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

Multiple Clients

I work with CEOs and CTOs of growing SaaS companies to enable their engineering departments to generate more business value. These are some common problems I can help you solve:

🤦‍♂️ Our engineering department doubled in size, but productivity hit a brick wall!
🤷‍♂️ We’re totally dependent on the agency that developed our MVP!
🤑 Engineering is a Cost Centre instead of a Profit Centre!
🙏 Engineering Management Guidance Needed

Hire me as your CTO in a fractional capacity, or to troubleshoot a specific problem.

CTO | Coach & Mentor for Engineering Execs

CTO Logic

Writing a newsletter that delivers pragmatic, hard-earned advice for professionals at the intersection of software engineering, tech management, leadership, and business.

Chief Logician

Logiq Labs

✅ Managed 120 people (~90 engineers and product managers), across multiple sites internationally. 
✅ Led development of a FinTech B2B2C SaaS asset trading platform and scaled it to handle $180+ billion in annual trading volume.
✅ Led deployment and scaling of internally developed Marketing Automation platform (B2B2C SaaS) to successfully handle 9 million monthly unique visitors.
✅ Doubled the size of product & engineering department; led organisational transformation through mergers, spinoffs and implementation of Agile methodology. Member of executive management team. VP Engineering and VP Product reported to me.
✅ Managed comprehensive re-architecting, rewrite and successful deployment of internally developed B2B2C payments processing solution.

Chief Technology Officer

Responsible for engineering department of 40 people.

Director of Research & Development

Morpheus Games

✔ Set up the company's engineering department and grew it to 13 members, in Israel and Kyiv, Ukraine.
✔ Worked with my teams to deliver the company's lottery tickets and betting e-commerce platform, and first B2C product, within 8 months (industry typical: 1 year).
✔ Provided technical and managerial oversight (and mentoring where required), and guided architectural decisions.
✔ Established standard and consistent processes for recruiting, evaluating employee performance, designing new functionality, managing the software development life-cycle (SDLC), controlling technical debt, deploying code, handling and resolving production issues.
✔ Invested heavily in automating every step of the development, testing and deployment pipeline (JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, AWS EC2 and ECS) to support CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment).
✔ My department successfully passed multiple audits mandated by relevant governmental regulatory and standards bodies, based on the ISO 27001 information security standard. These examined both our internal engineering methodologies, processes and information systems, as well as the security of the deployed product, including undergoing (and surviving) penetration testing. These efforts also contributed greatly to being able to achieve PCI/DSS compliance.

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Jargon for keyword bingo players: Angular 5, Amazon Web Services, Node.js, microservices, using AWS SNS/SQS as an event bus, ELK (Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana) for logging and monitoring, Agile.

Director of R&D

Snappers.tv

Finalist - 4YFN competition at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona 2016

http://www.snappers.tv

Independent Consultant

✔ Development of web apps (Google Closure Library/Compiler, AngularJS, Bootstrap) including backends (Google AppEngine (Python), Node.js, Firebase, PHP, Heroku, Amazon EC2 & various cloud services) and even Outlook Add-ins (VB).
✔ Worked with a long term client on a concept that challenged conventional assumptions, and iterated it until it was mature enough and successful enough to be mainstreamed into production at the client's IT department.
✔ Work remotely, coordinating and collaborating with client teams.
✔ Experience with analytics and multivariate testing to increase conversions.
✔ Experience with spreadsheet & visualization techniques to support data driven decisions, for both engineering decisions and determining business goals.
✔ Worked with lawyers / corporate counsel to minimize client risk exposure, ensure compliance with relevant regulations, and to compose EULAs.

Technology & Product Management Advisor / Full Stack Developer

Claritude Software

Claritude Software's mission is to help busy people overcome email overload and increase their productivity. Our first product is SpeedFiler, a powerful add-in for Microsoft Outlook that makes it extremely easy to file incoming and outgoing email. SpeedFiler's super-fast, find-as-you-type folder selection window makes filing almost effortless, even if you have a deep hierarchy of hundreds of folders. When you send a message, SpeedFiler can prompt you to select a folder in which to file it, so you don't have to dump it in Sent Items. Supports Outlook 2003 and 2007. Ideal for busy people with full inboxes.

✔ Identified the problem and corresponding market niche and devised a product (SpeedFiler) with a simple, streamlined UX/UI that masked complexities of the solution.
✔ Sold multiple enterprise licences (1000+ seats) and tens of thousands of small business licenses.
✔ Developed partnerships with industry-specific enterprise resellers.
✔ Set up website; wrote sales and suppport content; integrated with credit card / invoice processing system; used web analytics and multivariate testing to improve conversions.
✔ Set up a blog to help market the product by becoming recognized as a thought leader in the relevant space. This led to quotes in other blogs, print magazines, radio shows and even a book!
✔ Worked with outsourced contractors to produce various components.

Founder & CEO

Finjan

Finjan Software (www.finjan.com), since acquired by Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), is a leading provider of proactive secure content management solutions for global enterprises, protecting over 4 million enterprise users from existing and future Internet threats.

✔ Member of executive team, reported to CEO 
✔ Initiated product management function; recruited and nurtured a cohesive team of 3 product managers and 2 technical writers
✔ Led migration of product portfolio from software to appliances; developed vision and requirements for an innovative next-generation product line and supervised its successful execution
✔ Acted as catalyst for development of revolutionary technology for the new generation product line
✔ Overall strategic and tactical responsibility for 9 products
✔ Active participant in strategic sales efforts to global corporations (including multiple successful deals of over 100,000 seats/$3M each) and in OEM and technology partner relationships
✔ Spokesman for press interviews, webinars, etc.

VP Product Management

Alchemedia

Alchemedia Technologies developed enterprise security products that prevent information theft by trusted insiders - today's costliest information security problem.

After leaving Alchemedia, I participated in the design review for Microsoft Windows Rights Management platform in Redmond. Microsoft has recently (2005) licensed Alchemedia's technology for use in their security products.

✔ Joined as Senior Product Manager; promoted to Director; reported to VP Marketing
✔ Initiated product management function at the company; built, trained, managed and mentored a team of 3 product managers and 2 technical writers
✔ Overall tactical responsibility for the product line; feature roadmaps, functional specifications, delivery schedules and marshalling products through Engineering and QA; technical white papers
✔ Cooperated with partners on integrated products 
✔ Held pre/post-sale contacts with global corporations; participated in sales/business development activities.

Director of Product Management

Better On-line Solutions

Better On-line Solutions (www.bosweb.com, NASDAQ: BOSC) develops Voice-over-IP Telephony solutions and networking products for personal and IBM mid-range computers.
 
✔ Managed an e-commerce development product for IBM platforms, developed in cooperation with IBM.
✔ Responsible for technical relationship with IBM; coordinated development with senior IBM staff, including the chief security architect and managers of the HTTP and FTP server products. 
✔ Defined the functional specifications, designed the system architecture, object model and user interface. 
✔ Represented company at trade shows; delivered lectures and presentations at distributor and customer conferences. 
✔ Interviewed and hired prospective team-member candidates.

Product Manager / Team Leader

Engineering Management Expert • Fractional CTO • Remote • 🇮🇱

I help CTOs and Engineering VPs become indispensable by teaching them how to deliver high impact business outcomes, based on a strategic approach and tactical execution, through two 1:1 weekly programmes:

1. Indispensable CTO — Deliver High Impact Business Outcomes — You'll be able to recalibrate your tech department, and optimise it to produce business value that impacts the right metrics.

2. Sharper CTO — Sharpen Your CTO Skills — You'll sharpen up your decision-making abilities, leadership skills, deepen your collaboration with other executives, improve processes in your department, and optimise it for scaling up.

More details → itzysabo.com

I'm a product and engineering executive leader and manager, having alternated between Product and Engineering for much of my career.

As a business oriented software CTO and executive leader, I have experience across a broad range of industries (cyber, fintech, gaming, productivity), business models (B2B, B2C, B2B2C SaaS) and company growth stages.

I help CEOs, CTOs, Engineering VPs, Engineering Managers and teams deliver more business value in less time, by working with them to identify and solve systemic problems that are holding them back, and to align engineering with the company's business goals.

I have built engineering organisations from scratch, managed departments up to 120 people in size, and learnt how to execute hypergrowth, mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs, as well as reorganisations and downsizing.

I have also successfully prepared organisations for audits, certification and licensing in regulated industries.

I am highly analytical, organised and systematic. 

My superpowers include:
- Sharpened problem-solving instincts.
- Leading and managing teams remotely.
- Hiring trustworthy people, then trusting them.
- Proceeding with confidence through labyrinths of uncertainty.
- Communicating effectively with people at all levels of an organisation.
- Seeing the bigger picture, but able to dive into details where necessary.

taplio

The Battle

Tobias Mende

Itzchak Sabo

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