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

Delivery Hero

Responsible for the Tech Foundation area. Leading a team of ~50 Product Managers, Product Ops, Project Managers, and Designers in an area with ~250 Engineers

Data Platform
• Provide data infrastructure to the entire company
• Building the ML Platform

Developer Platform
• Built and led adoption efforts for our central developer platform serving ~3k engineers

Core Services
• Providing core capabilities to all of DH and its entities (i.e. Experimentation, Authentication, Image Service, Ops Portal)

Tech Strategy and Operations
• Leading and driving the tech strategy.

Senior Director of Product - Platform

informero UG

Co-Founder and CEO

NXLab

Advisor

peekd

•  Raised the series A together with the founding team.
•  Responsible for the entire product strategy, mission, and vision. Introduced a SaaS solution for consumer brands and retailers and identified areas of product market fit.
•  Hired and established a product management function of 3 product managers, 2 designers and introduced product management processes to ensure proper product discovery, problem definition, design and delivery.
•  Ensured the company is ready for growth by setting up and leading the people and culture function (director of people and culture leading a team of 4).

Chief Product Officer

Stealth Mode Startup

OLX Group

•  Increased customers' trust in the OLX platform globally by 75% (as measured in a trust survey).
•  Doubled the rate of automation in content screening, such that 95% of content was moderated by AI moderators.
•  Scaled the trust and safety area from 10 people (1 team) to more than 70 people (8 teams) - located in Delhi, Poznan, and Berlin.
•  Direct lead for a team of 5 product managers and 1 program manager.
•  Full ownership and accountability for the trust & safety, content quality and customer service KPIs as well as the  products used by 18 local teams in over 40 countries all across the globe.

Global Head of Product - Trust & Safety

Zalando SE

Product management lead for revenue protection (risk management and fraud prevention)
• Building fraud prevention solutions with a focus on deferred payment
• Part of the group defining the holistic strategy for Zalando payments
• Leading a team of 3 product managers

Interims lead for Business intelligence
• Defining and implementing the Business Intelligence strategy for payments
• Leading a team of 4 Analysts/Data Engineers

Interims product management lead for the credit management product 
• Topics included accounts receivables, factoring and dunning/collection
• Leading a team of 1 product manager

Head of Product - Payments

• Laid the foundation for the experimentation platform used at Zalando
• Designed and analysed experiments for evaluating the impact of business processes on user behaviour and business KPIs
• Designed experiments and provided data-driven decision for a variety of stakeholders and departments (e.g. sales, advertising)

One of the authors of the zalando open source Python library for statistical analysis of randomised control trials (A/B tests): https://github.com/zalando/expan

Senior Data Scientist - A/B Testing and Personalisation

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

Worked in the Methods and Development Unit: MEG and EEG – Cortical Networks and Cognitive Functions. Main focus of my work here was the research in the field of local models for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
•	Developed and improved models describing the fibre layout in the human brain
•	Built a library for processing of magnetic resonance tomography images in C/C++

PHD Researcher

Dynardo GmbH

•	Head of the project: Statistics on Structure - visualization of statistical measures on surfaces
•	Development of algorithms for the design and statistical analysis of experiments in C/C++ and SLang

Software Developer - Statistics on Structure

Development of numerical algorithms in C/C++ for incorporation in SLang and OptiSLang.

Software Developer (Working Student)

Product leader with a track record in leading areas building successful data-driven products at scale.

taplio

The Battle

Tobias Mende

Till Riffert

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