Tech Unicorn Builders

Hands-on Growth Studio for Scaleups: automations, AI MVPs, product analytics, and insights, CPTO coaching. Short-term high-impact projects that help you grow your revenues and minimize chaos. Build faster, automate smarter, and grow with data. We help you scale product, team, and market with AI, analytics, and hands-on execution.

Co-Founder

EffizienzAgent

Automation specialist helping German SMEs eliminate manual processes. GDPR-compliant solutions delivering ROI within 1-2 months. Remote-first approach for cost-effective implementation across DACH region.

Automating what annoys you. 🤖

Founder, CEO, Consultant

Diving Nomads

Bridging the gap between deep focus and deep dives. I’m co-building a community for certified divers who work remotely — curating remote-work friendly dive spots, organizing colivings and pop-up divecations, and creating spaces for meaningful connection both online and in real life.

We're building a platform where freedom meets flow — for freelancers, founders, and creatives who live and dive differently.

🌍 divingnomads.club

unblocked.engineering by INOCEA Consulting Ltd.

Technical Leadership, Technical Advisory, and Lean Software Development for SaaS Startups from Seed to Series B.

Founder, Fractional / Interim Tech Lead, Tech Advisor, Trainer & Mentor

Seed-Stage Startup

Introducing Product Discovery and Sync processes, enabling the team to work on the most important things. Running product strategy workshops with the team to enable better decision-making on all levels. Product management for a mobile app. Technical coaching for dev teams, introduction and facilitation of retrospectives and continuous improvement of ways of working. Introducing infrastructure as code and increasing automation of the deploy process.

Interim/Fractional Senior Product Manager & Technical Agile Coach

The Mentoring Club

Helping young software professionals from around the world with their next step. Mentoring on topics like leadership, software engineering and architecture, agile & lean, remote work, SaaS/Cloud, developer experience and organizational design and culture.

https://www.mentoring-club.com/the-mentors/tobias-mende

Mentor

Stealth Startup

Technical Advisor and Technical Agile Coach

Supporting the founding team in technical and cultural questions and decisions to ensure quality, scalability and development speed. Coaching and mentoring the team in development (technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, Vue, Go, GCP, Mongo, Elastic). Architecture and code reviews and recommendations for action. Coaching of junior developers. Development of prototypes and proofs of concept. Increasing testability and reducing the complexity of architecture and code. Development of tech vision and strategy.

Fractional CTO and Technical Advisor

BRYTER

Founded and led a cross-functional platform team to improve developer experience and productivity, implementing continuous delivery, reducing the development lead time by 75%, and driving cultural and technical changes toward engineering excellence.

Developer Experience Engineer and Technical Lead

PAYONE

Development of payment connectors and fraud prevention systems. Refactoring of monolithic applications into independent services. Reduction of development lead time by 50%.

Senior Software Developer / Architect

Dräger

Application development for distributed gas detection systems. Teaching Git, Git workflows and TDD. Promoting awareness of software craft and introducing Continuous Integration in multiple teams and projects.

Software Engineer, Technical Lead, Coach and Trainer

I help SaaS companies with up to 250 employees build a high-performing engineering organization by utilizing my expertise in (technical) leadership and developer productivity.

🚀 Helping Founders Build Businesses That Run Smoothly — Without Becoming the Bottleneck

You started your business with passion and vision. But as it grows, new challenges emerge:

⚡ More and more decisions demand your input.
⚡ Your team hesitates to take full ownership.
⚡ Delegation feels impossible — things still land back on your plate.
⚡ The quality isn’t where you want it to be, and stepping away seems risky.

This is a natural stage of growth, but it doesn’t have to stay this way.

I help founders break free from being the bottleneck by building self-sustaining businesses — where teams take ownership, make smart decisions, and keep things running smoothly without constant oversight. The goal? A business that thrives, even when you step away.

👥 What I Do

I work as a sparring partner, advisor, and trainer for founders of growing startups and SMBs, helping them:

🔍 Uncover blind spots – Identify what’s slowing down decision-making and execution.
🛠 Enable smart leadership – Build structures that empower your team to take real responsibility.
📈 Streamline operations – Reduce complexity, eliminate bottlenecks, and free up your time for what truly matters.

The result? Less stress, fewer roadblocks, and a company that works — with or without you.

🌍 Who I Am

I’m Tobi — entrepreneur, leadership advisor, and sparring partner for founders who want high-performing businesses without unnecessary stress.

As a digital nomad, I’ve worked with founders worldwide and seen firsthand how different cultures approach leadership, decision-making, and collaboration. I know that “right and wrong” are often contextual, that true resilience comes from adaptability, and that great companies are built on trust and autonomy.

🌊 Home is wherever the ocean is. As a rebreather diver, I know that true freedom comes when you trust your system, stay calm under pressure, and let things run smoothly — just like in a well-functioning business.

Tobias Mende

ServiceTitan

Principal Product Manager

Altana Technologies

As the Group PM, I manage a team of Product Managers that owned all surfaces of the Altana Atlas, an experience used by people working in each of our customer segments. I work with my Design & Engineering peers and our executive team to determine what to build as we balance vision with sales requests and existing customer feedback. I represent Product as a key participant in our efforts to integrate AI in our products (via using Azure OpenAI services).

ABOUT ALTANA
Altana AI enables trusted commerce by generating and providing a shared map which represents the single shared source of truth of the global supply chain. Our AI platform connects and learns from billions of data points to help governments and the private sector build safe, resilient, and sustainable supply chains.

Our customers - Enterprise, Governments, Logistics Service Providers - use the Altana map to visualize and understand the supply chains that matter to them, and to create, visualize, and collaborate around insights & analytics.

Group Product Manager

As the "Product Management Lead, Hub and Spoke", I worked with my engineering peers to define & develop Altana's federated hub & spoke setup. Altana built a core graph from public + private + generated data (the "hub"), and can set-up discrete copies of this in customer environments ("spoke") even when those environments are airgapped. We were working to get the hub updating spokes, and getting generalized/anonymized data from spokes back to the hub to drive updates across our customer network.

Product Management Lead

Freight Farms

I joined Freight Farms as a rebuild / re-platform of the "farmhand" software was underway. I worked to clarify the vision and communication of the software, strip out extra features & work from the initial build, and ship the new software in time to meet the shipping of our new hardware. 

Farmhand software helps farmers run their hardware, manage their operations, and grow / track plants. Through this, farmers reduce effort & errors, improve revenue thru improved operational management, and Freight Farms is able to create new digital products. 

I contracted an external development & design firm with whom we ran a design sprint, and then built, launched & got users to adopt Android + iOS mobile applications. 

We expanded our software from running only on our hardware to running on third party hardware, giving us an ability to ramp & scale a software business as well as enable farmers to expand & hack their farms and still use our software.


ABOUT FREIGHT FARMS
Freight Farms makes farming accessible to anyone, anywhere, through a unique combination hardware, software and services. 

Our Farm automation software pairs with your farm to offer you remote farm control, farm data analytics and insights, crop planning capabilities, and pre-set growing recipes.

A commercial-scale, modular, hydroponic farm built inside a shipping container provides the controlled environment solution to grow hyper-local produce 365 days a year.

All paired with an online shop for consumables purchases.

Our customers - Small Business owners, non-profits, and educational institutions - come to Freight Farms with a wide variety of farming backgrounds and skills. Our hardware & software need to be intuitive enough to drive learning for new farmers, while powerful enough to support the complex realities of experienced operators looking to optimize yield, flavor, color, or harvest timing.

Product Lead

Indigo

I was the International Product Management Lead, tasked with 
• Leading software product efforts to internationalize (i18n) & localize (l10n) software initially built for one market - including driving user research in market(s). Our ex-US market opportunities were in Brazil, Argentina, Europe, Australia & India
• Uncovering opportunities (ie - user problems & business problems) to build new software for our ex-US markets and then get those pieces of software built

My primary work was around zero-to-one build & launch of our AgFinance product in Brasil, and then Argentina. In this work, I ran process mapping sessions to understand existing processes, ran Design Sprints in Brasil & Argentina, worked with various external partners to integrate their needs & systems into the software, and got the software launched for web & iOS & Android mobile experiences. In the first year of the program, over $40M USD of financing was provided to farmers in Brasil. 

Additionally, I:
• Acted as the technology & product business partner for the International Lead Team, including preparing & delivering quarterly updates to Indigo's Board
• Evaluated partnership & acquisition opportunities for our International Team
• Hired & managed additional product managers for my team

ABOUT INDIGO
At Indigo, we work to improve grower (farmer) profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health through the use of natural microbiology and digital technologies.

Senior Product Manager, International

Assembly at the Berkman Klein Center and MIT Media Lab

In 2019, I was a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society via the Assembly program. I was part of a cohort of Fellows focused on the ethics and governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). My group ("Watch Your Words") specifically focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) / Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, where we showed evidence of bias in these systems, explored approaches to raise awareness of bias, defined harms visited on vulnerable groups, and suggested approaches for bias mitigation.

Output of our work is here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-07/what-we-created-during-assembly-2019

ABOUT ASSEMBLY
Assembly is a collaboration of the Berkman Klein Center & the MIT Media Lab. The program gathers technologists, managers, and policymakers to confront emerging problems related to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence.

Assembly Fellow (Ethics and Governance of AI)

Spotify

Developing & driving product vision across business units to ensure safe experiences for Spotify users and Content Creators. This work developed into the creation of a full 'Trust & Safety' team at Spotify.

R&D Road Manager, Content Moderation

My work centered on building & extending Spotify's "Knowledge Graph' - the musical data graph foundations for Spotify's understanding of music. I led efforts to directly gather metadata improvements from our users ("crowdsourcing"), which extends this graph to enable additional great user experiences.

More broadly, my work involved connecting Spotify users to new musical experiences, and generating new opportunities for content Creators. 

Some examples of that work:
• Create, grew and managed Spotify's Data Curation team
• Lead Diversity & Inclusion projects (invited Speaker at 2017 & 2018 internal Spotify Inclusion Summits)
• Work with our (New) Markets teams to ensure appropriate product market fit (with focused work on Japan, India, & Brasil)
• Evaluated and managed partnership opportunities & relationships around data acquisition + enhancement
• Represented my business unit in "Product Management" career development efforts and cross-functional Product gatherings
• Organized "Product Days 2017" for all ~200 PMs at Spotify

Senior Product Manager

Erich Ludwig Creative Consultancy

See more about my consulting projects at http://erichludwig.com/

Select projects:
• Federator N°1 (2011-2019) - 14 piece afrobeat(+) band based in Boston http://federator1.com
•  JUMP! (2011) - live music + DJ'ed dance party. Part of the Uhuru Afrika family of events.
• Organic Music (2005-2013) - artist management, creation/execution of business plans for artists, budgeting for label projects (tours, releases), strategizing sales opportunities in a wide variety of formats/platforms/retailers.
• Nomadic Wax/African Underground (2007) - brand management & strategy for Nomadic Wax & the African Underground: Democracy in Dakar projects - included booking, promotion, artist-management.
• 1 Giant Leap / What About Me (2004 - 2007) - "Fixer" in Mali, West Africa for film/album/tv project produced by 19 Entertainment. Translation of footage/songs from Bambara to English. Artists filmed include Oumou Sangare, Rokia Traore, Ramata Diakite, Zoumana Tereta, Baba Salah, and more.

Founder

The Echo Nest

Focused on expanding product offerings of The Echo Nest, and our global understanding of music.
I managed our:
• Dynamic Music Data product (http://the.echonest.com/solutions/musicdata/)
• International product offerings & global localization projects

I conceived, hired & managed our Data Curation team which brought human care & insight to our datasets and products globally. 

I worked with our Business Development team to scope & close deals, and brought insights from this process back to our product development work.

The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify in March of 2014. http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-joins-spotify

Brooke Charter Schools

Young Advisory Board

Acquia

Led Acquia's training business, scaled a partner driven delivery program, and established Acquia as the premiere source for Drupal training globally.

Grew revenue 4x, partner activity 3x, doubled available curriculum.

Director, Learning Services

I am an experienced product manager and leader, with a passion for building and developing mission-driven products. 

I thrive in environments where I can mix hands-on execution, team leadership, and contributions to strategic direction.

My background includes 5 years in agriculture & supply chain tech, 15 years in music tech, and 6 years experience building and organizing communities.

I build bridges, facilitate effective communication, forge meaningful connections between people, and foster inclusive environments. 

I'm inspired by looking at Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging generally, and also specifically in relation to Product Management. I'm driven by questions such as - how might products better serve diverse populations, promote equity among underserved groups, and resonate culturally with a broader spectrum of users.

taplio

The Battle

Tobias Mende

Erich Ludwig

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