Dr. Franziska Horn

User-Centered Software Architecture

Freelance Consulting

I help software organizations scale effectively. Growth—whether from 10 to 50 people or 50 to 250 and more—often brings challenges. A monolithic codebase, for example, may have been perfect for prototyping and finding product-market fit. But as your team grows, it can turn into a bottleneck, slowing progress and frustrating developers.

Common signs your company might be struggling to scale include:
  • Too many meetings. Communication and coordination needs grow exponentially as the tightly coupled software architecture prevents teams from taking ownership of components and working autonomously.
  • Slow feature delivery. As technical debt piles up, even small changes become increasingly cumbersome.
  • Developer churn. Frustration eventually causes talented team members to become disengaged and quit.

To scale successfully, you need 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. By applying principles like domain-driven design and restructuring work so teams own end-to-end value streams, I help organizations reduce friction and increase flow.

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 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

As a temporary staff engineer embedded in your team, I can:
  • 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, I'd love to chat! You can reach me at hey@franziskahorn.de.