Crossing Waters
It started in Los Angeles. I (Felix) was advising a client on product-market-fit, and over dinner, somewhere between the main course and dessert, we ended up talking about why companies actually struggle to succeed in the market. Usually it’s not a strategy problem, it’s the moat between departments, product, marketing, and sales all defending their own territory instead of pulling together. Selling across the Atlantic makes it worse in both directions, European companies landing in the US and the other way around, everyone insisting their market is the complicated one.
At some point I said, half-joking, that crossing those waters, the moat inside a company and the ocean between markets, is basically its own business. Whether it was the Venice Beach sunset or the genuinely great people I had the pleasure to talk to, something about it stuck. And if you’re going to do this properly, there’s no halfway version: either you take on the whole process, or you don’t do it at all.
That’s still the premise today. We don’t stop at go-to-market, we get into positioning, product strategy, vision, and product marketing until they actually pull together, and the internal process and tools behind it too, agile ways of working, AI included, so it sticks. The picture is from that exact evening.
„Product success is all about the system you build around it.“
Crossing Waters was founded on one premise: product success comes from a clear process, a system that keeps improving itself, motivated teams, and real alignment, not months of fighting, theater, or hiring your way out of a problem.
We’ve led product, sales, and marketing organizations, not just advised them. That’s decades of experience leading these functions, building teams, and bringing products to market successfully (we’ve learned plenty from the ones that didn’t).
Whether you’re entering a new market, launching a new product, or rethinking your strategy, we give you fast, uncomplicated access to product, sales, marketing, and technical expertise, backed by a real network and distribution, not just a slide deck. We stay until it’s stable, and help you build the team that carries it from there.
Felix Rosbach
The Product & Marketing Nerd
I’ve always wanted to know why something works, not just that it does. That curiosity took me, over the years, from hands-on implementation work into eventually running product organizations that built fantastic, and (mostly) successful, products. Along the way I noticed that strategy on paper is often too rigid and too light on real data, and even good strategy isn’t only about strategy.
It’s about the people who have to make it work. So probably 90% of what I actually do is get people aligned and pulling in the same direction, the roadmap and the go-to-market follow from that.
I focus on cybersecurity companies because that’s where I can tell a technically sound product from one a CISO will actually trust. That trust comes from working together. If you’ve read this far and prefer a straight answer over a buzzword, we’ll probably get along.
Christian Milde
Sales & Go-To-Market Leader
I’ve spent my career scaling go-to-market organizations, most recently as Worldwide VP Sales and Managing Director Central Europe for international cybersecurity brands. I built the Code Blue by Dussmann cybersecurity joint venture from the ground up, and grew Kaspersky’s Central Europe region into its best-performing international market, about 150 million euros in revenue at a steady 25 percent growth every year. What I bring to Crossing Waters is the network side of things, more than 1,000 channel partners in Germany, and a decent sense of which one actually gets your product in front of the right decision-maker instead of just adding another slide to somebody’s deck.
Partners
Please Don’t Hack Me
Please Don’t Hack Me (pdhm.org) is a cybersecurity event series and community Felix co-founded with Charlotte Christensen: no pitches, no slides, no fluff, just real security people having real conversations.
It’s grown into events across Europe, and it’s one of the reasons we actually know the room before we ever try to sell into it.