Søren Brogaard: Culture as a Scaling System

How Søren Brogaard helped shape a culture that builds trust, enables performance, and holds as the company grows.

Culture That Leads

When Søren Brogaard stepped into the CEO role at Trackunit in late 2020, it didn’t feel like a dramatic shift. It felt like a continuation.

Søren had joined Trackunit back in 2016 and had already been deeply involved in shaping both the company and its direction. By the time he became CEO, the strategy, priorities, and culture were well underway.

“It felt like the most natural thing to do for the company,” he says.

The transition had been discussed openly and prepared carefully. Søren had hired most of the leadership team himself, earned the trust of the board, and worked closely with the previous CEO, who fully supported the change. Rather than starting over, the task was to take what already worked and make it clearer, stronger, and easier to scale.

“Culture isn’t something you say once,” Søren reflects. “It’s something you do, again and again. Especially when no one is watching.”

As Trackunit grew internationally and strengthened its software platform, the need for shared cultural guardrails became more important. The challenge was how to keep ambition high, avoid silos, and ensure that decisions across teams and regions were guided by the same principles throughout the organization.  

“Culture isn’t something you say once. It’s something you do, again and again.”  

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The Trackunit Way: From Beliefs to Practice

Those questions led to The Trackunit Way – a shared framework that describes how people are expected to grow, collaborate, and take responsibility.

At its core is a simple idea: develop yourself, develop others, and deliver results.

“If you can’t develop yourself, you eventually become obsolete,” Søren explains.

“If you don’t develop others, silos start to form.

And if you don’t deliver results, we fail our customers and shareholders.”

All three matter equally. The framework isn’t meant as a checklist, but as a way to think when trade-offs and tensions arise. It shapes everything from hiring conversations to leadership expectations and performance dialogues.

Another cornerstone is compassion – though Søren is quick to clarify what that means in practice.

“Compassion isn’t about being nice,” he says. “It’s about being clear.”

For Trackunit, compassion means addressing issues early, having honest conversations, and talking openly about what’s actually going on. Avoiding difficult topics may feel easier in the moment, but it rarely helps people grow or teams perform.

Global, but Still Grounded

As Trackunit expanded into North America and Asia, cultural consistency became harder and more critical.

Søren often uses a simple image to describe how decisions should be made: imagine Trackunit as a third person in the room.

“What would Trackunit say?”

Not your manager. Not what’s most convenient. But what aligns with the company’s shared beliefs.

The idea isn’t to create identical teams everywhere. Local context matters and different markets, roles, and cultures require different approaches. But the underlying mindset should be the same.

“You don’t want people following a leader,” Søren says. “You want them following a flag.”

The shift from dependency on individuals to shared responsibility allows leadership to be distributed without losing direction. It also requires leaders to actively protect the culture. When people start building fences around information or teams, it’s a signal that something is off.

“You don’t want people following a leader. You want them following a flag.”

Leadership as Something You Design

Søren’s own role has changed as Trackunit has grown. In the early years, he was deeply involved in building the leadership team. Today, his focus is on creating conditions where others can lead without him.

“If I become the bottleneck, we won’t scale,” he says.

That means trusting people, letting go of control, and accepting that learning sometimes comes through mistakes. Leadership, in his view, isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking better questions and giving others room to step up.

A phrase Søren often returns to is walking on two legs: delivering results today while building the capacity needed for tomorrow.

“You can’t choose one over the other for very long,” he says. “You need both.”

Building what comes next

Over the past year, Trackunit has been working on what Søren Brogaard calls a business inside the business.

Alongside its core business, the company is developing IrisX – an operating data platform that lets customers use the same infrastructure Trackunit’s own developers rely on. The ambition is not to start something separate, but to extend what already works and make it usable for more people.

In many ways, IrisX is the Trackunit Way made tangible. The same principles that guide leadership and decision-making internally – ownership, trust, and closeness to the product – are now being applied to how customers build, adapt, and evolve solutions themselves.

“We’ve been flipping our IT stack on its head,” Søren says. “We’re offering customers the same capabilities our own developers use.”

That shift changes more than technology. Trackunit is increasingly speaking not only to fleet managers, but also to CIOs and IT leaders. Pricing models, support structures, and internal ways of working are evolving along with it.

What excites Søren is the return to product closeness, something that sits at the heart of the Trackunit Way.

“It’s almost like going back to the early days of being a founder,” he says. “If you can’t use the product or explain the value, innovation quickly turns into a spreadsheet exercise.”

Balancing this kind of innovation with a strong core business is not easy. Withing the Trackunit Way, the focus remains on practical outcomes – creating safer job sites, better uptime, lower emissions, and less friction between systems.

“You have to stay close to the product. That’s the only way to keep building something people actually want to use.”

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