Chapter 19: Settling In

Leadership transitions and personal milestones collide in this intimate chapter, as Gero reflects on maintaining momentum while building deeper connections with his team and family.

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Transcript

“Gero, it is time for me to go.”

Every now and then, Willi had asked me whether he could take a longer vacation. He needed a break to recharge and regain his energy.

My standard response was always the same, “I hear you, Willi. But now is not a good time, there is just too much to do.”

Willi had seen the engineering organization grow rapidly under his leadership. From a bunch of students to several teams, to multiple product groups and now to more than 300 developers, the expansion continued at a rapid pace, and it was clear that the team would grow again significantly. After 13 years of full dedication, he could sense that the coming years would prove extremely stressful again. “This is the right moment to dedicate more time to my family,” Willi said. “I will leave SAP Signavio and hand over my responsibilities in the coming months.” This time, I knew I couldn’t hold him back. He would leave for real.

Willi cared deeply about our teams and dedicated significant effort to their well-being. He was more than a manager; he was like a nurturing figure for the team. No typical “manager” could fill the void he would leave behind. 

I feared that Willi’s departure might trigger an exodus of other long-time Signavians. He had worked closely with many of them and had become “Mr. Engineering” at Signavio.

I sensed that it needed to be me to step in. I couldn’t stay out of engineering any longer. I needed to serve as a point of identification and stability, ensuring that we didn’t lose key leaders. On top of that, I had to see Willi’s exit as an opportunity to elevate the organization to the next level.

Willi’s departure came at a particularly challenging time in my personal life. My wife was pregnant with our third child, due in the summer. I had promised Karolina that I would significantly cut back my work hours and take care of our newborn.

With our first two children, Karolina had shouldered most of the responsibilities during those early months. This time, she wanted to focus more on her own startup. Life rarely aligns perfectly with our plans. Thankfully, my father-in-law stepped in and moved to Berlin for a few months to help with the baby, making it possible for me to balance work and family.

Torsten Zube, a long-time SAP employee, led the development team for Process Insights.  Juuso Hämäläinen, an external consultant, had significant experience in change management and was also the funniest Finnish person I’d ever met. They became my key partners for planning the next steps for SAP Signavio. 

Finnish is such an interesting language and very different from all other languages I came across. Did you know that there is only one Finnish word that changes its meaning entirely based on intonation? “No niin” (or “noni” for short) can express everything from “well, …” to “good” or even “really?” depending on how you say it. This one word will allow you to have a full conversation with a Finn. I’ve always loved languages. Sorry for the brief detour - back to the story.

My main goal was to strengthen connections with our most critical engineering leaders while ensuring the organization ran smoothly and efficiently.

Without Torsten’s support, I would have been completely lost. He was different from me in all the right ways. Whenever I started dreaming big, Torsten would ground me by asking, “And what does that mean exactly? How do we turn that into a plan?” I often left things too vague, but Torsten couldn’t stand ambiguity and always pushed for clarity and answers.

To mark the start of the “post-Willi era,” I wanted to create a meaningful experience for the team. Juuso had the excellent idea to take us all to Lapland, to Northern Finland, for a week.

Using my tried-and-true formula for successful offsites - 70% fun, 30% work - we filled our schedule with husky tours, skidoo racing, and watching the northern lights, while also dedicating some time to strategic content work.

I don’t remember much of what we worked on, but I vividly recall the bonding moments in the snow. There was Bastian Steinert almost getting lost in the forest at -20°C, Andre Wenz flipping his skidoo during an intense race, and the entire team gathering around a reindeer sausage shack once all the bars in town had closed.

It was an ideal way to unite the new engineering team and ignite their enthusiasm for the journey ahead. Even the fact that nearly all of us caught Covid on the trip couldn’t ruin the experience.

2022 brought a lot of change, well beyond Willi’s departure. We completed the “Legal Entity Consolidation” (LEC) for all countries, which meant that Signavio GmbH in Germany, Signavio Inc. in the U.S., and all the other international subsidiaries were legally merged into the corresponding entities of SAP.

It might sound like a mere administrative step, but it had wide implications on all kinds of dimensions. Most visibly for our colleagues, they now officially became SAP employees with SAP contracts. They now lived in the SAP “job architecture,” fit into SAP seniority levels with SAP salary bands, and went through the SAP annual compensation cycle.

We had intense discussions with SAP HR to make sure the job leveling went right. On average, we had paid people less than what was common at SAP and now wanted to adjust that, while career progression at Signavio had gone much faster, spurred by the super-fast growth of our organization.

With Signavio dissolving as a standalone company, we needed to make sure we built a strong identity for SAP Signavio inside of SAP, now more than ever.

Consistent branding became a top priority, and we pushed hard to ensure that everything process-related at SAP was also called SAP Signavio. We even rebranded certain SAP products to SAP Signavio whenever they fell into the process domain.

For the SAP folks involved, this felt a little awkward at times, almost like a reverse takeover. On the other hand, there was this special vibe to SAP Signavio, and people gladly wanted to be part of it. Indeed, many colleagues from within SAP applied for jobs in our teams.

We didn’t want to be separate from SAP in any way. We rather wanted to create the new, cool version of SAP. We aimed to be the frontrunners for how a great team inside of SAP could look like. I loved it when colleagues told me, “I have been with SAP in different units for many years already, but this is the greatest place by far.”

With Rouven as my fearless co-leader, we had the perfect setup. He liked to call it his “shit umbrella,” whenever he made sure that unnecessary SAP burden didn’t affect our teams.

We retained a lot of good habits as our team grew. We could identify deeply with SAP’s “How we run” behaviors: Tell it like it is, stay curious, embrace differences, keep the promise, and build bridges, not silos. However, we also knew that we were somewhat special and wanted to find the right words for it.

We decided to introduce a sixth behavior, as the SAP Signavio superpower: Dare to try, fail, and learn.

We wanted people to continue experimenting and to celebrate failure, as long as they learned from it. We had immense opportunity but also expectations in front of us. We knew that incremental improvements wouldn’t do and that we needed to bend the curve. Only through initiative and the courage to fail would we be able to make the leap forward and continue to reinvent ourselves.

Honesty and transparency are important ingredients to accepting the necessary actions for growth, however difficult. There is no point in sweeping things under the carpet and trying to suffer through alone.

Stefan Krumnow was a perfect example of this brutal honesty. He led the engineering teams for some of our longer-running products. There was a lot of tech debt that his teams needed to fight, combined with the largest number of users active on his products. Progress was slow, and there was a lot of frustration from Go-To-Market hitting his teams all the time.

Stefan realized that his organization needed to push the pause button and fix certain important issues, both technically and operationally, before they could move forward again. We agreed to suspend all feature deliveries by a quarter and spend the time on fixing the root causes of the struggle.

While some might have seen Stefan’s “stability quarter” as the ultimate sign of failure of the leader, we celebrated it and embraced it fully together, in order to build the strength for the years to come.

All together, we needed to reach the next level with SAP Signavio. The market opportunity in front of us was massive, and now with SAP’s machinery backing us, we could actually tap into it. Our customers and user numbers suddenly became much larger and more demanding, bringing both immense potential and new challenges.

SAP’s gravity was real. It could accelerate our progress and magnify our reach, but it could also pull us in too deeply, risking our distinctiveness.

I love gravity, especially when it can be harnessed. Downhill mountain biking is my big hobby, and I love racing down the Alps. However, extreme gravity creates black holes. In a black hole, gravity is so powerful that even light cannot escape. You literally become invisible.

Integration with SAP was a journey full of challenges and learning curves. As we transitioned from being an independent company into becoming SAP Signavio, I faced the intricate task of merging our teams and values while adapting to SAP's established organizational structure. Preserving our unique identity while navigating this giant organization was a balancing act.

There were areas where it was clear we had to diverge from SAP’s rigid framework - especially when it came to roles, strategy cycles, and decision-making processes. SAP brought vast resources and scale, but Signavio had thrived on agility, creativity, and a sense of human connection. To preserve this spirit, I advocated for maintaining our team-centric culture, flexible work arrangements, and innovative practices. We needed to keep the elements that made us successful, even as we aligned with SAP’s larger operational standards.

Our cultural integration wasn’t just about processes - it was about people. 

This topic was especially dear to my heart. SAP’s push for a mandatory return-to-office policy wasn’t in-line with what worked for us. Remote and flexible work had become ingrained in how we collaborated and maintained productivity, while at the same time allowing and even encouraging colleagues from across locations to meet in person.

We ran our own leadership development program across the newly formed SAP Signavio team. We called it the Integration Acceleration Studio (IAS). More than a hundred participants from Go-To-Market and Product and Engineering from across the globe came together in a number of cohorts, to learn leading practices together, solve their most pressing business challenges together, but equally importantly, have fun together and bond.

Throughout this consolidation period of integration I saw my role as a bridge-builder. I became an advocate for maintaining our unique Signavio culture while fostering trust and collaboration within SAP. I was determined that SAP Signavio would stand out as a place where people loved to work.

At SAP Signavio, we needed to leverage SAP’s gravity to amplify our impact while simultaneously escaping it enough to maintain our unique value and agility.

That gravity was most visible when it came to crafting our product strategy. The big wave of ERP migrations to the cloud created a massive business opportunity for us. Every time a company replaced its old ERP system with a new one, a large number of business processes were necessarily touched. We had the perfect product to manage and optimize those transformations.

On the other hand, we had to be vigilant not to be pigeonholed as just an ERP migration tool. Our market potential was much broader than ERP transformation alone. Every year, companies around the globe spend up to $200 billion dollars on process improvement consulting. Our products could augment and even replace significant aspects of these projects. If we captured just 5% of this market opportunity, we could reach revenues of $10 billion dollars.

With this opportunity in mind, I started claiming that transformation management software could outpace ERP in terms of revenue impact for SAP. Yes, transformation management would be bigger than ERP for SAP. That’s what I started claiming. Given SAP’s 50-year legacy in ERP and its humongous revenue contribution, it was a bold statement.

Revenue-wise, we still had a long road ahead. At the time of acquisition, we had just surpassed €50 million euros in ARR. Now, we had crossed the €100 million mark. However, reaching the €500 million milestone that Luka identified as the level of “here to stay” at SAP still seemed far off. Billions in revenue were an even more distant goal.

“Gero, you are a dreamer,” some colleagues said. On the other hand, the pattern is always the same: First you dream, then you believe, and then you make it real. But don’t ask me for the exact plan, please, that really is not my strong suit.

The SAP install base provided a strong foundation, with its massive customers serving as powerful validation points for our software. However, our mission was to create the most value for the broadest range of customers, rather than solely optimizing for SAP’s largest accounts.

If we wanted to succeed in the long run, we shouldn’t just celebrate large customer deals. SAP had thrived on serving very large customers for decades, sending vast numbers of people to help ensure their success. While large customer deals were significant, our focus needed to shift toward scale: delivering value repeatedly, efficiently, and fast, and in vast quantities for every customer.

One of the key ingredients to this approach was speed. Time-to-value became a crucial success metric.

Our Process Insights product exemplified this. We reduced the time it took to connect to a customer’s system and deliver actionable insights on process performance down to minutes. We even demonstrated it live during a keynote at one of our major customer events: connecting to a customer’s previously unanalyzed system on stage and surfacing actionable process improvement ideas within minutes.

Having launched Process Insights in late 2021, our sales goal for 2022 was €5 million euros in new ARR for this product - a target we initially found ambitious. We hit that goal within the first two quarters, prompting us to raise our expectations even higher.

I introduced the “14x14 challenge”: to achieve €14 million euros in new ARR for the year and deliver meaningful insights within 14 minutes for each customer.

At first, the team was intimidated by this new target but in true SAP Signavio spirit, we rose to the challenge and surpassed both targets by the end of the year.

Another critical element of delivering customer value was deepening our understanding of how business transformations actually work within organizations. Up to this point, we primarily provided software tools with some domain expertise in specific business processes. We lacked comprehensive transformation expertise - a gap we urgently needed to fill.

Rouven’s brilliant idea solved this problem. He convinced an entire team from Deloitte’s “Center for Process Bionics” to join us. Led by Tobias Unger, they brought vast experience in guiding business transformations and significantly strengthened our strategic customer transformation team.

While SAP Signavio was growing and evolving at a remarkable pace, I also found myself needing to figure out my own role within SAP. The integration of Signavio into SAP was progressing well, and it quickly became clear that the acquisition was a significant win for SAP. Seeing the positive impact made me proud, but it also pushed me to reflect on what I wanted next.

On one hand, I wanted to honor my promise to my family to step back and be more present at home. The birth of my third son was just around the corner, and I had long owed my wife the chance to prioritize her career after she had taken the lead in raising our older children. On the other hand, SAP was truly a fantastic place to work. I felt energized by the opportunity to contribute further, beyond the boundaries of SAP Signavio.

Many colleagues encouraged me to set my sights on SAP’s executive board. Some even engaged in bets that I would be the CEO of SAP at some point. It was flattering, and I understood why they saw potential in me climbing the corporate ladder. However, I wasn’t tempted. The role as an executive board member seemed to involve too much of what I wanted to avoid: constant travel, public scrutiny, and being unable to truly dive deep into meaningful content. Every offhand comment could lead to a storm of backlash or wind up in the press. I cherished my autonomy and focus as General Manager of SAP Signavio. And we already had a great CEO, Christian Klein.

So what was my destiny instead? I had no clue.

For the first time since founding Signavio, I had a boss - Luka Mucic, SAP’s CFO. Like every SAP employee, I also went through the annual compensation review. I made a point to Luka that I didn’t want any raise nor any stock options from SAP. I had enough money already. He was surprised to hear my request, and I could almost see the corporate alarm bells going off. Some people quickly assumed that I was planning my exit. 

The truth was simpler: money was no longer my motivation. My satisfaction came from building, influencing, and making a difference, not from an increased paycheck. So, I redirected any budget allocated for me to my team instead.

Additionally, I requested to reduce my contract to part-time in anticipation of my third son’s birth. Apparently, this was a rare move for someone in senior leadership at SAP. Officially, I have stayed on part-time ever since, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. The flexibility allowed me to support my family more actively while still contributing to the growth of SAP Signavio.

I loved meeting new people inside of SAP. As lockdowns finally ended, physical events began making a welcome comeback to our calendars. SAP organized an offsite gathering in Miami, inviting its 200 senior executives. The chance to meet and connect with colleagues I’d heard so much about - but had never met in person - was invaluable. For the first time, I truly felt integrated into the broader SAP family. And, of course, Miami is an incredible place to have any event.

There was a palpable sense of mutual respect among the leaders. As the only founder of an acquired company still around - the founders of Concur, SuccessFactors, Hybris, and others had all moved on - people were engaged and interested in hearing my perspective and the lessons from our journey with Signavio. It was gratifying to see the curiosity and engagement from others, and yet humbling to realize that many of these leaders managed businesses far larger than SAP Signavio. In the vast scale of SAP, we were still just a small piece of the puzzle.

I seized every in-person networking opportunity I could. I attended a leadership training program in Paris, connecting deeply with my peers and expanding my insights into effective leadership and strategic growth. Evenings spent at Sapphire, SAP Select, MaxAttention and all the other big customer events were especially memorable, filled with lively conversations that stretched late into the night. Those moments provided me with invaluable quality time to bond with fellow leaders and gain a wealth of knowledge from their experiences.

Leonard, our third son, was born on July 7 - healthy and happy. I cherished those early weeks and took full advantage of the chance to spend time with him. Holding him, watching his tiny expressions, and being there for every little moment felt incredibly special and grounding.

I had promised Karolina that I wouldn’t travel for the rest of the year, and I made good on that commitment, aside from a few unavoidable exceptions. After years of relentless pace, it felt like a gift to slow down and be present at home.

But I also discovered something about myself during this time: while I loved being a hands-on dad, I wasn’t suited to be a full-time stay-at-home parent. I could fully immerse myself in baby time for a couple of hours, but soon I found myself itching for a new work challenge. I needed that sense of purpose and engagement to feel balanced and energized.

During this period, I was approached by many people offering me roles in other companies. Startups and scale-ups sought me out as a potential CEO. The offers were flattering, but I wasn’t tempted in the slightest. I knew deep down that my journey with SAP wasn’t over yet - there were still intriguing challenges and opportunities ahead that I wanted to pursue.

To cap things off, we ended the year on a high note. We now had over 1,000 employees. The demand for our products continued to surge, and our ARR climbed beyond €140 million euros. It was a testament to the dedication of the entire team and the strength of what we had built together.