This may sound counterintuitive coming from someone who spent years in the startup trenches, but here's a confession: sometimes the best way to change a giant is from the inside.
Three months ago, I was stretched thin. Days at Trunk, trying to find product-market fit for our inventory management software. Nights and weekends moonlighting at Revel Social - wearing every hat from software developer to feature prioritization to bug bash QA. Funding was running low. The runway clock was ticking.
When Affirm reached out in September, it felt like the obvious move. Fintech was hot. The role was solid. It made sense on paper.
But then SAP Eureka came along with a different pitch entirely.
I can already hear the startup purists shaking their heads. SAP? Really? The enterprise software giant? Isn't that where product innovation goes to die?
I had the same hesitation. I'd already done my time at a giant company - four years at Boeing on the 787 Dreamliner. I knew what big company bureaucracy felt like. The idea of going back to that world wasn't exactly appealing.
That's exactly why Eureka exists - to prove that assumption wrong.
SAP Eureka is designed to be the skunk works of enterprise software. The mission: re-invent how SAP builds and delivers products. Think co-innovation with customers, cloud-native architecture, minimal marketable products (MMPs), and shipping in two-week sprints.
The radical idea? Customers can buy products a la carte instead of massive monolithic suites. If that sounds obvious, remember - this is SAP. The company that practically invented "enterprise software takes 18 months to implement."
I'm here to bring startup DNA to the operation. Self-disrupt before someone else does.
My first month was exploration. Eureka's mandate is broad - reinvent SAP delivery across industries. We could go anywhere: manufacturing, utilities, retail, healthcare.
We've landed on Consumer Industries.
Why? A few product teams had already built early applications in the space - a claims tool, some other business process apps. There's momentum. More importantly, Consumer Packaged Goods is a domain where the pain is real and the legacy systems are ripe for disruption.
Three groups are emerging within Eureka's Consumer Industries focus:
We're scraping together early co-innovation conversations with Red Bull, Colgate, Maple Leaf Foods, Georgia Pacific, and Pepsico - companies willing to explore alongside us rather than wait for a finished product. That's the Eureka model.
But internally? We're still figuring things out. Hiring is ramping up. We're aligning on processes across product, engineering, and UX - with a lot of new folks who've never touched enterprise software before. SAP Product Standards are appearing on our radar - release management requirements I never dealt with, even at Boeing. No sales team. No marketing team. Pricing strategy is an afterthought.
What we do have is a heavy focus on design thinking. Business process outlining. User story mapping workshops. We're learning the domain by immersing ourselves in it - sketching out entire workflows before writing a line of code.
Three months in, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around what trade claims actually are. And honestly? It's more interesting than it sounds.
Here's the scenario: Coca-Cola runs a promotion with Walmart - buy two 12-packs, get $2 off. Walmart runs the promotion in their stores. Customers love it. Sales spike. Everyone's happy.
Except now comes the messy part. Walmart needs to get that $2 back from Coca-Cola. Not for one customer - for potentially millions of transactions across thousands of stores. They submit a "trade claim" - essentially a bill saying "Hey, we fronted this money for your promotion. Pay up."
Sounds simple enough, right?
Now multiply that by hundreds of retailers. Thousands of promotions running simultaneously. Tens of thousands of individual claims per week. Each claim needing validation - did the promotion actually run? Was the discount applied correctly? Does the math add up?
I'm spending a lot of time right now understanding enterprise personas I'd never thought about before. Claims analysts. Deduction specialists. The people who sit in spreadsheets all day reconciling numbers that don't match. And the claims themselves vary wildly - North America handles things differently than Europe, which handles things differently than Asia. Different formats, different business rules, different edge cases.
From a manufacturer's perspective, every invalid claim that slips through is money lost. Some estimates put leakage at 3-5% of total trade spend - which for a major CPG company means hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
From a retailer's perspective, they legitimately ran those promotions and deserve to be compensated. Slow processing or rejected claims strain the relationship.
From a technology perspective - and this is what's hooking me - there's a genuine automation opportunity here. Pattern recognition. Anomaly detection. The kind of problems that sound boring on the surface but are actually fascinating once you dig in.
So here I am. Three months into SAP Eureka. Still learning the difference between a billback and a scanback. Still getting used to hearing "SAP Product Standards" in meetings. Still adjusting to a pace that's faster than traditional enterprise but slower than startup chaos.
I won't pretend I have it all figured out. The domain is deep. The personas are new to me. The gap between "minimal marketable product" and "enterprise-ready" is wider than I expected.
But there's something energizing about being part of a team that's trying to change how a giant operates. We're not here to maintain the status quo. We're here to prove that enterprise software can ship fast, iterate with customers, and actually solve problems instead of just checking compliance boxes.
The startup world taught me how to build from zero. Boeing taught me what scale looks like. Maybe Eureka is where those two worlds collide.
Ask me again in a year. For now, I'm heads down - learning the domain, building relationships with customers who are betting on us, and figuring out how to bring startup energy to a space that desperately needs it.
Uncertain, but exactly where I want to be.