From industry hire to advising International Executives in 18 months with Bob Mertens

I’m Bob, and I’d been working in a purely technical role for almost 4 years before joining Addestino. I was fueled by technical curiosity but missed the bigger picture and the connection to the company as a whole; I wanted to understand the technology and what it could mean for the company. Addestino offered to help me work on exactly that. In the past 18 months, I’ve worked on various projects that have accelerated my career trajectory and added skills to my repertoire.

A large international Telco approached Addestino for a major strategic project in the area of software-defined networking. It’s a project with high value and high uncertainty because the technology is evolving.

I’m the lead on this project and have a consultant Flor, working alongside me. The project touches on core business in terms of growth, profitability, and data communication in the B2B space. The international Telco has subsidiary companies in two European countries. We started the project by interviewing sales, finance, marketing, and product management personnel integrating all that data into one map of the world.

We learned who the customers are, what they buy, which vendors they use, what margins they make, and why they are asking for software-defined networking. The map of the world allows you to balance many data sets and produce a strategic landscape story.

How should software-defined networking be deployed by this Telco in each European country? We will use a set-based design methodology based on our map of the world to define three strategies.

• Aggressive growth
• Protect and slow down
• Reactive vs proactive

Based on these three strategies, what growth they give, and their competitive implications, our Telco customer can derive the most optimal path forward.

I never dreamed that in such a short amount of time, I would be leading an international project with high stakes and working directly with international executives. It’s precisely the role I hoped to grow into, and I’m excited for my future growth with Addestino!