Capability built to last.

Building more products was not enough. The capability had to work without depending on me.

As demand grew, a small internal team could no longer rely on a few people knowing how everything worked.

More products meant more decisions:

• Which problems were worth solving?
• What should be built?
• How should it work for users?
• What was technically viable?
• Who would own it after launch?
• How could several products move forward at the same time?

If those decisions kept coming back to me, we had not really built a capability.

We had built a bottleneck.

I built and led an internal product organisation from the ground up.

It started as a small digitalisation unit of around five people.

I recruited people and developed them into the roles the work increasingly required:

• Product Managers;
• Designers;
• Software Engineers;
• Scrum Masters / facilitators.

Many of them did not join as experienced specialists in those roles. They grew into them inside the organisation.

We built multidisciplinary teams that could take responsibility from a business problem through to a working product.

As the organisation grew, I was responsible for up to 11 direct reports, recruited and developed around 25 colleagues, and oversaw a portfolio of roughly 10 products and initiatives at a time.

The organisation stopped depending on one person to turn business needs into digital products.

Teams could increasingly:

• work directly with business areas;
• understand and challenge requests;
• make product and design decisions;
• build and operate working solutions;
• develop people into larger roles;
• run several products in parallel.

The team generated more than €4 million in revenue for Magyar Telekom from work commissioned across Deutsche Telekom Group.

But the result I value most came later:

the organisation continued after I left.

A colleague I had originally recruited grew into larger responsibilities under my leadership and eventually took over my position.

The capability did not leave with me.

The operating model changed as the work changed.

At first, people could cover several responsibilities informally.

That stopped working once the portfolio, complexity and team grew.

We gradually made responsibility clearer around:

• business value and product decisions;
• usability and design;
• technical feasibility;
• delivery and team effectiveness.

The goal was not to create more organisational structure for its own sake.

It was to make sure the team could make good decisions without escalating everything upward.

At some point, this stopped being primarily a product-development question.

It became a leadership question.

I did not want to become better at being the person everyone depended on.

I wanted to become better at making myself less necessary.

That was one reason I studied Corporate Internal and Executive Coaching at Corvinus University alongside the role.

The practical goal was simple:

less managing, more ownership and judgement inside the team.

Developing people was not separate from building the organisation.

It was how the organisation became sustainable.

Earlier in my career, leverage came from technology:

build on the right foundation and a small team can create many products.

Here, leverage increasingly came from people:

build judgement, responsibility and leadership into the organisation, and the organisation can create value without everything running through you.

The €4M+ figure is revenue for Magyar Telekom, not profit. It came from work commissioned within Deutsche Telekom Group.

And the organisation was obviously not built by me alone.

What I can claim is narrower and stronger:

I designed and led the organisation, recruited and developed much of the team, built its product operating model, and left behind a capability that continued to operate under a leader who had grown into the role inside it.