- Mike Cottmeyer received his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from UF in 1993.
- He is the founder and CEO of LiminalArc, formerly Leading Agile.
- His engineering education formed the foundation for a surprising and fascinating career.
“Adopting agile” and “leading large-scale enterprise transformations” might not be phrases commonly associated with computer engineering, but to Gator Engineer Mike Cottmeyer (BSCEN ’93), it all makes sense.
The CEO of LiminalArc, formerly Leading Agile, received his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering (then bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts) from the University of Florida in 1993. And since then, it’s been quite a ride.
Cottmeyer worked in the information-technology sector immediately after graduation, a world away from the sort of management consulting he’s doing now.
Speaking recently from the Atlanta office he shares with more than 50 guitars and a handful of guitar amplifiers (by his own admission, he has a bit of a guitar-collecting problem), Cottmeyer reflected on his career since his days at UF.
“I went from IT infrastructure data center stuff, virtual servers and rack-mounted servers to security infrastructure,” he said. “I learned all that stuff for 10 years and moved more into IT project management, and then from that, I moved into software development and project management. And then that kind of got me interested in the methodology stuff.”
What does he mean by “methodology stuff?” Cottmeyer was an early adopter of Agile software development, an umbrella term for software-development approaches, which were later applied to leadership.
“There is this way of building software that was spawned in the early 2000s called Agile, with added methodologies like Scrum and Extreme Programming. And then Lean methodology is in there, though it’s typically in manufacturing settings,” Cottmeyer said, referring to a management system that strives to eliminate all activities that do not add customer value.
After years of immersing himself in these new, somewhat fashionable management methodologies, Cottmeyer had an epiphany.
“If you want to operate with agility, it’s less a process problem and it’s more of an organizational design and governance problem,” he said. “Underneath that, there are questions like how do you organize around value versus activity, and underneath that, there are software architecture strategies that will either make it easier to deploy with agility or way harder to deploy with agility.”
These insights, paired with his wide-ranging work experience, his engineering education and his upbringing, led to one place — starting his own company, LeadingAgile.
Cottmeyer is the first to admit that LiminalArc and LeadingAgile are hard to describe.
“What we basically do is modernize businesses,” he said. “We modernize the technology that they rely on to be able to deliver value faster in the market with a proven return on investment.”
Basically, when LiminalArc takes on a client company, they learn everything about its leadership structure and the technology that underpins it, all with an eye toward optimization of both.
“So we’re working with two disciplines,” Cottmeyer said. “One, out of the business world, we think about business capability modeling or business architecture. The other one is domain-driven design and technology architecture. If we can get the business architecture in alignment with the technical architecture, and then point that at the biggest problem that the business wants to solve, we’re really able to transform our client’s business.”
It all seems pretty far from engineering, and the Gator grad would be the first to agree.
“I was a terrible, terrible engineering student; C-plus at best,” he admitted. “But still, the thing that’s been most present for me through the years is my UF degree. I think part of the reason why I was a very credible project manager back in the day was because of my computer science background. When you are managing technical people and you have no idea what they do, it’s really difficult to lead them. I always felt like I understood how software worked and how it was created, and that helped keep me relevant in the non-technology spaces.”
Relevant is an understatement. LiminalArc continues to transform its client businesses across an astonishingly broad array of industries. Its portfolio includes avionics companies, utility companies, digital publishing and a home services company worth several billion dollars.
Cottmeyer’s clients, whether they know it or not, are benefiting from his analytical systems thinking, finely honed by his computer science degree from UF.