Cornelius Rabsch
Product & Engineering Leader
About
For over 20 years, I've worked at the intersection of product management and engineering. My career has taken me across the full organizational spectrum — from the high-speed world of VC-backed startups to the scale of global tech leaders, including participation in multiple acquisitions and due diligence processes on both sides of the table. I'm at my best in environments where bridging technical architecture with a clear product strategy is the difference between shipping value or just shipping code.
I've always been a builder at heart with a bit of an "early mover" streak. I was developing BLE beacons back when the iBeacon protocol first launched, and today, I'm just as energized by how AI is changing the way we build. I focus on shipping early and iterating based on real-world feedback rather than staying in the lab.
Right now, I'm particularly focused on how AI-driven development can make our engineering cycles faster and more creative. I believe it's one of the most exciting times to be building products, and I love leading teams that aren't afraid to embrace that change.
Solopreneur Project
Productapp
productapp.com ↗Stay in control as your stack grows.
100% Agentic Coding
Every line written by AI coding agents
100% Human Verified, Tested & Hardened
Every feature QA'd and production-hardened
A SaaS platform that helps organizations take control of their software stack — tracking every tool they use, what it costs, when it renews, and whether it meets compliance requirements. A public marketplace lets teams discover and compare business software in one place, replacing scattered spreadsheets and tribal knowledge with a structured, searchable system.
Built AI-First
An in-app assistant answers questions about your software portfolio and surfaces spend optimizations. An automated scraper pipeline uses LLMs to extract and generate product descriptions, then auto-localizes them into five languages. A discovery tool uses GPT-4o-mini to research entire product categories with confidence scoring. All LLM calls are routed through Vercel AI Gateway for unified provider management, rate limiting, and observability. The development workflow itself is agentic — GitHub Copilot, Google Antigravity, Claude Code, and custom skills drive most of the implementation.
MCP Server
The platform exposes a first-party Model Context Protocol server that gives external AI agents structured, authenticated access to an organization's live data — product inventory and spend records — turning any MCP-compatible client into a context-aware assistant over a company's software stack.
LLM Wiki
The entire knowledge base — architecture decisions, specs, runbooks, changelogs, and daily notes — lives in an Obsidian vault treated as a first-class LLM context source, following Andrej Karpathy's wiki-for-LLMs pattern.
Core Values
- Outcomes over Output: Success is measured by real-world impact, not hours logged or features shipped.
- Agile Pragmatism: I follow the Agile Manifesto's spirit: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, adapted to context.
- Radical Transparency: I share context openly and expect the same, because trust cannot exist without information.
- Iterative Excellence: Ship early, learn fast, and compound improvements — perfection is a direction, not a destination.
- Customer-Centricity: Every product decision is grounded in actual customer needs and validated with real feedback.
Leadership Philosophy
- Psychological Safety: Teams do their best work when it's safe to take risks, ask questions, and admit mistakes.
- Developmental Leadership: My job is to develop people, not just projects — I invest in growth like a long-term asset.
- Enablement over Management: I remove blockers and create clarity so people can operate with full autonomy.
- Cross-Functional Alignment: I build shared understanding between product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
- Strategic Clarity: I translate business goals into engineering priorities that teams can execute with confidence.
- Change Management: Leading technology and organizational transformation with structured communication, stakeholder alignment, and adoption playbooks.
Expertise
- Agentic SDLC: Designing and operating software development life cycles where AI agents handle implementation, testing, and review — human judgment stays in the loop.
- SaaS Architecture & Scalability: Designing multi-tenant cloud services that grow with customers, not against them.
- GRC: Embedding Governance, Risk, and Compliance into product architecture from day one, not as an afterthought.
- PLG: Building Product-Led Growth loops into SaaS products so acquisition, onboarding, and expansion are driven by product value.
- Mobile & Location-Based Services: Native and cross-platform mobile apps enriched with real-time location, geofencing, and spatial analytics.
- Developer Experience: Improving SDLC efficiency through tooling, platform engineering, and metrics (DORA, SPACE).
Career
AddSecure
Principal Architect · 2025–present
Director IoT · 2020–2025
Square Metrics
Managing Director · 2014–2020
eBay
Mobile Product Manager · 2012–2014
kaufDA / Bonial
VP Mobile Devices · 2010–2012
Tagcrumbs
MD & Co-Founder · 2008–2010
Education
- 1
Universität Mannheim
Dipl. Wirtschaftsinformatiker
Computer Science & Operations Research · 2003–2007
- 2
University of Waterloo
Computer Science & Economics
Exchange program · 2006–2007
- 3
DERI — Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Master Thesis
Galway, Ireland · 2008–2009