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

Spotify

Principal Product Manager

Senior Product Manager

Product Area Lead, Products and Order Management

Product Area Lead, Conversion

Product Manager

Tandem Bank

Led a team of product managers in charge of acquiring, onboarding, and activating customers to successfully launch a new digital bank

• Defined Growth strategy to meet aggressive first-year business targets
• Launched the Tandem app with a pre-release waitlist of nearly 12,000 users
• Built website, CMS, waitlist, financial product origination, and app onboarding​
• Specified and built end-to-end analytics from four platforms to an internal data warehouse, driving insight, reporting, ad targeting, and remarketing

Senior Product Manager, Growth

HarperCollins Publishers

Set up a digital product function, bringing best practice lean product management to one of the world’s largest publishers

• Developed a market-focused product strategy with the executive team to build ongoing direct relationships with readers and generate meaningful revenue
• Built an award-winning Game of Thrones app: 20k downloads in first 3 weeks, featured by Apple, 50% of users signed in with email or social, 4.8 star rating
• Explored 20 opportunity areas, from eBooks to live events and connected cars
• Led discovery and development of two new greenfield user-centric platforms

Product Manager, Group

Guardian News & Media

Owned the Guardian’s “open journalism” digital strategy to improve journalism and reader engagement

• Managed the Guardian’s comment platform, increasing commenter conversion by 30–40% and comments by 85% over 14 months
• Developed a business case to build new moderation tools, improving time to action by 25% despite increased volumes and without expanding the team
• Performed analysis and communicated insight using tools including Adobe Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, PostgreSQL, d3.js, and R

Cincom Systems

Provided technical product expertise for the sales team and defined customer requirements for two enterprise products

• Designed a new agile process workshop, where 10-20 developers work simulataneously on a single live codebase, earning invites to present at 20 European events
• Proposed and implemented a Continuous Delivery process, reducing release build time from several hours to just a few minutes

Pre-sales Consultant

Seaside Web Framework

Created a popular open-source web application framework in Smalltalk, offering component-based encapsulation, flexible callbacks, continuation-based control flow, and a rich development and debugging environment

Co-creator and Core Developer

Self-employed

Independent consulting work, supporting worldwide clients with system design, software development, and on-site training

Software and systems consultant

Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Led a team responsible for all university web services and core network infrastructure

Senior Programmer Analyst

The University of British Columbia

Part of an agile pilot team, collocated with clients to design and build web applications supporting the university’s researchers

Programmer/Analyst

Customer-focused product manager with an Oxford MBA and 20 years expertise delivering digital products in North America and Europe, across industries including entertainment, fintech, publishing, and education. A former developer with a design degree and a deep understanding of using data and product best practice to build products that customers love!

taplio

The Battle

Tobias Mende

Julian Fitzell

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