I'm an interim Product Transformation Lead, Head of Product and Agile Coach. I help R&D organisations in biopharma move from plan-driven programmes to empowered, product-led teams — hands-on, inside your leadership team.
I'm Timo Mulder, founder of Value First. Since 2012 I've worked as an interim transformation lead, head of product and agile coach — first in fintech, e-commerce, retail and SaaS, and over the last years increasingly in biopharma R&D at CSL and Arcturus Therapeutics.
What I do is fairly simple to describe and hard to do: help R&D, product and engineering organisations become genuinely product-led. That means empowered teams with real ownership, leaders who set direction instead of dispatching work, visible flow, short learning loops, and an operating rhythm that keeps compounding after I leave.
I work hands-on — typically 3–5 days a week, in the leadership team and next to the teams doing the work. Before consulting I co-founded and led product at an international sports ticketing venture. MSc Business Administration (Strategic Management), Rotterdam School of Management.
Biopharma R&D has long horizons, regulated hand-offs, lab constraints and deep scientific expertise. Copy-pasting a software agile framework onto it fails — and so does running it as a 5-year plan.
Scrum installed at team level, decisions still made in steering committees. Progress measured in milestones met, not in learning gained. Scientists treated as resources on a plan.
Teams organised around a scientific or customer outcome, with the decision rights and data to pursue it. Leadership sets the strategy and the guardrails; the work is sliced towards the next real decision.
Shaped by the work itself, and by three books I keep coming back to: Marty Cagan's EMPOWERED, Henrik Kniberg's Lean from the Trenches, and Melissa Perri's Product Operations.
R&D teams should be given problems to solve, not lists of deliverables. That means a real product owner with decision rights, a clear outcome, and leaders who coach instead of assign. Most of what looks like a delivery problem is a missing empowerment decision two levels up.
Coaching teams while leadership keeps steering on output changes nothing. I work in the leadership team: product vision, strategy, principles, team topology and the quarterly cadence, before touching the ceremonies.
One board, the whole flow, work-in-progress limits and a weekly cadence that people actually trust. In R&D that means making experiments, lab capacity, data and regulatory hand-offs visible — not just software tickets.
Long R&D horizons are not an excuse for annual plans. Slice towards the next decision: what would we have to learn to stop, continue or scale this? Then design the smallest experiment that answers it.
Transformation sticks when the data, the insight loop and the way of working are operationalised — shared definitions, one source of truth on progress, and a rhythm that survives after the consultant leaves.
Interim, 3–5 days a week, inside your leadership team. I build with your people, hand over the operating rhythm, and step back. No 80-page strategy deck.
Strong product leadership and teams that are given problems, not roadmaps. Coaching is the job.
Make the whole flow visible, limit work in progress, and improve with the people doing the work.
Data, insights and a shared cadence that make the product model repeatable at scale.
From regulated biopharma R&D programmes to scale-up product organisations — always interim, always hands-on.
Supported the strategic sa-mRNA COVID vaccine (Kostaive) programme, and earlier designed and tested a new Agile R&D way of working across Europe and Australia — robotic lab automation, data science, cell culture intensification, gene therapy and early clinical trial teams. Also led the PAT (Process Analytical Technology) product vision and strategy for R&D BPD.
Product strategy, roadmap and quarterly OKR cadence for a global HR tech marketplace. Rollout across UK, North America and APAC, product-engineering team topology, and coaching and hiring of product managers.
Worked with the CTO, CPO, Head of Engineering and CHRO to move the product and engineering organisation towards an empowered, product-led operating model.
Helped the Head of Data Science and his management team accelerate multiple data science and machine learning product-engineering teams. Earlier: technical product manager and agile/kanban coach in the store domain.
Operating model design inside IT, marketing and innovation departments — from lean startup and growth practices to a new way of working for senior leadership.
CSL, Arcturus Therapeutics
HeadFirst-Impellam*, Randstad
Albert Heijn
ABN AMRO, AEGON, Rabobank
KNVB (Football), IPL (Cricket)
CarNext*
Login VSI*, Usabilla*
KIFID
Recommendations from R&D leaders, CTOs, CPOs and team members I've worked with are published on my LinkedIn profile. Named references from recent biopharma and scale-up engagements are available on request.