AVAILABLE NOW

Senior tech leadership. By the day.

I'm Andy. I help SME founders and boards get a senior CTPO without the full-time hire. Embedded in your team, two to three days a week, from day one.

IF ANY OF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR

01 / Services

Four ways
to work
together.

Pick the shape that fits the moment. Not sure where to start? Most engagements begin with an Advisory Hour.

ENGAGEMENT

Fractional CTPO

Senior product & engineering leadership without the seven-figure cost.

Two to three days a week, embedded in your team. Product strategy, technology direction, engineering leadership, roadmap, board prep. Whatever your stage actually needs. For founders doubling as CTO, and for SMEs that simply don't need a full-time one yet.

  • Tech & product strategy
  • Hiring & team design
  • Roadmap & delivery cadence
  • Board & investor comms
ADVISORY

Advisory hour

One sharp conversation when you need a second pair of eyes.

A 60-minute working session for the decision you've been chewing on for two weeks. Architecture call, hiring dilemma, vendor selection, board narrative. You bring the question, I bring 25 years of pattern-matching.

  • 60 minutes, focused
  • Pre-read review
  • Written follow-up notes
  • No retainer required
SPRINT

AI strategy

AI is already in your business. Now make it intentional.

Tools in place, experiments running, no strategy holding it together. We map what's actually happening with AI across your business, cut what isn't working and build a plan that moves AI from experiment to advantage. No magic, no vendor pitch.

  • Opportunity mapping
  • Build-vs-buy decisions
  • Risk & governance
  • 90-day execution plan
HIRING

Senior tech hiring

Hire me to interview for you. One bad senior hire sets you back a year.

You can't hire a senior engineer or engineering leader you can't out-interview. I run technical and leadership interviews for your CTO, Head of Engineering and senior IC roles. You get a clear, opinionated recommendation. Calibration included.

  • Interview design
  • Live technical & leadership rounds
  • Reference & calibration
  • Hire / no-hire memo
Also available for NED and board advisory roles
02 / How an engagement works

Senior, embedded, accountable.
Not a deck-and-dash.

01

Connect

30 minutes, no agenda. You tell me the problem. I tell you whether I'm the right person for it. Honestly, no sales pitch.

02

Diagnose

A focused discovery session to map the real shape of things. Hard questions, honest answers and my assessment of where things stand.

03

Embed

I join your standups, your Slack, your leadership team. Visible, accountable, there for the decisions that count.

04

Enhance

Better processes, stronger team, clearer direction. Things should be materially better than when I arrived. That's the only measure.

03 / Who this is for

I'm picky.
You should be too.

A good fit
  • Companies with momentum but no CTO or CPO yet
  • Founders carrying the product and engineering function alone
  • Companies scaling faster than their technical leadership
  • Anyone needing a senior, independent technical view
Not a fit
  • × Founders who want their plan validated, not challenged
  • × Companies that want more hands, not more thinking
  • × "Make us an AI company" with no problem to solve
04 / Thinking

Notes from
the work.

Honest takes on AI's real impact on software development. The parts most teams are getting wrong, and the patterns that actually work. No newsletter pop-up. Read what's useful, ignore the rest.

The spec strikes back

Read

Everyone is a manager now

Read

AI doom loop or to infinity and beyond?

Read

The 10x Developer Is a Myth. The 10x Process Isn't.

Read

The creative production line

Read
All posts
05 / Track record
Hello

I've been doing this since dial-up.

Started as a software engineer and never stopped thinking like one. Founded three technology businesses, winning three consecutive industry awards with the first.

Led eleven cross-functional teams at a £2bn e-commerce operation, with ownership across product, engineering, and delivery. Scaled EMEA at Apollo GraphQL from $1M to $11M ARR, holding both technical and commercial accountability.

Across all of it, the same pattern. Senior product and engineering leadership is the lever. Most SMEs don't need it full time. So I step in two to three days a week, do the work that only a senior person can do, and leave a team that doesn't need me anymore.

I'm building in the AI space alongside this work. The problems I write about come from practice, not theory. UK-based. Remote-first by preference, in-person wherever the work needs it.

11×

EMEA ARR scaled from $1M → $11M at Apollo GraphQL

£6M+

Annual savings delivered through transformations

40,000+

Engineers and leaders reached through event speaking

95%

Offer acceptance rate across 200+ hires

SELECTED EXPERIENCE

2025–present

Fractional CTPO

Various

2025–present

Founder / CPTO

API Orca

2022–2024

Founder / CRO

Block Guerrillas

2021–2025

Head of EMEA Enterprise Solutions

Apollo GraphQL

2017–2021

Head of API Engineering

RS Components

2009–2017

Founder / CTO

FactorEleven

2001–2009

Head of Product

The Exchange

Let's talk

What's the
real problem?

30 minutes, no deck, no pitch. You tell me what's keeping you up. I tell you honestly whether I can help.

Get in touch