Cookies Preferences
Close Cookie Popup
Cookie Consent
By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage and assist in our marketing efforts. More info
“I help engineering organisations think clearly about software quality.”
THE PROBLEM
Engineering organisations rarely fail because of individual incompetence. They fail because of systemic misalignment — between how quality is understood across teams, where responsibility sits, and how development, testing, product, and UX actually collaborate in practice.
The cost is rarely visible on any single dashboard: it accumulates in rework, production incidents, late-stage defects, deferred releases, and engineers who lose motivation when their work repeatedly unravels downstream.
The levers for change are rarely technical. They are organisational, cultural, and structural. That is precisely where this advisory operates.
WHO THIS IS FOR
This advisory is designed for CTOs, VP Engineering, Directors of Engineering, and Heads of Engineering in product organisations with roughly 20–200 engineers — particularly in SaaS, fintech, platform, and technology-driven companies scaling their engineering teams.
The right fit is a senior engineering leader who recognises that quality and through put problems are not purely a tooling or process question, and who wants a rigorous, confidential thinking partner with experience in both the engineering and the organisational dimensions of the challenge.
THE APPROACH
Most quality advisory focuses on process frameworks and testing toolchains. This advisory starts from a different premise: that software quality is primarily a social and organisational phenomenon. The frameworks that explain why engineering teams succeed or fail draw as much from organisational psychology, communication theory, and systems thinking as they do from software engineering practice.
Crucially, this advisory does not sell certification frameworks or methodology packages — it offers thinking partnership grounded in context, craft, and organisational reality.
Ilari Henrik Aegerter brings an unusually interdisciplinary background to this work — academic training spanning General Linguistics, Sociology, and Software Engineering, combined with senior leadership experience across two demanding environments: global e-commerce at eBay Europe, where quality engineering operated across distributed, high-throughput systems at scale; and regulated medical device development at Phonak AG (now Sonova AG), where quality carries both legal and patient-safety implications.
This combination produces a distinctive analytical lens: rigorous about engineering, and equally attentive to the human and systemic dimensions that purely technical frameworks cannot address.
Training in linguistics, for instance, surfaces directly in how engineering miscommunication is diagnosed: the concept of indexicality — the context-dependence of meaning — explains why requirements, bug reports, and handoffs across team boundaries so routinely generate ambiguity that tooling alone cannot fix.
“Leadership is not control. It is much more giving people the liberty to shine.”
TYPICAL QUESTIONS ADDRESSED
OUTCOMES
The silent capacity drain of poor quality
Defects, rework, and production incidents consume engineering bandwidth that should be building product. Identifying and removing this drain is typically the first and highest-leverage intervention.
Coordination friction between development, testing, product, and UX
Misaligned responsibilities and duplicated effort slow delivery and erode team morale. Clear collaboration structures release throughput that was always there.
Hiring and retaining engineers with strong quality instincts
Building lasting quality capability requires knowing what to look for — and creating the conditions that keep strong engineers motivated and effective.
Sustainable release confidence at scale
The ability to ship predictably without increasing headcount or sacrificing stability — achieved through organisational design, not just test coverage.
CORE AREAS OF ADVISORY
ADVISORY FORMAT
Engagements are limited to a small number of organisations at a time to ensure depth and focus.
Minimum commitment: six months. Organisational change operates on a longer cycle than monthly sprints. Six months is the minimum horizon at which meaningful shifts in collaboration patterns, engineering culture, and decision-making become visible — and it is also the point at which the advisory relationship has the context depth to be genuinely useful for complex, sensitive leadership questions.
ADVISOR BACKGROUND
Ilari Henrik Aegerter is the Founder and CEO of House of Test GmbH, a specialist consultancy focused on software quality and test engineering. Over more than two decades he has led engineering and quality organisations across medical technology, global e-commerce, and product consultancy — and has been a consistent voice for rigorous, professional software quality at the intersection of engineering excellence and organisational effectiveness.
TESTAMONIAL
I highly recommend Ilari Henrik Aegerter and his Leadership Quality Advisory. Ilari is one of the sharpest minds in engineering leadership. He helps leaders build the right culture and collaboration so high software quality becomes natural — while actually speeding up delivery. He’s the experienced, confidential sounding board many tech organisations desperately need. Strongly recommended for CTOs and Heads of Engineering who want to reduce the hidden cost of poor quality and scale effectively.
