Isaak Tsalicoglou

With 15+ years of experience in various products and organizations, I provide the holistic business acumen, pragmatism and technocommercial expertise that new ventures requires for success, as well as what any going concern needs for rejuvenation.

Thanks to always preferring to roll up my sleeves and collaborate, instead of making pretty slides full of buzzwords, my skills range from analyzing opportunities to developing business models and plans, to implementing technology, system architectures, and differentiated products and portfolios, as well as the teams and processes for organizational performance and product quality.

As a Fractional General Manager of RENT21 P.C. with strong Product and Technology skills, I currently 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.

In parallel, for use-cases related to the business model of an equipment distributor like TECTRA Ltd , I am developing my own micro-SaaS offering by coding in Elixir and Phoenix LiveView. Some of the software I develop is available under the open-source Apache 2.0 License.

Beyond Product Portfolio Management and Marketing at TECTRA Ltd , since mid-2020 I am the Managing Director of the company, overseeing and contributing to all of its operations. Additionally, I drive the company’s continuous improvement, and the adaptation of its customer touchpoints and brand to a rapidly-evolving customer base.

Besides the day-to-day management from the first customer contact to revenue recognition, in the past few years I pursued a drastic reduction of effort in getting things done, from anywhere. This was achieved through digital means, i.e. software I developed and/or open-source software I 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 record-breaking 2023 results with record-low management and administrative efforts, and has allowed me to branch out to “The Venture Era” with OVERBRING, my sole-proprietor brand.

Recruited by Proceq based on an article and consultation regarding responsive product management, I built and expanded a skilled team of product managers and experts. Through the relentless use of methods, coaching, and meticulous interviewing, I developed and selected top PM talents in the Swiss market, most of whom are still the company as of 2024.

During that time, I spearheaded the launch of the world’s first handheld, iPad-enabled radar device , achieving global sales in the seven digits within two years. Collaborating across teams, I played a key role in developing over 10 digital-enabled products, initiated the creation of the company’s geotechnical product portfolio , helped development project teams get unstuck in developing a stellar UX , and developed the product pipeline for doubling global revenues within 5 years.

Upon my return to Greece in 2020, I analyzed TECTRA Ltd’s industrial equipment portfolio and executed a two-pronged marketing strategy to expand our customer base and increase revenue from higher-value product variants in new industry segments.

Notable achievements of this era include the late-2019 launch of 10+ Proceq products in Singapore that pushed the boundaries of technology , with some featuring subscription-based models, and with others becoming global industry benchmarks. Additionally, TECTRA Ltd shattered its pre-2020 records, with over 90% of 2023’s best-ever revenues coming from customers who were inactive between 2016 and 2019.

Following my MBA at IMD , at Hilti Corporation I worked on the company’s most complex collaborative 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 across all Business Units and Regional Hubs.

Moreover, I led the expansion of 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 of this era 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 agile service product development.

At the tail-end of this era, through noito GmbH I provided MNCs with 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 developed an arsenal of Python code for the engineering optimization of complex mechanical components and their interfaces by using CAD, FEA and CFD. To this end, I also modularized various legacy Fortran 77 and C++ programs of the company for embarassingly-parallel computation on cutting-edge High-Performance Computing cluster infrastructure.

Over a period of 4 years I developed new engineering design processes from scratch and led an R&D project to establish single-objective and multi-objective engineering optimization as a core competency of the company’s R&D, supported by the then-increasing accessibility of Machine Learning algorithms, and a collaboration with ABB’s Corporate Research Center in Switzerland.

The crowning achievement of this era was the development and portfolio-wide application of a novel, proprietary method of probabilistic design of turbocharger shafts using the Monte Carlo at a massive scale, as well as of all supporting Python software tools for the downstream design processes. These methods are, as of 2024, still being used productively.