Philipp Echteler

// about

About Me

Product Manager by title. Systems thinker by nature.

I've spent 12+ years in industrial automation – defining IoT strategies, building software products from zero to market, and leading teams through the hard parts of digital transformation. I care about outcomes, not roadmaps.

Outside of work: I run a homelab, go bouldering, follow VfB Stuttgart, and spend as much time as possible on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

📍 Neuhausen auf den Fildern 🧗 Bouldering ✈️ Florida ⚽ VfB Stuttgart 🏭 12+ yrs Industrial IoT

// from inside sales to product strategy

12+ years of shipping in industrial automation.

Owning two edge compute products within Belden's Emerging Technologies group: ACEIO, an edge compute platform with an integrated IO-Link master, and OpEdge, a line of standard edge compute devices.

Product strategy, roadmap, and go-to-market for ACEIO and OpEdge
Built for IT/OT convergence: controls enablement, and IT-ready data acquisition in OT environments
Accountable for the business case and revenue trajectory of both products
Working across engineering, sales, and leadership to align on positioning, pricing, and market entry

Product Line Management Edge Computing IO-Link IT/OT Convergence Industrial IoT Go-to-Market Emerging Technologies

Leading the evolution of classic product lines through strategic lifecycle management.

Responsible for a cross-functional project team driving updates to legacy products
Focus on lifecycle optimization, market relevance, and sustained customer value
Bridging product management, R&D, and sales across complex legacy systems

Legacy Transformation Lifecycle Management Cross-functional Leadership

Led the strategy and execution of Balluff's entire software portfolio.

Introduced ADP (Advanced Data Pipeline): enabled customers to build and manage industrial data pipelines – a net-new product category for the company
Launched Balluff Engineering Tool: streamlined configuration and deployment for industrial automation solutions
Built and mentored the team; promoted a colleague to lead Cyber Resilience Act compliance
Owned product vision, roadmaps, go-to-market, and global rollout

Software Product Strategy Industrial IoT Edge Computing Team Leadership Go-to-Market

Contributed to shaping the company-wide IoT strategy.

Ensured the IoT strategy was grounded in scalable, future-proof architecture
Designed an internal Corporate Startup Program based on Lean Startup principles – empowering teams to validate ideas and build a culture of intrapreneurship
Defined IoT use cases, ecosystem design, and implementation roadmap

IoT Strategy Lean Startup Innovation Intrapreneurship Architecture

Owned a software IoT product end-to-end – tracking chocolate molds in production.

Managed the scrum backlog, feature prioritization, and customer presentations
Combined sales responsibility with product ownership from day one

Product Ownership Scrum IoT Software

Bachelor thesis: Strategic Marketing for Industrie 4.0. Started in Inside Sales before transitioning into product roles.

Industrie 4.0 Marketing Strategy

// iot & homelab

The lab is where product intuition meets hands-on systems thinking.

Everything self-hosted. Everything dockerized. No vendor lock-in.

Homelab Infrastructure

A Raspberry Pi 4 runs five Docker Compose stacks, every image pinned, new versions reported automatically. Proxmox carries the heavier workloads, and a nightly backup lands on the NAS. The homelab is where I validate what I preach in product strategy.

Docker Compose Raspberry Pi Proxmox OpenMediaVault

Monitoring & Observability

InfluxDB 3 and Grafana, every query in SQL. Dashboards for climate, energy, laundry, grid frequency, and the lab itself, plus a wall display that still runs on a 2012 iPad mini. Same stack as production IoT – just at home scale.

InfluxDB 3 Grafana Telegraf SQL

Sensors & Energy

Smart plugs meter every major consumer, from the washing machine to the Proxmox cluster. Climate sensors around the house, calibrated against a reference thermometer, with the corrections in Node-RED instead of firmware. All of it on MQTT, all of it in HomeKit.

Tasmota BME280 MQTT Homebridge

Access & Security

One login for everything: single sign-on with two-factor authentication in front of every web UI. Pi-hole handles DNS for the whole network, WireGuard brings it along on the road.

Authelia 2FA WireGuard Pi-hole

3D Printing Station

A Sovol SV07 on Klipper, with remote control and a live camera behind the same single sign-on. Because walking to the printer to check on a 6-hour print is not how I want to spend my evening.

Sovol SV07 Klipper Remote Monitoring

// homelab infrastructure

Self-hosted. Dockerized. Connected.

All services behind one reverse proxy and one login. No cloud dependency.

Internet

Nginx Proxy Manager + Authelia Reverse Proxy · SSL · Single Sign-On

Monitoring

Grafana InfluxDB 3 Telegraf

Automation

Node-RED Mosquitto Homebridge

System

Pi-hole WireGuard OpenMediaVault Webcam

// outdoors

Climbing walls. Chasing coastlines.

Weekend warrior. 3–4 sessions a week, indoors and out. Trying to fit as much climbing into life as possible.

Bouldering is my main discipline – the problem-solving aspect maps well to how I think about product. Outdoors I've worked up to UIAA 7. The next grade is always the goal.

UIAA 7 Outdoor grade

3–4× Per week

Indoor + Out Both disciplines

Florida, USA

Gulf Coast is my reset button. Warm water, no agenda, maximum decompression. My vacation homebase for years.

Worldwide

Industrial automation took me across Europe, Asia, and the US. Travel stopped being tourism a long time ago.

// contact

Let's talk.

Especially if it's about product strategy, industrial IoT, or system architecture.

philipp@echteler.de

About Me

12+ years of shipping in industrial automation.

Product Line Manager

Projektleiter Balluff Classics

Head of Software Product Management

Strategy Manager Industrial IoT

Product Manager (Choc-ID)

Inside Sales / Bachelor Thesis