Henning Groß

Co-Founder and Advisor

Zeile7 - The jack of all trades

I do all the things here!

Egoditor - Interim Chief Technology Officer

I helped navigating an organically grown and successful company through a phase of massive growth.

Element - Co-Founder CTO

As a co-founder I helped build and grow ELEMENT from the very beginning. Together with the small initial team we layed the foundation for our innovative insurance company, spotted our talented team and grew an innovative and integrated organization with a healthy people and performance oriented culture. I worked on board level and as an executive manager I shaped all aspects of ELEMENT until the successful Series A financing round and stayed close until it was ready to succeed without me.

Bertelsman - Interim Chief Technology Officer

I ramped up the engineering org of a new venture focusing on data-driven product discovery in the field of media streaming. We created prototypes and concepts eventually resulting in a re-organization and change of strategy for the established units.

I had the pleasure to work at Element while Henning was the CTO. Although he was several steps above me, I always found him truly approachable and immensely candid. Whenever I asked him he spoke openly about his learnings,successes and failures at tech management and gave me invaluable advices,both professionally and personally. I count my self lucky as a young professional for having the chance to dip into someones knowledge with such a diverse and high-profile project portfolio.
Károly Kemény

Great tech lead and one of the first members of upday. Well respected by his team and peers. Good balance between fitting in and standing out. Challenging assumptions yet being pragmatic about operational needs.
Thomas Hirsch

Henning was one of the high potential and high impact talents in myteam at Ideas Engineering. He has profound know-how on software architectureand he can deal with the realities of legacy and production environmentchallenges extremely well. He is one of the leaders that don’t need reportinglines and official assignments for people to follow them. His work as aCTO has been record of success, his fellow developers are loyal to him.Henning does not play politics and he puts the team and customer in focusall… Read more
Füsun Wehrmann

Henning is a pleasure to work with. He is honest, direct and to thepoint, attributes l look for in any leader. His leadership style puts transparencyand autonomy at its core, which create space for creativity and growth.He has a strong bullshit filter, that is essential to manage a large groupof people with different skills. He is very straight forward and direct,that can be overwhelming for people at times. As someone who worked in histeam, I quite liked it. He would see trouble from a mile and shields… Read more
Srikanth Achanta

Professional in communication and a great client who knows how softwaredevelopment works. My team supported Henning at element.in with developmentpower.
Hannes Maack

I have had a partnership with Henning for almost 15 years now, andI greatly appreciate his technical expertise and innovative approaches duringthis time. I can therefore highly recommend working with him as a technicaladvisor.
Marco Hamburger 🤖

I have had a pleasure to work closely with Henning at upday, currentlybiggest news app in Europe, launched in 2015 by Axel Springer in cooperationwith Samsung. As a manager, he was also a coach and mentor to his people.I was impressed by his ability to handle problems and lead the team, hewas devoted in his management role, but also great as a colleague from thenext desk. I am sure he would be a great asset to any digital first companies.
Michal Wodzinski

I worked with Henning during our time at FinLeap. Henning is a greatCTO with the perfect balance between "can do" attitude and actually deliveringwhat he promises. His solutions were both set up fast and rock solid. Greatleader and builder. Would certainly love to work with him again.
Mark Bothorn

I had the pleasure to work with Henning at a large project where hewas Co-CTO, and I was a developer. Henning has both strong leadershipskills and very good technical understanding - a combination that is rareto find in my experience. He also has experience in facilitating the scalingof agile processes for fairly large development teams, where he could strikethe balance to share his opinion and leave autonomy to the teams.I wish Henning all the best :-)
Andreas Profous

Henning Groß ist eine Person, mit der die Zusammenarbeit sehr leichtfiel. Seine offene und reflektierte Art machten es immer möglich schnelleund pragmatische Lösungen zu finden. Die Kundenbeziehung zu ihm war geprägtvon Respekt und der Möglichkeit uns über Interessen und Motivation auszutauschen.
Oliver Urlauber

I've worked with Henning for many years now helping him recruit toptalent for his development teams. Henning is one of the few CTOs I've workwith that understands the need for speed and he is extremely decisive whenmaking important decisions. He always gives honest and fair feedback whichis so beneficial in everyone improving the process for the future. It'salways great to collaborate with Henning as he combines professionalismwith personality and this has installed solid trust between us. I… Read more
David Manley

Henning is one of the most inspiring, motivating, knowledgeable and talented CTOs I have come across in my career. I have worked very closely to Henning since Element insurance began its operations. I was one of the first hires within the software development team, reporting directly to Henning. Since the very beginning, I have loved every single minute of working in Henning’s team. Not only he was able to create the right working environment, but also systematically made the perfect hiring decisions,… Read more
Simon Aquino

7 ways to kill your business (as a cto)

As an interim-CTO, consultant, coach and advisor I have a chance to work with a lot of companies. Being part of CTO-networks I hear about even more. I got gradually aware of a few dangerous patterns, which I saw repeatedly ever since I started my career. Sometimes, these technical management traps are unavoidable. Sometimes, the mistakes pile on top of each other and create a highly dysfunctional climate in organisations. This in turn causes smart people to struggle in their roles and shifts the path of the organisation away from actually creating value.

Don't ask for permission

Often people feel they are not empowered. In reality, you have more freedom to act than you think. Understanding this is your biggest lever to improve things for you, your team, your company. In order to be successful, you need to overstep boundaries.

Culture - New Work Order

We consult all kinds of companies. But no matter what we do, how we create value for our customers, we are always involved in cultural matters. And in the end each gig involves an aspect of cultural change that we actively manage.

Culture: Brains and Passion, not Blood, Sweat and Tears

We believe, based on our experience and decades of research, that a certain type of culture provides higher productivity, more motivation, and more dedication than the classic ‘crunch-time’ culture.

Handbook Of Manners: How To Behave In A Code Review

Code reviews are a common practice for knowledge distribution, learning and increasing quality - but do we perform them in a way that actually creates value?