About us
We are not a consultancy that has others write the code. We are engineers who consult — and we use the tools we talk about every single day.
What Moana Works is
Moana Works is the consulting arm of Kilo Moana UG (haftungsbeschränkt), a product studio in Rellingen near Hamburg. It is led by Alexander Siemer-Schmetzke; for larger engagements we work with a small, fixed circle of experienced associates we know from shared projects.
That is deliberately small. Whoever hires us speaks to the same people on the first call, in scoping and in review — and those people write the code. There is no layer in between that sells and a second one that delivers.
Where we come from
Twelve years of software engineering, six of them as Head of Software Engineering at LetMeShip, a Hamburg logistics platform: replacing a legacy platform, growing a multi-team organisation, bringing a decade-old core application back in-house, shifting a culture from sales-led to tech-enabled.
Before that InnoGames, as a founding member of the Core Department — the central team that moved dozens of games onto shared infrastructure. And before that Funatics, including the studio's first Unity project.
A degree in business informatics sits underneath: business language and engineering language are not two separate worlds here. That is why we write up results so that a managing director can read them without translation.
Why Moana Works exists
Kilo Moana was founded in early 2026 to build its own products. Within weeks it became clear that engineering with AI agents is not incrementally faster. It is a different job — different order, different artefacts, different bottlenecks.
That shift is under way in many engineering departments. Teams often notice it only when a competitor ships noticeably faster — and then have neither a plan nor numbers to go on.
Moana Works works exactly on that gap — with people who are going through the shift themselves, not with material somebody else assembled.
How we work
- Measure first, then build. Without a baseline there is no decision later, only a debate.
- In the code, not in the deck. What we deliver runs. Presentations are a side effect.
- Fixed scope, fixed price. The price is set before we start. Change requests move to the next stage, not onto the invoice.
- No commissions. We are not a partner of any tool vendor. We recommend what holds.
- Handover is part of the job. An engagement that leaves you needing us is a badly done engagement.
What we are not
We are not a software agency for outsourced development, not a training provider, and not a transformation consultancy with a slide apparatus. We do not take on engagements where the codebase may not be touched — without access to the work itself, all that remains is opinion, and there is plenty of that on this subject already.