Finding ideas is not the hard part. Getting one funded, again and again, is.
Your ad wants radar sessions, a pipeline and business cases, run from one desk across three business areas, nine producing countries and 3,663 people. This is how I would run that, and where I have run it before.
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01 Find
- How I work
- Read the business's own material until the gaps show, then go to the people who touch customers and machines. The output is a scouting route that keeps working when I am not in the room, and a one-page opportunity note anyone can fill in.
- Where I have done it
- I run opportunity scouting for AI business models at Swiss Post now. At Sparrow Ventures I had to become useful inside an unfamiliar business model every few months.
- Here
- Electrical, Medical and Fiber rarely compare notes, and 3,663 people see things I never will.
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02 Size
- How I work
- Turn a hunch into a number a CFO recognises: the market, the margin, build versus buy, and what it quietly takes away from something else.
- Where I have done it
- At Swiss Post I take opportunities from sizing to a prioritised roadmap with KPIs, including the build-versus-buy and cost-versus-benefit calls. At Ifolor I owned the P&L of a CHF 100M+ business, so I know what a number has to survive.
- Here
- Every case measured against the alternative use of the same money, which at the moment is more capacity.
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03 Decide
- How I work
- Agree what would kill it before the test runs, then run a small real test instead of a workshop. The rule decides, not the mood in the room.
- Where I have done it
- At Die Mobiliar I took three market pilots from MVP to launch and then operated them, one of which is now BOND Mobility. At WePractice the founding team closed two funding rounds on evidence.
- Here
- Eight weeks, three live projects, one decision. That step is worked out below.
What I would not do first: tour nine sites running idea workshops. It fills a spreadsheet with hunches nobody has sized, and it is how these roles quietly disappear.
Step three, worked, on a real question in your business. The three test customers are illustrative; the facts about Weidmann are sourced below.
Could the insulation design be sold, and not only the Transformerboard?
- The idea
- Put a price on the design work your engineers already do around every order: design review, transient voltage analysis, bid evaluation, and finite element dielectric studies run in your own pre-processing software. From outside I cannot tell whether you charge for that work or fold it into the material price. That is question one in week one, and the answer decides whether this is a pricing move or a packaging one.
- The size of it
- Lead times for large power transformers now reach four years, and demand for generator step-up units grew 274% between 2019 and 2025. You are answering that with new plants in Middletown, Wuhan, Croatia and Saltillo. Every transformer they make still needs an insulation design, and the design decides the bill of materials.
- The test, and what would kill it
- Three transformer manufacturers, one live project each, fixed fee and fixed turnaround, because a workshop cannot tell you whether anyone pays. The risk it has to measure is cannibalisation: if the design work is what wins the order today, charging for it could cost more margin than the fee earns.
2 of 3 paid
Fund it, narrowed. Only the segment that paid, and only where the material margin held.
The rule was written before the test ran: fund only if at least two of three pay a fee that covers the loaded engineering cost. Which two matters less than how many, and pre-committing is the whole point.
Sources: Weidmann key figures 2025; Weidmann news of 8 July 2026 and 16 October 2025; the services pages on weidmann-electrical.com; PwC and Wood Mackenzie lead-time and demand figures via pv magazine, May 2026.
I designed and built this page myself with the AI tooling I work in every day. It is the same tooling I would point at your radar, and the honest answer to how one person covers nine producing countries.
Where I fit, and where I do not
Idea to proof-of-concept, and well past it
Your ad puts ideation to proof-of-concept at the centre of the role. Proof-of-concept is where most people stop.
I do this at Swiss Post every week, and I have gone the whole distance before. At Die Mobiliar I took three market pilots from MVP to launch and then ran them, one of which is now BOND Mobility. At WePractice I was in the founding team that turned an idea into a funded, staffed business. Pedal Peak and smedium are my own, and both are live today.
Business cases that survive the CEO's questions
An idea only counts once someone has signed off the money for it.
At Swiss Post I lead AI-driven business models from opportunity sizing to a prioritised roadmap with KPIs, including the build-versus-buy and cost-versus-benefit calls. Before that I owned the e-commerce P&L of a CHF 100M+ business at Ifolor and lifted conversion by 9%.
No engineering degree, no energy background
You would prefer a master's in a technical field, electrical engineering ideally. I have a BBA and a CAS in Innovation, and my industries have been insurance, retail, health and postal services. Never energy.
What I have done repeatedly is build the business around other people's technology, most of it invented by engineers I had to learn to argue with. The brief above was written with no inside access and no engineer in the room. That is the standard I would work at from week one, and I would be asking your engineers better questions by week three.
The record behind the brief
- Since Jan 2026
- AI Project Lead, Business Development. Swiss Post, Advertising, Zurich. Sizing AI opportunities, prioritising them into a roadmap with KPIs, and running the winners through to launch.
- Aug to Dec 2025
- In between jobs and own ventures. Built smedium and grew Pedal Peak, and went deep on AI tooling: own tools built with LLMs, prompt engineering, AI-supported production.
- Oct 2024 to Jul 2025
- Senior Product Manager, Lead E-Commerce. Ifolor Group, Zurich. +9% conversion and +15% checkout step rate on a CHF 100M+ business, reporting to C-level.
- Jun 2023 to Sep 2024
- Lead Project Manager. Brixel, Zurich. Owned partnerships with UBS and Baloise, and was the bridge between senior client stakeholders and the product team.
- Mar 2020 to May 2023
- Marketing & Growth Lead, founding team. WePractice, Sparrow Ventures / Migros Group. Two funding rounds closed. Grew to 10 locations, 23 people and 170+ customers, with 1000+ client matches in year one.
- Sep 2019 to Sep 2022
- Growth & Venture Builder. Sparrow Ventures, Zurich. Go-to-market for several internal startups, validation through to scale-up. Fast in unfamiliar business models.
- Jan 2017 to Aug 2019
- Intrapreneur, Innovation. Die Mobiliar, Bern. Smide, now BOND Mobility, XpertCheck and Lizzy, built and then run. Market experiments that steered product decisions.
- 2005 to 2016
- Commercial and product marketing. Trade marketing at Promena, product management at Cruspi and Domaco, accounting at Kuoni and AMAG, commercial apprenticeship at Bridgestone Switzerland.
Also built, and still running
- Pedal Peaka cycling platform built end to end, SvelteKit, Cloudflare, Strava API, n8n. Live, with real users.
- smediuma studio doing branding, websites and AI workflows for small businesses.
Education
- BBA Business AdministrationZentrum Bildung, Baden
- CAS InnovationBFH Bern
- CAS Digital MarketingHWZ Zurich
Practical
- Zurich, Swiss citizenAvailable with notice.
- LanguagesGerman and Swiss German native, English fluent, French conversational.