Doing a PhD while shipping products

Since 2018 I’ve been doing doctoral research at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca — on IT project management and how software teams deliver — while holding full-time product roles: scaling squads at Toptal, integrating acquisitions, and now building two platforms in parallel. The most common question I get is “where do you find the time?” It’s the wrong question. The right one is “what does each side give the other?” — because that exchange is the only reason the arrangement survives.

What practice gives the research

Academic software engineering has a data problem: the interesting phenomena happen inside companies, behind NDAs, at a scale most researchers can’t touch. Working practitioners smuggle reality into the field. My papers on agile at scale, delivery KPIs, and leadership exist because I could study delivery from inside organisations that were actually doing it — not from surveys of undergraduates.

Practice also ruthlessly filters research questions. After a week of real delivery problems, you lose all appetite for studying things that don’t matter. The question “which framework is best?” dies fast; “why do identical frameworks produce opposite outcomes in different teams?” survives.

What research gives the practice

Three habits, worth more than any methodology:

Skepticism about sample sizes of one. Most management advice is a survivor story. Research training makes you ask: compared to what? measured how? would this replicate? That filter has saved me from at least three expensive process fads.

Writing as thinking. A literature review and a good product strategy doc are the same discipline: compress a messy field into claims someone can disagree with. Peer review made my product writing sharper than any workshop ever did.

Comfort with slow loops. Products teach you week-long feedback loops. Research teaches you three-year ones. Leading anything substantial requires holding both clocks at once — shipping this sprint while betting on things that pay off in years.

The honest costs

It’s not free. Conference deadlines land during launch weeks. Reviewers ask for revisions precisely when a funnel needs attention. And a PhD “on the side” is a marathon where the university clock keeps running whether your startup does or not. What makes it sustainable is a single rule: the research topic must be the day job, abstracted. I study software delivery and I run software delivery. One calendar, two altitudes.

If your research and your work are strangers, one of them will starve. If they’re the same thing at different zoom levels, they compound.

The papers are on the Research page; the findings that survived contact with practice are in this post.