CTOSummit 2024

Claire Fautsch is working as CTO at Joblift, where she is leading the engineering team but also still enjoying regular coding time. She enjoys being part of a team building innovative products and tackle complex challenges. Besides spending all non-coding and tech time with her family, she enjoys reading and sports

Boyan Dimitrov is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SIXT, responsible for the company’s tech vision and strategy. He oversees the SIXT Engineering Hubs in Munich, Bangalore, Kiev, and Lisbon .Prior to joining SIXT in 2015, Boyan had a long career in the startup ecosystems in the UK and Bulgaria. In his last position, he led the platform teams at Hailo in London, where he worked on a global microservices platform in the mobility space. With over 15 years of experience in cloud and distributed systems, Boyan is a frequent speaker at tech conferences around the world. He holds a bachelor’s degree in network technologies and an MSc degree in IT project management from Aston University in Birmingham.

Jan Ramm has built up FREENOW as CTO from the very beginning and has been leading the company through various M&A activities since 2010. FREENOW has been acquired in 2014 by Daimler and 2019 BMW joined as an investor. FREENOW is operating in 9 countries with more than 150 cities, serving more than 48 million users over 430k vehicles. The highly volatile demand on mobility required building a scalable tech stack. Due to the micro margins in mobility reselling, there is not only the need to upscale quickly, but also to downscale to be cost conscious.

Alex has been working with a wide range of industries as a software engineer. In the last 5 years his focus has been on system reliability engineering as a Staff Engineer at 3 companies. He is writing a book about building a mindset for reliability engineering (https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/rem) and is the creator of Service Level Calculator (https://slc.alexewerlof.com/)

Alex Ischenko, VP of Engineering at Elopage (Series A 32M€+, B2B, SaaS, Fintech), began his career as a Software Engineer over 20 years ago and transitioned into Senior Management roles. His extensive experience includes: - 15+ years driving technical strategy and building and leading development teams - 10+ years in startup environments - Managed teams of 150+ FTEs - Expertise in SaaS, Fintech, Insurtech, Healthcare, Gaming, and Real Estate Alex is passionate about mentorship and public speaking, eagerly sharing his leadership and architectural knowledge.

Alexander is the Chief Technology Officer at Adyen. Prior to his role, he was VP Integrations and later EVP Technology in Adyen's Berlin office. Before joining Adyen, Alex was the CTO and Vice-President of Rocket Internet-backed GlossyBox where he gained experience in leading a fast-growing company. He has earned degrees in IT and History from Humboldt University of Berlin.

Martin Janssen has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. He has worked on the product vendor side, on the customer side and on the consultant side. His positions include head of development of an enterprise CMS product, working in a startup for accounting software in the SaaS model, head of product management at a global pool for the exchange of product master data and as a consultant for architecture and IT strategy issues with a focus on SMEs.x

Matthew Skelton is co-author of the award-winning and ground-breaking book Team Topologies, and CEO at Conflux and Team Topologies. The Team Topologies book was rated one of the ‘Best product management books of all time’ by Book Authority and is widely used by organizations worldwide to transform the way they deliver value. Matthew is one of the foremost leaders in modern organizational dynamics for fast flow, drawing on Team Topologies, Adapt Together™️, and related practices to support organizations with transformation towards a sustainable fast flow of value and true business agility via holistic innovation.

Melissa Perri is a strategic advisor, author, and board member that works with leaders at Fortune 500 companies and SAAS scale ups to enable growth through building impactful product strategies and organizations. In 2018 she wrote the industry-acclaimed book "Escaping the Build Trap". Currently, Melissa is the CEO and founder of Produx Labs, which offers e-learning for product people through Product Institute and CPO Accelerator. She is as a board advisor for Labster and Dragonboat, and a former board member of Forsta (acquired by Press Ganey in 2022). In 2019, Melissa was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. She has consulted with dozens of companies to transform their product organizations, including Insight Partners, Capital One, Vanguard, Walmart/Sam's Club. In her free time, you can find her trying to finish her house renovations before something else breaks.

Nadia was one of the Heads of Product at Zalando in Berlin and Hamburg, and she helped launched a retailer media division with Zalando Marketing Services. She was also Director of Programmatic at WPP / GroupM / EssenceMediacom for the Mars account in New York, and she got to work on a part of the super bowl ad for M&M's, where they had a political argument about whether the shoes for the candy were sexy enough. The list of buzzwords she worked on include: radical agility, agile marketing, OKR, and NPS. Currently, she started GroupLGBTQ.com, a media company selling ads for websites and influencers, in order to help queer people everywhere make enough money to survive. She also volunteered with CherryOnTech this year, an organization that helps people of underrepresented genders start careers in product management.

Neil Metzler built multi-$MM revenue streams during his 10-year tenure at Amazon in Seattle, London and Berlin. He is currently a Senior Cloud Business Advisor at DoiT. DoiT deliver cost optimization solutions, terms negotiation expertise and trusted technical advisory for multiple Alphalist member CTOs. Globally, DoiT helped customers realize >$300MM in annualized cloud cost savings. Neil has been recognized as a TEDx speaker on self-directed career development in tech. In his private coaching practice, Neil works with founders and senior technical leaders on wellbeing at work, burnout risk reduction and life after being laid off. 

Sarah Polan is the EMEA Field CTO at HashiCorp where she leads executive advisory for customers in multi-cloud strategy and adoption. With a background in security, and as a leader in the Financial Services Industry, she previously focused on containerized workloads, cloud identity, and secrets management. She aims to elevate strategic conversation surrounding cloud adoption and improve the balance between technical enablement, velocity, and security. **Fun Fact:** Before Sarah joined the tech industry, she trained as an opera singer.  

anessa Stumpf is an Strategic Account Executive at Storyblok with more then 8+ years Software / SaaS Sales experience for different industries and company sizes. Her fields of expertise include Data &AI, CRM and CMS, differentiating benefits from headless architectures versus Software platform solutions. She enjoys supporting and guiding companies on the journey to great digital customer experiences and composable content.