Accelerate Into the
Agentic Era.
Seven startups from the inside. Two acquired. Now I write about and work with engineering leaders navigating the AI shift, through the signals that actually matter: people, process, architecture, and measure.
Four signals every engineering org sends
Every product and engineering organisation tells you how it’s really doing, if you know where to look. These are the four dimensions I use to diagnose health, guide decisions, and drive improvement.
People
Hiring architectures, career leveling, and the psychology of high-trust engineering cultures.
Process
Eliminating friction through lightweight SDLC, incident response maturity, and RFC cultures.
Architecture
Building for 10x scale while maintaining 1x simplicity. Tactical debt management and cloud strategy.
Measure
Beyond DORA. Connecting engineering output to business outcomes through precise technical telemetry.
Observe, measure, improve.
I studied Civil Engineering, then spent years mixing, curing and testing high-strength concrete. Observing, measuring and experimenting are second nature to me. My PhD work at Cardiff gave me a simple lesson: you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
That same scientific rigour now drives how I assess engineering organisations. Every product and engineering org sends four signals: People, Process, Architecture, and Measure. No hand-waving. No gut instinct alone. Data over opinion.
I started by measuring the strength of concrete. Now I measure the strength of product and engineering organizations.
Working Together
My experience comes from twenty-five years running startup engineering teams. The work has been entrepreneurial: seven startups, two acquisitions, one Series B. I still ship code. Diagnosing and modernising engineering organisations comes down to four signals: People, Process, Architecture, and Measure. The fourth is what tells you the first three are actually changing. That's the philosophy.
Engineering organisations pre-Series B have a particular set of problems. The CTO knows the codebase is fragile, deploys are slow, and the team is over-reliant on a few people. The hard part is knowing which to fix first, and what fixing it actually buys you. My experience through the four signals, anchored in the research from books like Accelerate, is how I shift organisations to the next stage of growth.
My speciality is Seed to Series B B2B SaaS. Zero to a hundred engineers, through and past product-market fit, hitting the wall where what got them here won't get them further. I'm usually engaged by a founder-CEO or incoming CTO to solve a particular problem. The first conversations are about understanding that problem and whether I'm the right fit. Startup-like teams inside larger organisations benefit from the same approach.
Success
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