Isaak Tsalicoglou

I currently manage RENT21 P.C. and lead Tethys’ first-ever incubation of a software venture: of the one and only “command center” for end-to-end property management in the Greek real-estate market, Breek.gr .

In parallel, I am developing my own micro-SaaS offering by coding in Elixir. Some of the software I develop is open-sourced with the Apache 2.0 License.

With 15+ years of experience, I provide the holistic business acumen, pragmatism and technocommercial expertise required for analyzing opportunities and developing robust business models, business plans, technocommercial product marketing strategies and content, and consultancy on product development and launch, product portfolio management, and operations improvement.

Since April 2020 I oversee and contribute to all operations of TECTRA Ltd as its Managing Director. Beyond the day-to-day management from the first customer contact to revenue recognition, we have been streamlining operations, driving continuous improvement, and enhancing customer touchpoints to better serve our evolving customer base across Greece and in neighboring countries.

The result has been a drastic reduction of effort in getting things done, from anywhere through digital means, i.e. own software solutions and/or open-source software deployed for managing product master data, customer data and inventories, for consistent pricing, offer generation and order tracking.

This rampant increase in productivity supported the company’s excellemt 2023 results with record-low management and administrative efforts, despite post-COVID market headwinds.

At Proceq , my Product Management team worked together intensely to develop itself into a skilled team of product managers and experts through the relentless use of methods, coaching, and meticulous interviewing.

Together with our Global Sales colleagues we spearheaded the launch of the world’s first handheld, iPad-enabled radar device and, in 2019 launched 10+ products in Singapore , including products that pushed the boundaries of technology , subscription-based models, and global industry benchmarks . Parallel to that, I kickstarted the geotechnical product portfolio , developed the product pipeline for doubling global revenues within 5 years, and repeatedly helped product development teams get unstuck.

After returning to Greece in late 2019, I analyzed the industrial equipment portfolio distributed by TECTRA Ltd and executed a two-pronged marketing strategy to expand our customer base and increase revenue from higher-value product variants in new industry segments. Since then, TECTRA Ltd has shattered its pre-2020 revenue records twice, with over 90% of 2023’s best-ever revenues coming from customers who were inactive between 2016 and 2019.

At Hilti Corporation I contributed to developing and improving knowlege-work processes for Product Portfolio Management, i.e. for defining development roadmaps out of new market/technology opportunities, for research, technology development, product development, engineering change management, and related methods and know-how.

Moreover, I played a key role in expanding the company’s capabilities into service products , represented all Business Units in a McKinsey & Co. project in the definition of the company’s new SDLC (Software Development LifeCycle), used System Dynamics to discover causes of dynamic delays in development project and, together with the Global Lean team, developed the principles of the “Hilti Development System”.

Highlights were the turnaround and cross-BU rollout of a stagnant 7-year-long initiative on Requirements Engineering and Management, the development of the product vision and UX/UI of an internal web app for managing Logistics’ pipeline-fill process, and the development and launch of the “Service Time-To-Money” process landscape for service product development based on Agile principles and the Lean Startup methodology.

Finally, through noito GmbH I provided consultancy and training on technology/product development and management capabilities, and developed a modular service product for data-driven technology co-development.

At ABB Turbo Systems Ltd (now Acceleron Industries ) I had the opportunity to grow from developing turbomachinery components to developing the engineering design processes themselves, and improving them with engineering optimization and Machine Learning.

A fruit of this labor was a Python toolkit for engineering optimization of complex mechanical components and their interfaces with 3D CAD, FEA and CFD, and the modularization of legacy Fortran 77 and C++ code to make it usable for embarassingly-parallel computation an an HPC cluster.

The most notable accomplishment was the development and portfolio-wide application of a novel, proprietary method and supporting Python tools for the probabilistic design of turbocharger shafts utilizing large-scale simulations at a massive scale.