Find the wedge.
Hold the plot.
I work with technology CEOs at the moment the technology works and the real question becomes: what could this become?
There are usually several plausible answers. A new market or use case. Enterprise sales or PLG. Channels, strategic partners or an ecosystem. A different business model.
The challenge isn't generating more options. It's figuring out where the real leverage is — and turning a complicated set of possibilities into a few choices that matter.
Find the wedge
I start with what's on the truck: the technology as it exists today. What's genuinely different? What has the company learned? What raw materials are already there?
I tend to see a technology portfolio like Lego pieces spread across a table. What do we have? What could we build with it?
Then I look toward the horizon. Where is the technology going? Where is the market moving? What becomes possible that wasn't before?
I hold the whole system in my head at once: the technology, the economics, the market, the ecosystem and the people. I pull the pieces apart, look for the dependencies and put them back together differently.
Often the opportunity isn't a new piece at all. It's a capability the company already has, a shift happening outside it and a route to market that haven't yet been connected.
The wedge is where those things meet: something real today that will matter more tomorrow, narrow enough to win and strong enough to open what comes next.
Hold the plot
Finding the wedge is only useful if the company can act on it.
Holding the plot means keeping the strategic logic connected through product, positioning, pricing, partners, ecosystem and sales. The route to market should reinforce the reason the company can win.
Markets change and companies learn. The strategy should evolve too. But the underlying logic shouldn't get lost along the way.
Through Shiny Thing
I've worked with CEOs and leadership teams across cybersecurity and identity, observability, telecom and network infrastructure, data and cloud infrastructure, enterprise software and retail technology.
The technologies are different, but the moments tend to rhyme: early traction with too many possible markets; strong technology without a clear commercial wedge; a portfolio that needs a center of gravity; a technology shift opening something new; a business model that no longer fits; or a route to market that isn't unlocking the potential of the technology.
I've worked across direct enterprise sales, PLG, channels and MSPs, strategic partnerships and platform ecosystems. Sometimes I'm the CEO's strategic advisor. Sometimes I go deeper into product, marketing or GTM.
I don't bring a preferred playbook. The technology, economics and market should tell us which one makes sense.
About me
I moved into technology in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom in San Francisco. I came from economics and international finance, with an MBA in Finance and Marketing from Michigan Ross, so I brought a finance toolkit into an industry that wasn't spending much time thinking about unit economics yet.
At Critical Path, one of the early hosted-software companies, I started looking at the economics underneath recurring revenue: what customers actually cost to serve, where the value sat in the portfolio and which businesses made economic sense. As the company grew through acquisitions, those questions became increasingly important.
That experience shaped how I still look at technology companies: understand the raw materials, understand the economics, then ask what they could become.
I moved to Europe in 2002 and have spent most of my career since then working across European and global technology businesses. At Tail-f, I applied that thinking to network programmability and the economics of proprietary interfaces before Cisco acquired the company. Since 2017, I've also had the boardroom view at CLX, now Sinch, through years of organic growth, acquisitions, portfolio choices and global expansion.
There's another thread to how I think.
My undergraduate degree combined Economics and Chinese Studies, which took me to a startup in China before business school. I've lived and worked across the US, China, France and Sweden and speak several languages.
I've come to think of technology as another language — with its own grammar, conventions and vocabulary. I like learning it well enough to understand what's really there and connect it to economics, markets and people.
Engineers, product, sales, marketing, finance and boards often see different things in the same problem. I like understanding what each sees, finding the connections between them and reducing the complexity to something people can act on.
I'm happiest when the answer isn't obvious yet.
And, less formally, I like finding the competitive edge hidden in the nerd knobs.
If your technology is working and you're asking what it could become, let's talk.
renee@shinything.seRenée Robinson Strömberg
Founder, Shiny Thing AB · Stockholm
