CASE STUDY
Strategic clarity in deep tech — product and portfolio foundation for an autonomous UAV venture
VectaCore is developing autonomous UAV and UGV systems. At the time of this engagement, five vehicle platforms were under simultaneous development. Significant engineering resources with a substantial annual burn were being directed without a shared product architecture, validated market focus, or structured basis for prioritization. The organization was thinking in vehicles. The real question was which missions to solve, for which markets, with which platforms.
- €1M+
- Annual R&D investment informed
- 80%
- Fewer competing platform bets
- 30+
- Decision criteria per market
“What makes Clemens particularly valuable is his ability to identify structural inconsistencies, organizational risks and product risks early — often before they become visible to others inside the organization.”
— Alex Turek, Managing Director, LX media GmbH / Managing Director, VectaCore
Project Deep Dive
From Engineering Enthusiasm to Strategic Clarity
From vehicles to missions
The engineering team was building around specific vehicles and use cases — a centering approach that would have produced tightly coupled solutions impossible to adapt across missions, payloads, or domains as the platform evolved. I developed a Product Centering Considerations analysis that made the structural case for why vehicle-centric and use-case-centric approaches fail at scale for an OEM platform provider, and a Mission-Centric Reference Model that established the conceptual foundation for all subsequent product, UX, and engineering decisions.
The model defined mission as the first-class citizen of the system — with explicit lifecycle phases, responsibility structures, control and authority logic, and accountability requirements — independent of vehicle type, domain, or autonomy level. Both documents remain active references in VectaCore's product documentation today.
Separating evidence from assumptions
With five vehicle platforms at different maturity levels and six target industries under consideration, strategic decisions were being made on the basis of engineering intuition rather than structured evidence. I developed a 54-question Platform Baseline Survey — covering Technical Readiness (TRL 1–9, field testing, certification pathway), Serialization Readiness (supply chain, BOM cost clarity, production feasibility), Market and Business Potential (ASP, competitive intensity, time-to-revenue), and Execution Risk (technical uncertainty, organizational fit, capital intensity) — to be completed separately for each vehicle.
The goal was explicit: align the organization around what was defined and validated versus what remained assumption, and build a shared factual foundation for upcoming product and portfolio decisions.
Prioritising platforms and markets
Beyond surveying individual platforms, I built a two-dimensional decision framework — a UxV Decision Matrix evaluating all five platforms (VC-35, VC-5, BX, UGV, Katamaran) across the same dimensions, and an Industry Evaluation Matrix assessing six target markets (Agriculture, Blue Light, Infrastructure, Offshore, Defense, Cargo) across 30+ criteria including market attractiveness, technical feasibility, regulatory burden, time-to-revenue, and revenue and margin potential.
This gave leadership a structured basis for portfolio prioritization rather than a debate between engineering preferences and market assumptions.
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UxV Decision Matrix
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Platform Baseline Survey
Linking portfolio focus to investment decisions
With substantial engineering resources committed across multiple platform concepts, portfolio decisions had meaningful implications for investment and development capacity. I made this relationship more explicit by connecting strategic prioritisation with capital allocation and by establishing structured validation paths for technology investments. This helped focus engineering effort on the mission capabilities with the strongest commercial and strategic potential.
What changed with a shared evidence base
The situation this work was designed to prevent is common in deep-tech ventures: an engineering team with genuine capability, spread across too many directions, spending capital on problems that have not yet been validated as worth solving.
The work described here did not resolve every open question at VectaCore. It built the analytical and conceptual infrastructure that made those questions answerable — and gave leadership the tools to make portfolio decisions on the basis of evidence rather than enthusiasm.
In the months since this work was completed, VectaCore has focused its efforts on a single platform: the VC-35, a heavy-lift UAV. That decision reflects exactly the kind of portfolio clarity this work was designed to enable — and the VC-35 was the platform that scored highest across technical readiness, serialization potential, and market viability in the decision framework built during this engagement.
This work began before VectaCore was formally founded, initiated within the Pierer Digital Holding context and carried over into the new entity at incorporation. The foundation built during this period — conceptual, analytical, and structural — remains in active use.
Read another case study
This isn't the only example of my work. Explore another case study to see how I helped organizations tackle different challenges through strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration and evidence-based decisions.
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- TIME ON TASK REDUCED
- OPERATIONAL SAVINGS
Reducing NTS’s mission-critical alert handling time by 70% through structured operational analysis
An average alert handling time of 46 seconds, measured across 40+ users processing thousands of alerts daily. Six months later it was 13 seconds — a reduction that compounds into EUR 3.2M in projected operational savings.