Dr. Apostolos Kritikos works at the intersection of software engineering leadership and academic research, pursuing the long, unresolved question of how software organisations and companies learn. He is currently Senior Engineering Manager at Instashop \u2014 a position that evolved organically from his previous role at Toggl, where he led two cross-functional teams as a dual technical team leader. His responsibilities include coordinating across multiple teams, translating organisational priorities into engineering decisions, and keeping the distance between product intent and engineering execution as short as possible.<\/p>\n\n
He received his PhD in Open Source Software Resilience in 2023 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he continues as a Research Associate. His research focuses on how open source software projects sustain quality and coherence over time \u2014 a question that turns out to be structurally similar to those arising in product engineering organisations. Alongside this, he teaches software engineering at postgraduate level as an Adjunct Lecturer in Higher Education. The role functions as a feedback loop: what students push back on is usually the part of the theory that has not yet been tested in practice, or that was not designed with practice in mind.<\/p>\n\n
In 2014, he co-founded Social Mind, a digital solutions agency specialising in e-commerce and marketing in Thessaloniki, where he served as CTO. The co-founder role and those first steps in entrepreneurship provided a practical education in business administration, commercial processes, and organisational structures that proved particularly useful in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry that followed.<\/p>\n\n
Since 2026, he has served as an independent expert to the European Commission, contributing to the Europass Advisory Group. The work sits at the intersection of technical specifications and policy outcomes, with the goal of effectively informing and guiding European citizens toward the skills that can both ease their access to the labour market and help shape that market in ways that may reverse the talent drain of recent years.<\/p>\n\n
In 2025, he published his first book, \u0398\u03bf\u03bb\u03cc \u03a4\u03bf\u03c0\u03af\u03bf (\u03a0\u03b7\u03b3\u03ae \u03a0\u03b1\u03b9\u03b4\u03b5\u03af\u03b1\u03c2), rooted in the civic and intellectual life of Greece. He maintains two newsletters on Substack: Field Notes<\/em> in Greek \u2014 a general-register newsletter running for over six years \u2014 and Software Antifragility<\/em> in English, which covers the technical and organisational questions that emerge from his research and professional work. He serves on the board of the Alumni Association of the Experimental School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (\u03a3.\u0391.\u03a0.\u03a3.\u03a0.\u0398), and was coordinator of the Open Coffee Thessaloniki meetings from 2010 to 2020. Over that decade, he watched the local technology and entrepreneurship community \u2014 in Thessaloniki and across Greece \u2014 take shape literally from scratch. He is grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute, as a volunteer, to that effort. Open Coffee Thessaloniki continues its meetings to this day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr. Apostolos Kritikos works at the intersection of software engineering leadership and academic research, pursuing the long, unresolved question of how software organisations and companies learn. He is currently Senior Engineering Manager at Instashop \u2014 a position that evolved organically from his previous role at Toggl, where he led two cross-functional teams as a dual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-55692","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55694,"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/55692\/revisions\/55694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ak.porcupinecolors.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}