FOR CEOs POST-PMF

PMF didn't fix the system.

For 25+ years we have helped CEOs find the internal frictions blocking growth — the ones market data won't show.

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SELECTED CLIENT WORK

THE PATTERN

Customer pain or stalled revenue rarely have customer or revenue causes.

Underneath every customer or revenue stall, we see four frictions repeat — Strategic, Structural, Operational, Execution. One usually dominates.

STRATEGIC FRICTION

When direction is unclear and priorities collide at every layer.

Strategy decks land. Decisions don't.

STRUCTURAL FRICTION

When org design and ownership no longer match how the company actually scales.

Ownership lives everywhere. Accountability lives nowhere.

OPERATIONAL FRICTION

When processes break, handovers stall, and work falls between teams.

Customers feel the gap before the team does.

EXECUTION FRICTION

When delivery slows, quality drops, and firefighting becomes the operating mode.

Releases slip. Hotfixes accumulate. The team burns out.

FIND YOURS

Which one is yours?

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PROOF · 14 DOCUMENTED TRANSFORMATIONS

Where the diagnosis carried.

Five mandates featured below. Fourteen documented at /cases.

Version 138

The path I sketched — VDSL → FTTC → FTTB → FTTH — and the contingent-model logic that BNetzA and the Monopoly Commission later reviewed are still load-bearing sixteen years on; along that path, DTAG has cumulatively invested in the order of €17 billion.

Structural Friction

EWE Tel

01/2013 – 09/2016

Six Moves, One Reshape

40,000 external customers in twelve months, 20,000 internal connections to EWE itself, largest single deployment of 8,000 employees, roughly two-thirds shorter time-to-provision, and a Best UX Award for the integrated self-service platform; the write-off was absorbed through the partnership architecture.

Operational Friction

Landesbank Bremen

01/2016 – 12/2016

What the Assistant Wanted

Bid won against formally stronger competitors via a persona-driven demo from the daily life of the CIO's assistant; the platform went into production in December 2016, and the codetermination conflict over recording classification was resolved by capturing securities IDs at the trading desk during the call rather than by manual post-processing.

Customer Friction

Kardex

09/2023 – 02/2024

The CEO Wanted AI; the Customers Didn't

Customer interviews showed that customers wanted preventive maintenance and a better spare-parts logic, not predictive; the roadmap was adjusted accordingly, the AI feature was not added to the product, and the four-person software-PM team was lifted over six months into a more sustainable position inside the hardware-shaped corporation and handed over to a successor.

Execution Friction

Liberty Global

01/2018 – 09/2018

Michael, Pull the Plug

Recommendation to retire the programme; the board carried it, realising in the order of €113 million as sunk-cost write-off and avoiding a substantially larger follow-on investment in a non-viable product — Liberty Global subsequently bought an SD-WAN solution externally.

A LIBRARY OF 546 FRAMEWORKS

Find the lens that fits your stage.

From 3C Analysis to Wardley Maps. Organized by lifecycle stage and family.

Explore the full library →

PMF–PCF Matrix Wardley Map Friction House Jobs-to-be-Done Theory of Constraints North Star Metric OKRs Porter's Five Forces

THE FIRST STEP

Find the friction that's blocking growth.

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