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Mike
Veerman

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CTO in residence
from Belgium 🇧🇪

Mike is a seasoned software architect turned seasoned engineering manager

Building software products is a tricky balancing act and Mike loves helping teams get better at it. He's allergic to paint-by-numbers-Agile and believes the right process has to be tailor-made for each company.

Which is the coolest country you ever visited?
Definitely Iceland! Or maybe Romania...? Or Indonesia? Antwerp?

Water or coffee?
Hard to give up one or the other, so let's meet in the middle and settle on an Americano?

About Mike

Base: Antwerp (BE)
Studies: Bachelor in Software engineering
Passions: rock climbing, travelling, amateur craft beer brewing

Expertises

Technical leadership
High performance teams
Writing
Coaching
Software Architecture
Keeping things simple

Articles by Mike

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How to stop depending on that one developer

Team and leadership

Roles and responsibilities

Ideas and insights

Key Person Risk (KPR) arises when a team relies too heavily on one specialist. To reduce this, shift their role to an advisor. The specialist guides, others do the work. It’s slow at first, but builds team knowledge, confidence, and better documentation.

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Do we even need a moat?

Audits and due diligence

Ideas and insights

A technical moat is often seen as a product's defensive edge, but does every product really need one? For AI products, the choice between building proprietary tech or leveraging existing solutions like OpenAI is complex. True value lies in solving customer problems—not just in owning the technology.

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Scaling the A team

Ideas and insights

Team structure

Team and leadership

In recent audits, I've noticed a less obvious pattern: overly talented start-up teams. While smart, experienced teams thrive early on, they struggle to scale. Scaling requires structure, documentation, and room to grow talent in-house.

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