Published thinking.

After leading ERP transformations for a US insurance carrier, a global alternative asset bank, and multiple Berlin scale-ups, I have watched the same failure patterns play out with depressing regularity. The technology almost never fails — the product decisions made before a single line of code is written almost always do.

Every planning poker tool caps at five users; every retro board costs thirty euros a seat. So I built Agile Ceremonies — free, anonymous, no accounts, all eight ceremony types. Here is the full product thinking and technical architecture behind it.

The Quote-to-Cash process looks deceptively simple on a whiteboard. In production, with multi-currency billing, variable pricing rules, and revenue recognition schedules layered on top, it becomes one of the most complex processes a product team can own.

The deal team talks about EBITDA multiples. The product team should be in that room too. What happens after close — chart of accounts clashes, regulatory fragmentation, shadow spreadsheets — is a product problem of the highest order.

Most SAP migration guides are written for consultants. This one is written for the product manager managing twelve stakeholders and explaining to the CFO why it is taking longer than expected — covering phases, go-live decisions, and the post-go-live period everyone under-resources.

Finance thinks in quarters, engineering in sprints, compliance in audit cycles. The delivery model that makes all three work together: a single backlog, compliance at definition of ready (not done), and a shared language for risk.

I have worked with both platforms in production. They are not interchangeable, and any comparison that tries to declare a winner is selling you something. Here is how to choose based on scale, regulatory footprint, and implementation capacity.

PSP integration looks straightforward in a sandbox. In production, with real money and real regulators, it is entirely different. At HomeToGo I owned the stack with Adyen, PayPal, and Klarna — here is what the reconciliation, chargebacks, and routing decisions actually look like.

The most dangerous roadmap is a beautifully formatted one that everyone has agreed to and nobody believes in. After fifteen years of building, breaking, and rebuilding finance product roadmaps, four lessons separate the ones that ship from the ones that gather dust.