I’d genuinely love your thoughts.

#wardleymaps #strategy #learninginpublic #systemsthinking #productleadership

(Thanks Susanne Kaiser, Simon Wardley, Ben Mosior for the insights and inspiration.)

CTO | Tech Advisor | Mentor | Newsletter Author

taplio