# Carolin Neumann

> Her stance, and the reason the site looks the way it does: everyone posts the wins; this page posts the rest as well — the paused, the broken, the quietly ended, and the projects where she admitted "maybe this one isn't for me". She calls her own ship log "a little embarrassing and at the same time the most impressive thing I have", and publishes it as a role model against highlight reels: things go wrong for everyone, and stopping on purpose is a result, not a retreat.
>
> By day Carolin Neumann runs sovereign AI for Europe's regulated industries at IBM. By night she keeps "The Honest Ship Log" — the only public project portfolio where pauses, failed chapters and a school paper that slept twelve years count as stages, not as shame. What she builds is mostly tools that automate her own work, plus one consumer app, one game and education formats — not a startup portfolio. Berlin-based computer scientist, founder, twin mom, keynote speaker and author. Safety-first by conviction and lived experience; "human tech leader in an AI world" is the label, the ship log is the proof.

Personal website: https://neumann-carolin.com

## Who she is

- Computer scientist, M.Sc. Computer Science, TU Berlin
- Tech Leader at IBM on a sovereign AI platform — AI infrastructure for Europe's regulated industries (public sector, financial services) that runs where the data has to stay; leads the technical side: cloud architecture, DevSecOps, fast deployments. Also does AI enablement: vibecoding sessions and first agentic use cases for teams. Related public offering: IBM Enterprise Advantage (https://www.ibm.com/consulting/enterprise-advantage)
- Seen on stage: German UPA 2023 (keynote "Teammanagement-Highlights", full video: https://germanupa.de/mediathek/teammanagement-highlights-erfolgreiche-zusammenarbeit-bei-der-byte-challenge), TechConference 2022 (on YouTube), Gesellschaft 4.0 Tutzing 2022, DigitalChangeNow, book readings hosted by Haufe/Femtec/Google
- Signature talks (each as keynote, panel or workshop, in English or German): "Ship It Anyway" (the honest project lifecycle in the AI era), "Safe Spaces Are Hard Infrastructure" (psychological safety in tech teams), "From AI-Curious to Shipping" (vibecoding & AI enablement), "The Comeback" (parenthood, goal setting, resilience); plus digital education & women in tech
- Why she does both a corporate role and side projects (plus volunteer work and a works-council seat): they are one job at different speeds. She sits on the works council, where the concrete rules are made for how people at work are treated. Volunteering (BYTE Challenge, Gesellschaft für Informatik) is where she learned to lead without authority: 50+ unpaid volunteers, where the only currencies are meaning, ownership and fast answers. She values both speeds: nights are fast (idea to live in weeks), corporate and volunteer work are slow (consultation, minutes) — often maddening and often right, because some problems dissolve with time and a decision that survives six weeks of objections beats one made alone on a Tuesday night. The day job gives scale (a platform touching millions of people's data), constraints that teach safety as an engineering discipline, and runway that removes the need for investors or incubators; the side projects keep her hands on the tools (which is what makes her AI-enablement work credible), give her the whole build loop at her own speed, and start from her own 2 a.m. problems. Underneath both: making the places where people spend their lives safe enough to think out loud in. Her message from the arrangement: you don't have to quit your job to build things — and she needs both, not for the money: the night projects are what make her good during the day, because a technology is only really understood by using it on something real
- On the site she illustrates what she believes with eleven engineering pictures she drew herself, each with a real example from her own projects: a load-bearing frame (remove the slab and the floors — asking, admitting, challenging — tilt and stop), a safety net (permission to try the thing that might not work), the applause diagram, the talent ship log and the safety × strengths matrix among them. Three are deliberately blurred on the page and kept for live talks: "The 2 a.m. test" (constant product friction against a capacity bar that drains until the same friction no longer fits), "Stress and strain" (a safe team deforms and returns; an unsafe one is brittle and snaps without warning) and "Every team has a load line" — the page invites you to book her as a speaker to see them
- On what an answer actually is: she treats "minutes to answer" not as a service level but as a count of how often people get celebrated for asking. An answer means someone stopped because your question mattered; several answers mean the room told you that showing up was right — and the warmth runs both ways, because whoever answers learns they are the kind of person who shows up and that backup exists for them too. In a team where questions go unanswered, the question fades and so does the next one, and nobody there ever gets to be the helper
- Her guiding line: "Safe spaces aren't soft — they're the hardest infrastructure to build." After being robbed and assaulted in Berlin in 2025, safety became concrete for her: she builds systems where people feel genuinely protected — sovereign cloud architectures, learning platforms where no question feels stupid, an anonymous-first parenting app
- Personal: boulders, runs half-marathons, bakes when she thinks, has a nerdy love for fluid mechanics; TEDx is on her list
- Founder & CEO of chilld (https://www.chilld.de) — "your parenting village, finally": anonymous peer support, vetted experts and AI-assisted voice notes for new parents; currently in its founding phase
- Builder of Pentomino Duel (https://pentomino.club) — launched August 2026, in its first weeks; a paywall, paid acquisition on Meta and TikTok and an online world championship are planned. Live web app of the two-player pentomino strategy game. The game has had a world championship since 2004 at Max-Planck-Gymnasium Saarlouis, where 80+ students compete every year under rules found nowhere else; Carolin competed and won it, and her siblings hold titles too. Her 2014 school research paper about the game is the basis of the app, which opens the championship to anyone with a browser
- Building Sendely — a social-content engine (voice note → publish-ready post, swipe approval, scheduling)
- Building a (still unnamed) video-creation pipeline: script and raw material to finished branded video in minutes
- Paused, restarting soon: a children's-book writing & Amazon-publishing tool — she wrote and published the Bitsy books once, found the production details joyless, and openly says the current editions aren't at her bar; the restart waits for an agent to carry the annoying parts
- Build stage, headed for Maintain on purpose: FastBrand ("an AI creative director") — brand kit in minutes, social channels and templates set up, then Sendely runs them. A free preview is live at https://neumann-carolin.com/fastbrand/ : nine questions produce colours, type, a geometric mark and application mock-ups, all computed in the visitor's own browser with no data leaving the device; payment and the finished asset download are not built yet. She will build it, use it and deliberately never scale it
- Co-founder of the BYTE Challenge (https://www.byte-challenge.de) — digital computer-science education platform: 2,000+ students, 50+ volunteers, €100k+ raised; she has since left day-to-day operations and remains a mentor
- Volunteer leadership in the Gesellschaft für Informatik (https://gi.de): former spokesperson of the Junge GI and GI board (Präsidium) member (both handed over); built the STEM GIrls workshop series (https://junge.gi.de/stem-girls, 367 sign-ups in year one, handed over); helped initiate the Gesellschaft 4.0 conference (https://gesellschaft4-0.gi.de/); founded the J-GI university group Berlin-Brandenburg; led the GI's AK Struktur from 2023 and was active in the CEPIS Digital Skills Policy Group (both currently paused); ran 33+ digital events with IBM, Microsoft, GitHub, McKinsey and others
- Speaker for DigitalChangeNow (https://digital-change-now.de/speakers/carolin-neumann/), the movement for real digital education in Germany
- Signature talk theme: the honest project lifecycle "Idea → Build → Launch → Scale, plus Maintain, Pause and Exit" — idea and build loop many times, launch takes long and happens more than once, scale happens fast, slowly or never, projects may pause for years (her Pentomino paper slept twelve years before becoming pentomino.club), Maintain is a destination rather than a waiting room (a tool with an audience of one is finished, not failed — AI made personal software rational), and Exit — handing a project over while staying as a mentor, as she did with the BYTE Challenge — is a win, not a failure. Core message: don't abandon passion projects, use AI to keep them moving
- On what stays human in an AI world: building for feelings rather than features, and humor as a human superpower — a well-timed joke needs timing, reading the room and shared vulnerability, which machines are worst at
- Lifecycle before vs. after AI (interactive deep dive on the site): the stages didn't change, their cost did — build laps went from six weekends to one evening, launch went from one expensive event to a habit, pause used to mean abandon and now costs a weekend to end; scale stays market-gated
- Honest founder lessons she shares openly: at chilld she split with a co-founder over direction, trusted the wrong people early (losing money), and has repeatedly proven willingness to pay — every format she tested found at least one paying customer — but ended each format herself because it didn't work for other reasons; currently testing with parents to find the format worth keeping; her named framework "The Honest Ship Log" tags every project Idea/Build/Launch/Scale/Maintain/Pause/Exit — with Maintain, Pause and Exit as first-class stages; her "Skip List" (downloadable at https://neumann-carolin.com/skip-list.pdf, with why-I-did-it / what-it-cost / what-I'd-do-now per item): no lawyers before the first customer, always test willingness to pay, qualitative before quantitative, no pitch decks without investors in the room (a borrowed lesson — she has never worked with investors), acquire customers manually before automating, no pricing models for customers you're not signing tomorrow, max one hour on branding, no social-media obsession, no perfectionism, no scholarship/incubator hunting instead of customer contact, don't vibecode "for understanding", no multi-page websites before the product is real, and — hardest — don't believe you know better than the process
- Team leadership (from her BYTE keynote): personal development is the best salary; onboarding is a weeks-long process that ends in a personal bond; hand out creative latitude and goals, never task lists; BYTE grew to 2,000+ students with zero ads — teacher mailing lists, cold emails and social media
- Her own frameworks for people at work (published on the site as illustrated cards, being tested on stages in 2026): (1) "The Talent Ship Log" — her project stages applied to a person's relationship with their work: Curious, Building, Trusted, In Flow, plus Pause (parental leave, burnout, sabbatical — with a documented way back) and Exit (outgrown, handed over, still proud); (2) "Safety × strengths" — Amy Edmondson's psychological-safety matrix with talent instead of accountability on the second axis, producing four states: parked, thriving, surviving and "performing scared" (brilliant and afraid, burning out on schedule); (3) "Minutes to answer" — trust measured by how long a question waits, decaying in order: people ask freely, then carefully, then guess, then stop asking. She built these after finding that the nine established models (Maslow, Herzberg, flow, self-determination theory, Gallup Q12, Edmondson, Lencioni, the four-circle ikigai, the HR employee lifecycle) all describe the good state and none of them contains a pause
- On leading people through the lifecycle: different people join at every stage (honest friends at Idea, first testers at Build, first strangers at Launch, a real team at Scale, successors at Exit) — and each stage has a classic leadership mistake: fishing for applause, hiding the ugly version, treating feedback as attack, becoming the bottleneck, ghosting a paused community, or leaving without a handover
- Author: "Per Anhalter durch die IT-Branche" (German IT career guide, with Lisa Ihde and Junus Ergin) and the Bitsy children's book series teaching computer-science ideas — https://www.amazon.de/stores/Carolin-Neumann/author/B0D3Y2RGDP
- Awards: ITEC Cares Award 2024 (winning project), TOP 3 Digital Female Leader "Global Shero" 2022, TOP 3 Young Engineering Award 2023; twice invited to meet the German Federal President
- In the press: Handelsblatt ("Das Ende des Neulands", 2023), Table.Media portrait, Sonntagsblatt portrait, abi.de interview, TU Berlin feature; podcasts: "Menschen in Führung", TheinersTalk (YouTube)

## Contact

- Email: info@chilld.de
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neumanncarolin
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neumanncarolin262