Freelance Consulting
I help software organizations increase developer productivity and engagement by streamlining internal structures and processes. Many companies struggle with inefficiencies that slow them down—whether due to misaligned team structures, tightly coupled software architecture, or processes that create unnecessary friction. Take a monolithic codebase: while perfect for early prototyping and finding product-market fit, it can become a major bottleneck as your organization grows, slowing progress and frustrating developers.
- Too many meetings. When software architecture is tightly coupled, teams can't work autonomously, leading to growing communication and coordination overhead.
- Slow feature delivery. As technical debt piles up, even small changes become increasingly cumbersome.
- Developer churn. Talented team members become disengaged and quit when inefficient processes prevent them from doing their best work.
Addressing these inefficiencies requires a holistic approach that aligns your software architecture with your team structures—refactoring the socio-technical system. To accomplish this, an outside perspective often helps to see the big picture and tackle problems at their root. I help organizations reduce friction and increase flow by applying principles like domain-driven design and restructuring work so teams own end-to-end value streams.
- Increased productivity. Independent teams move faster with minimal coordination overhead.
- Better code quality. Clear boundaries result in more maintainable, reliable systems.
- Higher team satisfaction. Developers feel empowered when they have full ownership of their domains.
- Faster onboarding. New team members can understand and contribute to the codebase more quickly.
My goal is to support your company in a sustainable way, empowering your teams to succeed long-term. I aim to make myself obsolete by addressing issues at the system level and creating structures that support continuous improvement.
What I Offer
You can engage my services in two ways:
- System Audit: Identify opportunities for improvement.
- Fractional Tech Lead: Hands-on implementation.
System Audit: Identify what should be done
I'll assess your codebase and its surrounding socio-technical system to uncover areas for improvement. Together, we'll prioritize these findings into a refactoring roadmap with small, actionable steps your team can implement alongside feature development.
Fractional Tech Lead: Doing the work
- Refactor code, structures, and processes to boost efficiency and quality.
- Offer guidance on architectural decisions and conduct code reviews.
- Mentor junior developers to level up your team's capabilities.
- Provide hands-on implementation support, primarily using Python:
- Web Development: Build data-heavy apps, interactive dashboards, or ML-powered tools tailored to user needs.
- MLOps: Take machine learning models from notebooks to production, with pipelines for monitoring and automated retraining.
- Data Science: Unlock insights from your data, especially for predictive modeling with tabular or time-series data.
Ready to Work Together?
If this sounds like what you need, let's talk! You can reach me at hey@franziskahorn.de.