I led the product development department for all emerging products in commercetools as the responsible Vice President Engineering closely collaborating with a Director Product. Starting only with the product we sold in 2021 to commercetools additional products and teams were added to my product group. The original product grew from 2M to 10M ARR in 3 years, while successfully launching the additional products into the market. The product-development team grew from 40 to 70 people in this time. While being responsible for the product development and delivery of my product group a key part of my role was internal and external stakeholder management.

commercetools builds B2B enterprise SaaS eCommerce products delivered primarily as services to companies like Lego, VW, Audi, Spehora, ATM, and many others.

Founding, building, and selling a company in an undiscovered field (eCommerce Frontend as a Service) is a journey not easily summarized in a few sentences. Starting by building the product (backend, frontend, infrastructure automation), additionally leading product together with the CEO, participating in investor meetings, selling our product to prospects, and, of course, building an high-performing engineering team which can deliver and scale. Closing deals with and serving the website for the entire online revenue of companies like Apollo, Flaconi, and Green Thumb Industries.

Eventually we onboarded a Chief Sales Officer and a Chief Product Officer I closely collaborated with and we grew the company to 70 people, finding our product-market-fit, and 2M ARR before selling it to commercetools.

We founded Qafoo to teach the art of software quality. As a consultant and manager we taught this to many teams in smaller and larger companies. I was a well-established conference speaker during this time (some of my talks are available on https://kore-nordmann.de/talks/). We eventually also helped out as architects and assisted companies in automating their infrastructure.

While still acting as consultants we developed the first dedicated PHP application performance monitoring tool, available as SaaS. Since 2017 tideways is cashflow-positive and steadily grows by 10% to 25% per year. After participating in the development initially I've only acted as a passive investor since we founded Frontastic.

Starting with developing and leading projects on top of eZ Systems Open Source Content Management System I eventually worked for them as a developer on the Open Source PHP component library eZ Components, which was the first test-driven project in the PHP ecosystem and was eventually handed over to the Apache Software Foundation.