Work
What I have actually done, what it changed, and what it cost me.
Each of these is a real engagement with the measured impact. Each one says what it cost me and what I would do differently, because everyone says what went well … but when you claim transparency as a keystone value, this is where showing that counts.
Now
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NC-Squared (Distribution Engine) Fractional CPTO
Helping the product and engineering team build a new culture of innovation and bravery, while aligning them more closely to the needs of the company. Product strategy, software delivery lifecycle design, and creating an R&D and franchise model of operations.
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Openmynd Fractional CPTO
Helping a group of doctors and clinical psychologists build a mental health support platform. Guiding them on architecture, infrastructure design, and building an MVP efficiently and effectively … from a solid AI-generated prototype to true software engineering practices, AI-augmented. Getting ready for the friends and family launch.
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Notarised (Notarised.AI) NED and board advisor
Guiding the founders on how to build quality software: considering the P&L, projecting future scenarios, guiding the product development roadmap, and performing technical audits they can use to steer their development effort.
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The Being-Human Collective (The Converger) Technical advisor
Helping the founder with go to market, business positioning, and general business planning, and working with the developers to bring the project back on track. Getting ready to partner with major venues and media partners to showcase where art meets technology, in the physical and the digital world at once.
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Donna My own
A system for managing my several calendars and engagements, so I can stay flexible and available without meeting conflicts and time management chaos … executive dysfunction be gone.
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Yotomi My own
Investigating whether there is a booking and class management service worth building for boutique health and wellness providers, fixing the myriad problems the incumbents have. My wife has experienced them first hand, and I have watched what they do to owner-operators.
The receipts
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The teams that forgot why they existed
Outcome
Delivery reliability went from below 50% to above 90%. A $300K account that was leaving, stayed. But the number was the consequence, not the point.
What it cost me
It cost me credibility.
I leant hard on trust and freedom to drive the change through, and that came at the expense of being able to report accurately on what was happening when I was asked. Saying “I trust you” and then being seen to check everything anyway does not work. But trusting blindly, and reporting things as fact that I had no way to verify, is worse … it turns into pressure to reverse the change, and it undermines the belief that I can deliver it. Next time I would keep myself a way to verify what I am told that does not undermine the thing I am asking people to do.
Problem
A post-merger engineering function spread across North America, Europe, and Asia. A little over 30 engineers working in silos and shipping reliably less than half the time. The technology wasn’t the problem … the people had stopped trusting each other, and stopped believing in why they were there.
Approach
You don’t fix that with process. You fix it with clarity. Six months of building the foundations that should have been there from the start: structures, shared language, and genuine clarity about what the work was for.
The point was that 30 people came to work on a Monday with a reason to be there.
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The company that confused size and speed
Outcome
Three months became two weeks or less. In the same year, the function returned the only positive eNPS score in the department.
What it cost me
It cost me my standing with some of the senior leadership.
The company ran on tight delivery, hard dates, and leaders who knew every detail and said so to the people below them. Giving direction and then leaving room to decide meant I walked into leadership meetings without the answers they expected, and had to be honest about the ambiguity instead. I was called a rebel, and incapable, and I absorbed the pressure that came with it. Next time I would look for a way to translate the new way of working into the language of the old one … and if that could not be done honestly, I would do it exactly the same way again.
Problem
Seventy engineers in six teams, shipping on a three-month cycle, inside a culture of command and control that had spent a long time trying to fix it with pressure. Everyone had agreed the problem was speed. Nobody had asked what was actually slowing it down.
Approach
It was confusion, not effort. The six teams moved from waterfall to scrum, and the delivery managers who had been running them became scrum masters and engineering managers rather than being replaced … the people who knew where the work was buried were the ones best placed to dig it out.
The speed came from clarity and autonomy, not from pushing harder. The pressure had been the thing slowing them down.
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The engineers everyone forgot to keep
Outcome
Churn fell by around 30%.
What it cost me
Very little, beyond my own time and the attention it took away from other problems.
I would do it the same way again. It was a big win and a relatively easy one, which is rarer than it sounds.
Problem
The same 70-person function, and no shared answer to what any of those jobs actually was. No clarity on what a role meant, no honest way to hold a performance conversation, and no visible way up. So people left, and the leavers were rarely the ones anyone expected.
Approach
A careers framework, and not a grid to be measured against … a shared language for what the work is, so that a manager and an engineer could have the same conversation twice. Built for one function of 70, then adopted across the company’s entire software organisation: the other functions on the same product, and the teams building the other products, 300 engineers in all.
Retention was the symptom. Being seen was the cause.