Making deep infrastructure usable without hiding its complexity
I owned the company’s only product, the LORIOT Network Server, and led the cross-functional engineering team building one of the earliest commercial LoRaWAN platforms.
The infrastructure product
LoRaWAN connects battery-powered sensors that need to send small amounts of data over long distances. The network server is the brain between gateways and applications: it deduplicates messages, manages device sessions and security, tunes data rates and routes traffic to customer systems.
LORIOT was founded by one of the engineers behind the first LoRaWAN network server at IBM Zurich and launched one of the first commercial ones in 2015.
Connecting technology and market
- I reported to the CEO, sat on the management team and owned product definition, roadmap and prioritisation.
- I led eight engineers across backend, frontend, embedded and DevOps, hired into the team, worked directly with customers and represented the company at conferences.
- The technical co-founder owned the deepest technical direction. My job was to connect that direction with product, implementation, customers and the team.
Learning the protocol deeply
LoRaWAN v1.0 was not even finished when the product was taking shape. To make decisions I could defend with engineers and demanding customers, I learned the protocol from the specification up, down to reading payloads at bit level.
The product had been built by engineers for engineers. The challenge was to improve usability without pretending that genuinely technical infrastructure was simple.
Making complexity usable
- I rewrote the interface around how customers actually worked, and satisfaction moved for the first time.
- The product and team could serve use cases ranging from agriculture to national telecommunications operators while keeping one coherent network-server platform.
What I would measure earlier
The usability work moved the right signal, but the NPS window was too short to support a durable percentage claim. I would define the baseline, observation period and behavioural measures before the redesign so the result could be evaluated with more confidence.
“With his in-depth knowledge about Agile techniques and his interpersonal skills, he gained the respect of everybody in the office since the beginning. He's a great professional and a true leader, able to inspire and motivate people around him.”