How I work

Definitely Mabe AB (org. nr 556836-0688), Sweden. Contact: mathias@d-ma.be

Every engagement is the same five steps, whether it arrives as a portfolio problem, a research question, or an advertising operation that cannot be run by hand.

01

Pre-study

Stakeholder analysis, customer and market research, landscape studies. The point is to make the problem visible from four directions at once — customers, technology, organisation, regulation — because that is where the real constraint usually sits.

02

The crux

Naming the decisive constraint: the one that, left unresolved, makes everything downstream either cost more than it should or fail quietly. There is normally exactly one, and it is normally not the one the organisation is discussing.

03

Approaches

Options with their trade-offs stated plainly, in language a board and an engineering team can both act on. Including, where it is the honest answer, the option of not proceeding.

04

Implementation

Driving it. This is what separates an interim mandate from advice: being accountable for whether the thing actually happens.

05

Operating model

Leaving the organisation able to run it without me. An engagement that ends with a dependency has failed at the last step, however well the middle went.

The mandate

What I am usually brought in for

A change that is too cross-cutting for any single function to own. The decision needs someone who can hold the customer impact, the technical constraint, the organisational readiness and the regulatory position at the same time — and that person often does not exist on the org chart, because organisations are structured by function and the crux is not.

That is a different thing from an ongoing part-time role. The mandate is defined, the work is hard, and there is an end.

Background

Where the range comes from

Twenty-five years, starting as a backend developer in C and Java on exchange systems, through product ownership of a bank's FX trading platform, portfolio and strategy leadership, an acting CTO role, and business design for an electric aviation manufacturer. An MSc in Computer Science and an MBA in Innovation Management.

The useful part is not the breadth itself but what it allows: a conversation about a business model in the morning and a conversation about the schema underneath it in the afternoon, without either being a translation of the other. About.

Working together

Engagements are usually in regulated or otherwise complex environments — banking and payments, infrastructure, e-commerce operations at scale. Most start with a pre-study, because committing budget before the crux is named is the most expensive mistake available.

The straightforward way to start is an email describing what is stuck: mathias@d-ma.be.