Jochen Schäfer is Rail-Flow’s Senior Funding & Partner Manager. He sits at the intersection of two worlds most companies keep separate: the publicly co-financed innovation projects that fund Rail-Flow’s research-heavy work, and the ecosystem of rail associations, trade media, and channel partners that helps the company’s marketplace and SaaS products reach the market. We sat down with Jochen to talk about how funding and partnerships actually work behind the scenes, how he keeps focused work alive between deadlines that don’t move, and what it takes to keep engineering, marketing, and funding authorities speaking the same language.

Most people inside the company know you handle “funding and partners”, but few know what that actually looks like day-to-day. Can you walk us through it?

When I tell new colleagues that I work in Funding Management, I sometimes get a half-joking response: “Ah, so you’re the one handing out the money around here?” It’s actually the other way around: my job is to bring the money into the company in the first place. And the right partners along with it. 

Funding and partnerships both reach deep into strategy, product, finance, and sales. On the funding side, my job is to secure public grants for our innovation projects. As a scaleup, this gives us the room to tackle technologically ambitious topics early together with the market. In Partner Management, I’m expanding the partner ecosystem we use to bring our products to market and scale them. 

Day to day, that means constant switching: today a status meeting on a funding project, tomorrow an alignment meeting with a sector association, the day after a proposal for the next funding call. At first glance, these look like two different worlds: document-heavy and formal on the funding side, more open and relationship-driven on the partner side. On a closer look, though, they fit together well: funding projects anchor Rail-Flow in the market through innovation topics, partnerships through networks and reach. And the two areas often overlap. A project partner from a funding initiative later becomes a sales partner, or an association opens the door to a new funding opportunity. 

Funding projects come with non-negotiable deadlines and many documents; proposals come with months of work that may or may not get approved. How do you protect time for the deep work when the deadlines are this unforgiving?

Honestly, my most important tool is the calendar. Time for focused work needs to be blocked early and deliberately. Otherwise it gets overrun by day-to-day business. 

Reporting deadlines on ongoing funding projects are predictable and document-driven. If I keep these tasks moving steadily instead of leaving them to the last minute, they stay manageable. Proposal work is different: it needs longer, uninterrupted blocks for thinking, structuring, and writing. I try to deliberately separate these two modes in my calendar: reporting in the more fragmented stretches of the day, proposal work in protected time blocks, often early in the morning or during quieter afternoons. 

What also helps: clear expectation management internally. My colleagues know when I’m heads-down on a proposal, and that ad-hoc requests will have to wait a bit. And accepting that proposal work can also fail, despite months of effort. That’s exactly why it has to stay a priority. It’s the foundation of our future pipeline. 

Funding projects bring together different expectations – technical depth on the engineering side, clear narratives from marketing, formal criteria from the funding authorities. How do you make sure these three layers fit together in the end?

For me, the key is bringing the three perspectives together from the start, rather than trying to align them at the end. 

In practice, that means: when we set up a new funding project, we sit down early with Engineering to clarify what’s technically feasible, with Marketing to shape the story we want to tell, and with the funding authorities to understand the formal requirements. These conversations don’t happen one after the other – they run in a tight loop. 

Ultimately, everyone wants the same outcome: a successful project. They just measure and describe it differently. That’s why my role is less about negotiating and more about translating: turning technical insights into stories we can tell, and treating funding requirements not as a brake but as guardrails. 

You mentioned recently you take proper two-week holidays, which, in a role with reporting deadlines and grant submission windows, can’t be easy to plan. Where do you go to switch off, and how do you actually disconnect from work?

What I love most is travelling with my wife. A change of scenery is what really helps me switch off. Funnily enough, the best ideas for new projects tend to come to me precisely when I’m not thinking about them. 

At home, our two cats keep me grounded. And secretly, they’re the real bosses of the house anyway. Anyone who has tried to keep working with a cat on the keyboard knows what I mean.