You are Itziar Elorriaga, head of strategy at Sendoa Systems in Bilbao, seven weeks into the first firm-wide role of your career. The board has given you €5.0 million and twelve months to bring new-product revenue back to 30%. Before a single euro is committed, you have to tell it where the gap really is.
The situation
Sendoa designs industrial control software and connected sensors for manufacturers and energy firms in Spain, France and Germany: €86 million of revenue in 2025, a 16% EBITDA margin and 540 people, 310 of them engineers across four product units. For a decade it was the technical reference in its niche. Four years ago, products launched in the previous three years earned 38% of revenue. Today they earn 19%, and a flagship contract has just gone to a rival that reached the customer first with a comparable product.
In the last eighteen months three senior architects retired or left for competitors. They held the design patterns behind most of the platform, and almost none of it was written down; an internal estimate puts the cost of re-creating it at €2.1 million. Two more architects can retire within the next eighteen months. Each unit runs its own backlog and its own conventions, and engineers are paid and promoted on what their own unit ships. The knowledge platform bought in 2021 reaches all 310 engineers and is barely opened. Joint development with lead customers and with the universities in Bilbao and San Sebastián has thinned. You lived it yourself: in 2023 your unit spent four months rebuilding a calibration routine that the unit next door had finished the year before.
Your management team reads it three ways. The engineering lead says the platform was never given curators. The people and culture director says nobody was ever rewarded for putting anything into it. The finance controller wants the three architect posts refilled at senior level, roughly €1.6 million in compensation, because it is the only fix with a delivery date. If you commit nothing, the board has already said what it will do: stop funding Sendoa to build innovation and start buying it.