Chapter 14: For the Love of Fun

When the going gets tough, the tough… find joy. This chapter explores how laughter, teamwork, and an unshakable belief in their mission helped Signavio navigate technical crises and team transformations.

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Transcript

Finally, we were back in the flow.

The issues with cash collection were now under control, we had secured fresh funding, and I had found a great new CFO for the company: Daniel Rosenthal. I just had to wait a few months until Daniel could start in his new position.

Meanwhile, Mark continued to drive the Go-To-Market side of our business with full force. The year prior, we had launched in the UK and a couple of other European countries. Especially the UK developed very well under Ian Pollard’s leadership and became one of the key regions to drive our growth.

Our expansion into Australia proved to be a great success story, and this was no accident. Initially, Daniel Furtwängler was based in Singapore, but it soon became clear that Australia was a better fit for us due to its strong local demand and cultural openness to Western businesses. Australia’s geographic distance from major business hubs meant it was often overlooked, creating a market that valued consistent in-country presence and support. Daniel spent increasing amounts of time there, laying the groundwork that ultimately positioned us for rapid growth.

We could attract great talent, including our sales leader, Andrew White, based in Melbourne. Andrew’s leadership turned us from an unknown entity into a market leader in under 18 months. Customers appreciated our commitment to building a strong local team - especially in Melbourne and Sydney - and hardly any of our competitors had employees in Australia.

This success reflected a keen understanding of Australia’s unique market dynamics. We were able to capture a loyal customer base by consistently showing up, engaging deeply, and even participating in cultural norms like after-work beers and community events. By being present, we won both trust and business.

In terms of revenue, Australia soon joined our top-performing regions. Our four leading countries became Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, in that order. This rapid expansion was a testament to both strategic decisions and our ability to seize new opportunities as a unified team.

On the product side, we faced the first serious issues of scale. One day, we experienced a disastrous outage of our cloud service in Europe. One of our developers deployed a faulty script that ended up deleting the database for the entire European cluster!

Naturally, we had backups in place. But we had never properly tested how long it would actually take to recover the systems from those backups. Compounding the problem was the massive adoption we were seeing, which had caused our databases to grow significantly in size. What should have been a well-rehearsed recovery process instead turned into a drawn-out nightmare.

In the end, it took us 23 hours to bring the system back online. Twenty-three hours of downtime is an eternity for a cloud company - an absolute disaster. We were acutely aware of the frustration this caused for our customers, and the incident was a painful wake-up call. It became clear that while we had achieved impressive growth, we were not yet “enterprise grade” in many critical areas. Our lack of scalable backup protocols and our failure to thoroughly test recovery processes showed us just how vulnerable we were when pushed to the limits.

During the crisis, we were sleeping in the office, determined to stay until the issue was fully resolved. The experience left a lasting impact on our team. We realized we needed to implement better governance, invest in more robust operational processes, and make sure we never put our customers in such a position again. It was a humbling lesson in the realities of scaling a cloud service and a reminder that growth without stability is a fragile achievement. 

In moments like this, a culture of blame would have been counterproductive. Instead, we leaned into a culture of forgiveness. Yes, we were all frustrated - how could we not be? But our focus shifted immediately to finding a solution. There was no time to dwell on individual mistakes when our priority was getting the systems back up and ensuring it never happened again.

Our development team had grown to more than 80 people by now, but we were still operating like a small company with only 10 developers. We had never structured it properly, and everyone had the same title - “developer” - with no differentiation of roles.

Nico and Willi knew that the current operating model was not scalable and they urgently needed to bring it to the next level. To help us make this leap, they found a very talented colleague, Bar Schwartz, who came from McKinsey Digital. Bar had extensive experience in setting up Product and Engineering organizations the right way. She designed the blueprint for our new structure and introduced the roles we would need moving forward.

So far, our team leads wore three hats at the same time. They acted as product owners, defining what should be developed and maintaining the backlog; tech leads, serving as key architects, making important technical decisions, and guiding the developers; and people leads, ensuring their teams performed well and continued to learn and grow. Balancing all these responsibilities was simply not sustainable.

When we evaluated our existing team leads, we realized none of them excelled across all three dimensions. Most were skilled in just one, while a handful were good at two. None were good at all three.

This insight drove us to implement a major change: the “dual leadership” model. Under this structure, each team would have three distinct leaders - a product owner, a tech lead, and a people lead. The people lead would take on the responsibility of managing and developing people, while the product owner and tech lead would focus on functional aspects of their teams. The people lead would have 15 to 25 direct reports, spanning multiple teams.

We also defined additional roles such as Product Manager, Designer, Frontend Engineer, and Agile Coach. We developed a skills matrix for each position to guide future hiring and ensure we could effectively assess and support our existing teams. This approach allowed us to place everyone in roles where they could thrive and contribute most effectively as we continued to grow.

Our engineering team thrived on autonomy, problem-solving, and collaboration. From the start, we focused on building truly autonomous teams who could make their own decisions, take risks, and own their outcomes. Nico and Willi often emphasized the importance of giving clear direction while empowering teams to choose how to achieve it. Product managers worked closely with the engineering teams to prioritize what drove maximum impact for our customers and market opportunity, ensuring alignment between vision and execution.

Willi summed it up well: "The key was connecting the why and the how." This approach kept everyone engaged and focused on impact. We held quarterly planning sessions to align goals and connected through offsites and customer feedback events. Our growth was rooted in trust and people-first values, balancing autonomy with alignment.

Bar asked me whether I was really sure that I wanted to pursue this transformation. 

“It all makes sense, why shouldn’t we do it?” I asked her.

“Most likely, you will lose 25% of your team throughout the transition”, she replied. “This is a tough change. The organization will look very differently afterwards. Some people will not like it and will go find another company. And we will see drops in productivity, while we reshuffle the teams.”

Wow, 25% was a high number. However, we urgently needed to bring the organization to the next level, so I agreed to move forward with the program, despite all the risks.

The team leaders were the most impacted by the change. Each of them had to choose which one of the three roles they wanted to assume for the future, relinquishing the other two roles. Interestingly, 80% chose to become tech leads and 20% chose the product owner roles. None of the previous team leads wanted to take on the people leadership position; they were more than happy to hand that responsibility over to someone else.

After six months, we completed most of the transition and adopted the new way of working. Bar was surprised by the results: we didn’t lose a single colleague due to the changes. Every team member stayed on board and stepped into their new roles.

We also needed to restructure the product organization at the very top. Nico and Willi were outstanding engineering leaders, but they had little interest in driving product management for Signavio. They were happy to leave those responsibilities to me and avoided most interactions with the Go-To-Market team. I didn’t have the bandwidth to be Signavio’s Chief Product Officer (CPO) going forward and therefore, we started recruiting for a proper CPO as a peer for Nico and Willi.

Additionally, each product required a dedicated product manager. One of our standout hires was Alessandro Manzi, who joined us from Celonis. With his extensive expertise in Process Mining, Alessandro quickly became one of our star team members and a key asset to the company.

While the leadership team worked well on a personal level, the collaboration between development and Go-To-Market was fundamentally broken. And the worst thing of all: We didn’t even notice it.

Mark discussed all Go-To-Market related topics with me directly. Nico and Willi discussed all development-related topics with me directly, too. Unfortunately, I didn’t make sure that ends met, making decisions regarding Go-To-Market and development completely independently.

“Gero, how about launching in Japan?” Mark asked me one day. “This is a big market for us. We even have the right leader already - one of our Australian colleagues is interested in moving to Tokyo. His wife is Japanese and he fluently speaks the language, too. What do you think?”

Cool, Japan, I thought. I had never been, nor did I have any knowledge about the country. Mark, however, had more experience with Japan from his previous job and even spoke a bit of Japanese. Plus, Japan was the birthplace of process improvement, with the Toyota production system and approaches like Kaizen.

“Sure, why not?” I responded. Mark went off, leading the expansion to Japan with his team. What could possibly go wrong with such an experienced Go-To-Market crew?

Only six months later, we realized our product was not suited for the Japanese market.

One of the main obstacles was the Yen, the Japanese currency. Unlike most other currencies, the Yen has no decimals. Where you would have amounts like $4.99 dollars or €13.45 euros, you only have ¥50 Yen, not ¥49.99 Yen.

When presenting a software product that performs monetary calculations, it’s crucial to use the correct currency representation. Prospective clients openly laughed at us whenever we displayed the Yen with two decimals.

Changing the representation of monetary values throughout the entire product was a major undertaking and it took us a few months to complete it for all modules. This was massive time wasted in our Japanese sales pursuits. If we had known before, we would have been able to solve it ahead of the launch.

Beyond the currency issue, we faced cultural gaps and underestimated the complexity of translating not just language but product use and interaction with the Japanese market. Our informal decision-making without a clear framework - what essentially started as a casual conversation - revealed operational gaps and the need for structured planning between Go-To-Market and product development.

Moving forward, Japan became a symbol for why Go-To-Market and product development needed to work hand in hand. Planning together was crucial, and this experience in Japan taught us that many such minor oversights with major consequences could appear if we weren’t aligned properly.

Matthias and Steffan from Summit didn’t notice the hiccup. They were generally happy with our numbers and how things were progressing on the Go-To-Market side. Mark had everything under control and was able to clearly articulate our strategy and approach to the investors.

Daniel quickly settled into his role as CFO. He swiftly established our accounting, controlling, legal, and HR functions. Our investors were thrilled. “What an upgrade compared to our previous CFO,” they told me.

With Go-To-Market and finance and admin in capable hands, our investors turned their attention to product development.

Of course, Summit had done very detailed due diligence on that throughout the Series A fundraising process. But this was more than two years ago now and they became very interested in how things had evolved since then.

Nico and Willi obviously participated in all board meetings. As significant shareholders and important voices within the company, they were critical to our success. However, when it came to investor relations, they preferred to step back and let me take the lead. I was the one discussing our product strategy and ensuring that our investors stayed informed on our progress. This was different from the approach with Go-To-Market and finance, where Mark and Daniel maintained close relationships with the investors and frequently engaged with them directly. Nico and Willi did not.

From a numbers perspective, engineering looked solid. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for our product was strong, customer retention was steady, cloud costs were low, and apart from the one major outage, we hadn’t experienced any significant incidents. Yet, despite these metrics, Matthias and Steffan expressed concerns about whether Nico and Willi were the right people for their roles. They found their reserved approach troubling. For their taste, both were simply too quiet. 

I reassured them that everything was fine, and there was no reason for concern. The truth was, I didn’t have a concrete reference point for what “good” should look like. I mainly wanted to avoid any hiccups or unnecessary scrutiny from our investors.

To be proactive, we brought in advisors from the Summit team and assessed whether there were any areas where we could significantly improve in engineering. I was relieved when it turned out that with our organizational transformation, but also with many of the major technical decisions, we were on a very good path. Nico and Willi were off the hook.

As Willi said once, everything we did was "for the love of fun." This mindset fueled our creativity, strengthened our bonds, and kept us energized. Great to see that, almost as a byproduct, we were able to build a solid engineering approach as well.

Things were indeed going well. The only thing that was exhausting for me was traveling around the globe all the time. I spent one week per month in the U.S., flew to Australia occasionally, and visited the UK and France frequently. I participated in most of the major conferences in our space.

Airports became my second home, and overnight flights were the norm. I always traveled economy to save money for the company. With my long legs, these long flights were physically painful. My back was sore most of the time, and I constantly switched time zones, leaving me perpetually sleep-deprived.

Other than that, life was actually pretty good. My kids were happy and healthy.

Karolina started telling me, “Now, it is my turn.” She launched her own company, a fintech called finmarie. Thankfully, my in-laws helped a lot with our kids, often staying over. Without their support, managing life with two companies and two children would have been impossible.

As a company, we had regained our confidence after the invoicing disaster from the previous year. We felt strong again. Signavio was growing well, and it seemed the right time to ensure our key employees could also participate financially in our success.

The lessons learned from our Series B investment round were clear. Allowing our employees to invest had strengthened the bond within our team and deepened their connection to the company’s outcomes. The idea that we were all in this together, bound by a core value of trust, had made us stronger as a group.

So, I convinced my investors to do a second round of employee investments, offering it at the same valuation as our emergency Series B from a year earlier. By now, that valuation was far below market value, and I knew it would be an incredible opportunity for the employees who chose to participate.

“Gero, you are a communist,” my investors joked. But in the end, they agreed.

We invited a couple of dozen employees to join. The minimum contribution was €25,000 euros of their own money. Some employees, believing deeply in Signavio’s future, even borrowed from their families and invested as much as €200,000 euros.

To manage the complexities of the employee equity participation, I set up a structure where I would serve as a trustee for their shares. This meant that I personally held their equity on their behalf, taking on some risk to ensure their participation while also sparing the company from future administrative headaches. Having dozens of individual shareholders would have been a logistical nightmare, especially when it came to shareholder decisions and high-stakes transactions. Acting as a trustee allowed us to keep things efficient while ensuring that our key people were invested in Signavio’s future.

We approached this carefully. In the initial round, we only extended the opportunity to four critical employees - the ones who were most pivotal to our growth and success. Later rounds would broaden the circle of participation. It was about giving those who had built the company a chance to grow with it, and profit from our financial success.

Seeing our employees’ belief in the company and their willingness to invest millions of euros of their own money was deeply humbling. It was a testament to their faith in what we were building together and how strong the bond had become. For every euro they invested, they earned back eight euros just two years later, when SAP acquired us. It was satisfying to see that they, too, could benefit significantly.

We ended the year on a high note, achieving €26 million euros ARR and growing to 250 employees.