Johan Riis Johansen
Birkerød, Denmark

I build the conditions where good decisions happen everywhere.

Engineering leadership across pharma, global retail, and digital-native contexts. Twenty-five years building organisations that ship reliably, scale without fragility, and leave behind leaders — not dependencies.

Novo Nordisk · 2023–2025 Regulated enterprise at scale 4 product teams embedded in a 250-person traditional IT division. 20+ regulated markets. Zero severity-1 incidents. Built the onboarding programme adopted across the division.
Pandora A/S · 2020–2022 Global platform, DKK 100M+ tribe 6 squads, 24 markets, DKK 100M+ yearly budget. Drove CI/CD uplift, SLO-based reliability, and cross-squad dependency governance for Pandora's global online experience.
Coop Denmark · 2016–2020 Consumer scale, legacy core Denmark's largest loyalty platform — 1.6M members, 200+ stores. Modernised a 50-year-old ERP incrementally while shipping a national self-service rollout and building the team from within.
Leadership philosophy

One good decision engine at the top is vastly inferior to many capable decision engines distributed across a value stream.

My instinct is to look for the systemic problem underneath the surface issue — surface it in a way people can act on, then move the structural levers so the problem doesn't repeat. I optimise for autonomous, competent teams over controlled, dependent ones.

That means my job is rarely about having the answer. It's about building the conditions, the people, and the structures so that good decisions happen everywhere.

balance

Fairness

Whether the right people are heard, recognised, and promoted for substance rather than volume.

self_improvement

Autonomy

Whether teams own their backlog and their craft, or are executing someone else's specification.

trending_up

Growth

Whether an organisation creates real paths for people to develop and become leaders themselves.

How I work

I don't just build better processes. I build teams that lead themselves, dare be transparent and reach for leadership when the trade-off is genuinely hard.

01

Find the real constraint

Surface issues usually have a structural cause underneath. I look for where toil is accumulating: the wrong people compensating for something broken - and build a story around it that stakeholders can act on, not just acknowledge.

02

Move the people, not just the process

The people closest to the problem are usually the ones being overlooked. I elevate them, change how decisions are made to include them earlier, and build the trust infrastructure that makes directness possible, so hard conversations happen sooner, not later.

03

Build capability that compounds

I invest in leaders who invest in others. Career paths, real ownership, internal mobility, the conditions where people take on more than their job description. The measure isn't whether things run well while I'm there, it's whether they improve after I've shifted focus.

Background

Breadth that proves transferability, not a lack of specialism.

My career spans regulated pharma, global luxury retail, national grocery, and digital agency environments. Each context demanded navigating complexity, governance, and scale in different ways. I see it as proof that the connective leadership I practise transfers across industries.

2023 — 2025
Novo Nordisk Senior Engineering Manager
Pharma · regulated markets
2020 — 2022
Pandora A/S Principal Delivery Manager
Global luxury eCommerce
2016 — 2020
Coop Denmark Head of Digital Services & CPO
National grocery · consumer scale
2005 — 2015
Digitas LBi Global Client Partner
Digital agency · global brands
What I'm looking for
forest

I want to leave behind a forest of leaders, not just a well-run department.

I'm drawn to ambitious, meaningful problems where transformation and daily operations have to coexist, where autonomy matters, and where there's genuine complexity worth untangling. Roles where building leadership capacity at scale is the point.

Let's talk.

If you're working on something that needs this kind of leadership, I'd be glad to have a conversation.