Tom Hill

What I do …

An engineering function in trouble, turned around.

It usually starts as one of these.

• We’ve grown, and the thing that made us good has gone.
• Everyone agrees we’re too slow. Nobody agrees why.
• My best engineers keep leaving.
• Two (or more) engineering teams that were separate companies six months ago.
• Do I need a CTO, a CPTO, or neither yet?

The receipts are on the Work page, including what each one cost me.

Why I do it …

I don’t do it to make a fund its return, and I don’t do it for “efficiency”.

I do it to save missions, to keep people in their jobs, and to help a business serve the people on the other end of it. I do it to help people help people. Businesses make money by helping people solve problems, and I help them survive and thrive so they can. My purpose is to help people (and businesses) do more, and achieve more, than they otherwise could have alone.

Where it comes from …

I’ve worked with founders who were achieving everything they wanted but couldn’t explain why it felt wrong.

I didn’t arrive at this from theory. I arrived at it from rooms where the pressure was real, the stakes were personal, and the easy answer was to move faster, hire more, and measure everything. I’ve led teams that had forgotten why they were there.

I’ve been the person in the room who had to prove himself. Not had something to prove … had to prove himself. The distinction matters. One is ego. The other is necessity. It produces a different kind of understanding.

What I know from the broken teams, the post-merger silos, and the companies scaling in the wrong direction, is that the technology is almost never the problem. The problem is almost always a loss of tension. A system that has been optimised into one-sidedness. A team that has been told to move fast for so long that they’ve forgotten what they’re moving toward.

It is also where the philosophy comes from.

How I work …

Clarity before process.

In every one of those engagements the speed came from people knowing what the work was for, not from pushing harder … the pressure was usually the thing slowing them down.

I go after causes rather than symptoms. Retention is a symptom. Being seen is a cause.

And to hold my personal value of transparency, I publish what it cost me when I do. An engagement that lists only its wins is a sales page, and you cannot tell from one whether the person would tell you the truth when it mattered.

Who this suits, and who it doesn’t …

Founder-led, mission-led, bootstrapped businesses.

People with something they don’t want to lose, who would rather be told the truth than managed.

I spent a while aiming at private equity. They have the money to pay, and the problems to be solved … it seemed like the “natural” fit. But they wanted someone with “more experience”. A partner in that space put it as grey hair bias in reverse … I was being punished for being younger than expected, despite having already fixed the exact problems they had (and the evidence to back it).

But that is partly the point. I don’t fit the polished executive profile and I’m not going to. I’m a rebel, a creative, a polymath, a philosopher, and I have been successful because of how I work rather than in spite of it. I can do what PE wanted of me. But it wasn’t aligned with why I do it, or how I do it.

My differentiator is the thinking behind it, and the mission behind it. So that’s what I’m writing down (and figuring out) now. Start a conversation.