About
A small practice, deliberately.
Balzer Consulting is an independent advisory built around one principle: the people who design the work should be the people doing it.
Andy Balzer · Founder
Full-system software leadership, delivered hands-on.
I started Balzer Consulting because the most consequential decisions in software — what to build, how to organise the team building it, and what to keep doing once it ships — are still rarely treated as the strategic decisions they are.
I work with founders, executives and product leaders on those decisions directly. No account managers, no offshore handoff, no slide deck reused from the last engagement. The result you hire me for is the result I deliver.
Senior practitioners only.
The firm operates as a senior-only practice. Engagements are scoped, designed and delivered by the same hands. When additional capacity is needed, we bring in a small network of trusted specialists — never an offshored junior team, never a name on a slide we haven't worked with directly.
That structure has consequences. It limits how many clients we can serve simultaneously. It also means every engagement gets the kind of attention that, in larger firms, is reserved for the introductory pitch.
Principal profile
Balzer Consulting is led by Andy Balzer, a senior software and technology advisor with 30+ years of experience across software engineering, product innovation, technical leadership, and complex systems delivery.
His background spans CTO/CIO responsibility, acquisition due diligence, mobile, desktop, cloud, embedded, client/server, data, AI, 3D graphics, industrial systems, automotive, EV, and business aviation environments.
Previous work includes technical due diligence on acquisition targets, delivery of full-stack EV software ecosystems, global commercialization of automotive software solutions across 93 countries, and pioneering image-based AI for automotive damage assessment.
What we believe
Software is an organisational decision before it is a technical one.
The choice of architecture, platform and process shapes who can be hired, what can be changed later, and how a company will look in five years. We treat technology decisions as the strategic decisions they are — and write them down so they survive a leadership change.
That now includes pragmatic AI use: advanced research, AI-assisted software delivery, product strategy, and agent-based automation.
Strategy is what survives contact with shipping.
A plan that does not yield code, customers or invoices is not a plan. We work in tight iterations with explicit acceptance criteria so that strategy proves itself in the artefacts it produces.
Continuity is a deliverable.
The best sign of a successful engagement is that the company keeps moving without us. We document, train, and hand over by default — not as an afterthought.
Where we work
Switzerland and the wider DACH region, with selected clients across Europe. Engagements are typically delivered remotely with structured on-site days at meaningful inflection points — kickoffs, architecture reviews, leadership offsites, and major releases.
Want to talk about a specific situation?
Send a short note describing the problem. If it's not the right fit for us, we'll usually know someone it is.
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